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 🧵]

This may sound a bit weird, but I have been waiting for someone to make a robust defense of shame for what feels like ages and folks, this is it

I have a couple of small updates on this story, in case y'all have been wondering about any fallout since its July publication! 🧵

Now published in Cell! We found that ~15% of SNPs from divergent refs did not liftover as SNPs in the gray fox ref—half mapped to monomorphic sites, half failed to map. Co-authored with Matthew Genchev, @elliecat.bsky.social, and @jazlynmooney.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Friends: I'm recruiting at least one PhD student to join our lab in Atlanta in the Fall of 2026. Information about our research can be found at the link below. Please pass along to any students interested in the quantitative study of speciation, secondary contact, and the build-up of biodiversity!

Check out our new preprint! We compare sequence versus synteny approaches for resolving a challenging #phylogenetic problem. In this case, synteny is far more informative! Also includes the first chromosome-level #genome for the enigmatic #fish family Gyrinocheilidae. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Fun to synthesize some exciting future directions for spatiotemporal genomics in this Tansley perspective. Check er out!

What can a planet tell us about hands?

🎉🆕📰🎉: Diversity patterns and knowledge gaps of Atlantic Forest epiphyllous bryophytes: a highly neglected group doi.org/10.1093/aob/...

Interested in measuring trees and branches from Lidar data? Don't want to use Matlab? (who does). Take a look at our new Python package for reconstructing trees from point cloud data using quantitative structure models (QSM's). Fun with @jefferybcannon.bsky.social! ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

Happy to share that our paper on the #evolution and #genomics of the most common #color polymorphism in #frogs is now out in @pnas.org! My favorite frogs even made the cover of this week’s issue! 🎉🐸🎉 Read the paper here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🚨 NEW: Climate change is already causing 30,000 deaths per year - a global annual economic loss of $100-350B USD - but the true damage is probably 10x higher. Out TODAY in Nature Climate Change: the first systematic look at the science of "health impact attribution" 🔓 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

If You're Rare, Should I Care? How Imperfect Detection Changes Relationships Between Biodiversity and Global Change Drivers 🌎🌐🧪 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

First pop gen paper from our lab! We find repeated evolutionary turn over of sex chromosomes in darters contributes to reproductive isolation. Turnover may be an escape hatch to resolve mitonuclear conflict & neo sex chromosomes evolved via a rare recessive mutation. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Israel committing genocide in Gaza, world’s top scholars on the crime say

Got a story out today about something I’ve been fascinated by for years: From Atlanta hip hop to Bama RushTok, here’s how and why the South has taken such a firm grip on modern American culture. Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

My company is hiring a computational biologist! This role is the same position as mine, and will involve building genomic prediction models, some bioinformatics, and a lot of independent research on developing new methods to improve our crop development initiatives. www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/42...

Really enjoyed reading this one. Good food for thought, with important implications for how we might think about things like limiting similarity and character displacement / species sorting in recently diverged taxa

Anas Al-Sharif was one of the most remarkable reporters of his generation. For 673 days, he defied Israeli threats to kill him. Al Jazeera now confirm their crew in Gaza City have all been assassinated: RIP reporters Anas Al-Sharif & Mohammed Qareqea and cameramen Ibrahim Zaher & Mohammed Nofal

Jim Lovell did lots of cool things in his life. Maybe the coolest was the Xmas gift he got his wife in 1968. While he was orbiting the moon over Xmas, he had a mink coat delivered to her with the inscription “from your Man on the Moon”. Sets the bar rather high.

He didn't get to the moon but he got his crew home, and that was the more remarkable task. www.nbcnews.com/news/rcna223...

this is one of the worst crimes in human history and the entire global north and all of us in it share the responsibility

Canada: “We are prepared to issue as many empty statements as necessary to stop this genocide”