Awful news. David was a wonderful guy. A fantastic researcher and a truly nice, decent man, I so looked forward to seeing him at conferences. I had hoped for many more encounters. My heartfelt thoughts to his family and to his friends, of which he has many around the world.

Way to instantly evaporate the illusion your words at Davos meant anything. Pathetic, racist, supplicant nonsense.

I will never get used to the disdain our country holds for brown and Black children. From Palestine to Iran to Sudan, we normalize the destruction of schools and hospitals and daycares. We reduce children to death tolls and their futures to rubble with no consequence or second thought.

tropical lowland birds aren't doing well -- this is an excellent article on what's happening featuring a slew of fantastic research projects www.science.org/content/arti...

When someone dies in our field (I’m thinking of Dr. Hans-Dieter Sues), it’d be great for someone to aggregate all the positive comments and anecdotes about them on social media and send to their family. A lot of our lives are spent in our professional work but our families might not know impact. 🧪

This thread is amazing but as someone who writes obvious things for my own reference later, if a person were to see my marginalia, they would conclude I don't have a working brain

This genus is so fabulous

So glad we no longer have a regulatory state

More great stuff from a really great colleague -- huge congrats Ben!!

📄 No evidence that haplodiploidy favors the evolution of eusociality 🐝🐜 ⬇️ www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

My quote of the day It might seem unfair to reward a person for having so much pleasure over the years, asking the maize plant to solve specific problems and then watching its responses. Barbara McClintock

The US is starving Cuba to death www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026...

Really cool example on the use of comparative genomics to learn about key innovations in animals. In certain contexts 🐍 gene loss 💥helps adaptation!

Slim 5 can now simulate genomes with multiple chromosomes like autosomes, sex chromosomes, mitochondria and chloroplast dna academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

The US is gearing up to literally starve Cuba into submission. It is absolutely criminal and obscene. And this to a country that everyone knows poses *zero* threat to the US. The people of Cuba need our full solidarity in resisting this onslaught.

RIP to a true Canadian legend, first-ballot comedy hall-of-famer

Laboratory and wild Drosophila sechellia have conserved niche specialization phenotypes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.26.701819v1

new by @hebagowayed.bsky.social and @victorerikray.bsky.social in @theguardian.com: "Abolishing an agency that teargasses two-year-olds and shoots mothers in the street isn’t radical. It is basic human decency." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

One of those sentences that gets wilder and wilder

This is so sad.

“Uruguay did what most nations still call impossible: it built a power grid that runs almost entirely on renewables—at half the cost of fossil fuels. The physicist who led that transformation says the same playbook could work anywhere—if governments have the courage to change the rules.”

Matching the movie to the mood

We know that the role of nocturnal moths as pollinators has been greatly underestimated in Europe, but this impressive new study shows that tiger moths (Arctiinae) are important generalist pollinators in a lowland rainforest in Ecuador #teammoth 🌎 royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Wow: Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention (named for Holocaust survivor Raphael Lemkin, who coined term "genocide") calls Clinton's remarks "genocide denial." "Young people in the US are not stupid or gullible. They simply reject genocide – something the Secretary might consider doing as well."

Check out our cover article by @timjanicke.bsky.social and colleagues about the role of sexual selection in animal speciation. academic.oup.com/evlett/artic.... The beautiful illustration is by Katharina Bóth.

Israel has ‘de facto state policy’ of organised torture, says UN report

Congratulations to Joe Felsenstein on being awarded the 2026 Mendel Medal!

How are Pacific NW mountain birds responding to climate change? I got up at 4:00 am for a month to find out. but first the backstory, or "how I spent seven years telling everyone this project wasn't possible" new paper here: esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Check out our new paper in @royalsociety.org testing mechanisms behind elevational range restriction in tropical montane songbirds! ⛰️🦜🌳 Backstory: when i first visited Central America in the early 2010's i was struck with elevational ranges of birds.. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

And honestly, we all should aspire to and hope for more whimsy in our lives—it’s bleak out there

This obit of Watson is *amazing*.

It's irritating that they describe the effects of his racism as limited to causing controversy within science and reputational consequences for himself rather than giving an immeasurable boost, false veneer of legitimacy, and idiot-friendly prestige to modern scientific racism and eugenics.

The framing of this is hilarious: Democrats deeply worried about the repercussions of a victory www.msnbc.com/msnbc/news/m...

I really thought I’d seen it all in terms of the most depressing, soul-crushing, eye-watering failure that Toronto sports has to offer, but somehow I was wrong

YES, SAVAGE!!!

Excited to share our new paper where we find that the rise, decline and fall of clades is not explained by the usual suspects (diversity-dependence, ecological opportunities) but rather by species' insidious loss of macroevolutionary fitness: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/3

The people in the apartment across the street from me have had their patio fan running continuously since January. Never seen them out there. Need to learn flashlight Morse code.

My colleague @jameststroud.bsky.social is a fantastic scientist and an even better guy -- congrats James on this richly deserved recognition and research support!!

New review out! With students in my lab, we explore how population size shapes speciation—from drift in small populations to selection in large ones. Do small or large populations speciate faster? The answer is more nuanced than you might think. esj-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Human-mediated land-use and climate change occur simultaneously, but how do they interact to shape adaptive dynamics? Super excited to share the first paper from the Kreiner lab, led by postdoc extraordinaire @rpineau.bsky.social

Now available in Systematic Biology, a new paper (and R package) in which we outline an approach to account for non-independence in comparative analyses of lineage-pair traits academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

@jblosos.bsky.social and I (and, it turns out, many other lizard biologists!) kept seeing wild lizards with missing legs/hands/feet. How do they survive? Surely natural selection would weed out these unfortunate individuals? Perhaps not...🦎🦵 theconversation.com/3-legged-liz...

I see pieces like this a lot, often w/ a spin of lamenting cultural degeneration, but reading is a LABOR issue, it’s declined because so many people are working overtime or two jobs & employers expect after hours work. France has Earth’s highest reading rate b/c long lunch breaks & labor protections

RIP Jane Goodall. There's of course no better way to understand Goodall than in her own words, of which there are volumes to explore. But I also love Stephen Jay Gould's introduction to her "In the Shadow of Man": archive.org/details/insh.... As Gould notes, and Goodall embodied, "Nature IS context"

"Four years on, I see it clearly: the scientific system was never designed for equity. For people whose privilege stems from geography, institutional reputation and inherited networks, the system works perfectly the way it is. That’s why institutions focus only on improved access and optics."

Late Afternoon Light ~ Cyril Cox, 1958

C. elegans is a real animal and we set out to understand how it comes to have its distinctive biogeography. Its ancestral center of diversity is in the higher elevation forests of Hawaii. Its closest relatives are spread across east Asia. Did they travel from Asia? [Preprint 🧵]