A common type of ant in Europe breaks a fundamental rule in biology: its queens can produce male offspring that are a whole different species go.nature.com/4mOb5T9

Absolute honor to hop onto @newspeciespodcast.bsky.social to talk science, bugs and field anecdotes. Thank you Zoe! 🦂

🚨 Postdoc Opportunity in Quantitative & Population Genetics! We’re hiring a 2-year postdoc at CBGP (INRAE, Montpellier, France) to work on quantitative and population genetics applied to Drosophila biarmipes. 📍 More details: umr-cbgp.fr/rejoindre-le... #Postdoc #Genetics #Drosophila

I am somehow for the first time ever reviewing for PNAS and their reviewer instructions include this BANGER of a line: "The purpose of peer review is not to demonstrate proficiency in identifying flaws" Print it in eleventy point font and hang it from the hillside. Scream it from the rooftops.

OPEN biodiversity DATA ALERT: iNaturalist has released range data for 100k+ taxa: www.inaturalist.org/posts/106918 🌍🧪

New writing! For @sciam.bsky.social, I talk about misleading memes. If you understand evolution enough to know this already, great! But memes/youtubes/etc reach folks with no biology background. Science has been twisted to justify bad things, such as eugenics, before. NOT IN CRABS' NAME. 🦀🧪🦑⚒️

Upon learning that yesterday would be my last day as a program officer at the National Science Foundation, I shared this parting message with my colleagues. The next few months will be frenetic and stressful for them. Here are some things that you can do to help them with the mission ahead. (1)

Where do species come from? where and when did they meet and exchange genes? find it out with our new R tool for historical biogeography, RRphylogeography is published: doi.org/10.1111/2041...

The majority of people who responded to a poll in Nature say they’re now using Bluesky. They’re using it to connect with other scientists, keep up to date with other research or researchers, and promote their own research. 🧪

Our paper with #postdoc Michael Roswell is out! TLDR: We test regionally on plants and insects a machine learning protocol originally developed to predict global conservation needs. The tool performs even better at this scale & can readily assist conservation decision-making. doi.org/10.1111/ddi....

500 million years before humanity ever existed, the world was spectacular. There are too many horrors to look at right now. Help sustain your soul by remembering what was/is/will be beautiful. Thank you @cenospire.bsky.social for creating this. SOUND ON.

Arachnologist Lauren Esposito develops community platforms to share LGBTQ+ voices and wants to shed light on the overlooked intersectional barriers affecting queer people of colour. https://go.nature.com/4jiW1vi

The insanity of being a fire ecologist in the epicenter of a major fire event, bags packed and ready to evacuate, watching active fire from my window, while taking media requests and explaining to the public, for the 100,000th time how climate change is largely responsible for this

Our genome assembly of Hylesia metabus published in Journal of Heredity. A collaboration between CBGP, PHIM, LEEISA, CNRGV, BIPAA IGEPP, SEAG, FUNDSALUD and MGX @cbgpmontpellier.bsky.social @phimresearch.bsky.social

#microCT is awesome.

Species concepts in conservation biology — some thoughts derived from our 2023 paper advocating a retrospective reproductive community concept. waynemaddison.wordpress.com/2024/12/28/s... #conservationbiology #evolbio #philbio #philsci #hpbio #SpeciesSaturday @jeannettewhitton.bsky.social

Ok people. I’m drawing silhouettes this afternoon. If you have a paper coming up and you are in need of a #silhouette please let me know and I will have it ready today. As always I upload all my silhouettes to phylopic.org I also have tutorials on how to put a silhouette in a plot in R.

🚨 Don't eat uncooked snake! Your eyes & lungs can be parasitized by pentastomids, which are a CRUSTACEAN. Adults lack so many features that they weren't believed to be arthropods at all until their DNA was sequenced (and sperm morphology, but that was not widely accepted). Yet, they are! #Crustmas 🧪

📢 Soutenance de thèse de #Louise_Camus, Jeudi 19 Déc. à 14h00 "Prédiction génomique du potentiel adaptatif de populations dans un nouvel environnement : application aux espèces envahissantes" Thèse co-encadrée par @mgda76.bsky.social & #Simon_Boitard Zoom: tinyurl.com/yszp3wmw Mdp: n1.Czm.dxT

New Cases of Teratology, Albinism, Abnormal Pigmentation, Gynandromorphism, and Injury Healing in Scorpions. A great collaborative effort between mostly independant researchers and students and my most recent publication for your interest : www.researchgate.net/publication/...

MASSIVELY excited to see Tityus achilles, South America's first #venom spraying #scorpion, finally described in @zoojlinnsoc.bsky.social ! This new species from #Colombia can spray venom at potential predators, a striking case of convergent #evolution 🧵 (1/n) academic.oup.com/zoolinnean/a...

Who dis ? Meet Acanthops #mantises! (fam. Acanthopidae, here an unidentified species). These count among the few mantis genera in which adults retain the high abdomen flexure so often seen in juveniles. Can you make out this adult female's wings? Photographed in #Colombia.

For #crustmas, let's pop the hood on an #isopod! This 3D render, which shows the animal's trunk anatomy in intricate detail, was generated based on micro-CT data. Sarah Losso, @invertebratepal.bsky.social and I had a blast making this (and more) over the summer @harvardoeb.bsky.social!

Up close and personal with a #scorpion from #Colombia. Tityus (Atreus) icarus, which I had the privilege of describing (and naming!) earlier this year. Yes, I like Greek mythology...

Want to teach kids how evolution works? 🧒🏽🧒 With @eseb.bsky.social's generous support, my fellow Tate Yawitz and I have designed "Gene Bingo!" 🧬🎱 A fun game that has convinced many kids in the US and Mexico that evolution is important and cool! 1/3

To kick things off, here's a sneak peek at my current work: species delimitation in South African pest weevils ! We're looking for signals of admixture between sympatric Phlyctinus populations (Entiminae) and potential signatures of selection following host shifts. Powered by phytools! ⬇️