"Why do queen bumblebees emerge from hibernation during weekends?" I love this framing about bias in hobbyist-collected data.

Whoa! Elsevier fired @richardtol.bsky.social, longstanding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Energy Economics. Richard's side of the story should be ringing alarm bells. #EconSky Fraud and cover-up richardtol.substack.com/p/fraud-and-...

Nature having an amazing few weeks: 2 weeks ago: mega-spiky dinosaur Last week: ants are clonally propagating sex slaves This week: Martians

💡 Explore how practices from distributed, open-source software can make science more professional, open, and collaborative! Attend the “Science as amateur software development” lecture by Prof. Dr. @rmcelreath.bsky.social on Wed 17 Sept, 9:00. 👉 Register here: www.pretix.osc.lmu.de/lmu-osc/OSSS...

A (former?) friend has demonstrated the creative ability of AI for me. "A postdoc named Simon, alas, Loves great tits and runs up the grass. He sprints up the fells, Writes papers as well, But for tenure, he has not got a chance.”

"Hostility, exclusion and academic bullying should be formally recognised as research integrity issues because they directly impact who gets to succeed and whose voices are silenced." By @maddipow.bsky.social

Can someone enlighten me: what part(a) of the process are being offloaded to AI? Solely writing the manuscript? Or other parts of an investigation also?

First genetically confirmed record of a wild Marsh Tit × Willow Tit hybrid (Poecile palustris × P. montanus) | link.springer.com/ar... | Journal of Ornithology | #ornithology 🪶

An opportunity of a lifetime for budding lichenologists. The National Trust and the Royal Botanics, Edinburgh are offering a PAID lichen traineeship in #Scotland! The work programme looks fascinating and a great opportunity to develop skills. Deadline: 3/10/2025. www.asva.co.uk/jobs/trainee...

My university just instituted a new workload model that explicitly states external service work, like journal editing, is not to be considered part of paid workload allocation. Yet such service is still listed on promotion guides. When will academics get fed up with working for free? Join #UCU

Peer reviewers are exhausted. It's common to spend *months* inviting reviewers, getting refusals, inviting more, maybe 12 or more, then 2 agree but 1 doesn't complete, so you go again. That's why your paper is in limbo. I'm very sorry, it's awful, but it's also an untenable academic labour issue.

The AI authorship issue is real. We've caught papers that looked OK but had references to works by the *journal editors* that *do not exist*. Like, don't send us papers citing papers we know we didn't write, right?

This gets progressively funnier with every use of the term "floppy".

Finally, @lesleyuttley.bsky.social, who found 68 kinds of problems with systematic reviews, including lack of diversity in the review team: "a bad systematic review is worse than a non-review" because of the assumption of a gold standard doi.org/10.1016/j.jc... #OpenFest25

Imagine spending a research career trying to force scientists to pay exorbitant licensing fees to use the little 8 item scale you built using public (NIH) funds retractionwatch.com/2025/09/02/p...

Feeling seen by the Oxford Uni job portal

In our final online panel, a great paper from Batool Almarzouq, who shows how - if you follow the sources back - the same extractivist dynamics that transfer wealth from the global south to the global north in neocolonial projects play out in the open science funding landscape #OpenFest25

This is bonkers! Layer after layer of rapidly evolving madness. Every time you make sense of one aspect (“oh, that’s not so extreme as I’d thought, it happens in other species”), the article lobs a new wackadoo finding at your face. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

One of the rare days when birds seem terribly dull.

Last week in Nature: ooo look at my spiky dino. This week in Nature: EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT BIOLOGY IS WRONG www.nature.com/articles/d41...

With alt:

🤯

Each year I set my intro bioinformatics class a group exercise where they reconstruct the root sentence (usually a notable quote) on a phylogenetic tree, where the sentence "mutates" along each branch like a game of "Telephone". I used to just use a dictionary for this. This year I switched to LLMs

It hasn’t taken long for the mood here to deteriorate to match Twitter’s. Hardly surprising, when it’s a direct replacement, but still a shame.

I turned the car radio on to drown out the screaming of a meltdown that had entered its 2nd hour and The Ride of the Valkyries was playing. Alas, my smile at this only enraged him further.

I am just back from a wonderful few days in Sweden where I visited the incredible Lars Jonsson exhibition in Stockholm, and then his museum on Gotland. Absolutely mind blowing, the selection and range of work was just unbelievable!

Academia is all over this. It’s an ugly irony that nobody values tertiary education less than a professor seeking a field assistant with a biology degree to work unsalaried and covering their own travel costs.

Has anyone measured the frequency of these ‘SUVs’ (and 4WD pickups) across an urban-rural gradient?

A second lesson is the benefit of following focal populations for many years and being a hoarder when it comes to specimens and DNA.

While the introduction was entirely unintentional, I comfort myself that this is just 1 of 1000's of lakes with stickleback. And, the accident now shows us the potential magnitude of immigrant fitness advantage, and the speed and genome-wide extent of conspecific introgression in its early years.

Out today in Nature is the most exciting dinosaur paper I've ever been involved in - led by @tweetisaurus.bsky.social we describe a partial skeleton of the UTTERLY BIZARRE Spicomellus from the Middle Jurassic of Morocco, the oldest known ankylosaur. (1/x) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Exciting PhD opportunity at Nord University with @ebnilsen.bsky.social. The PhD will work together with a team of researchers to assess sustainable levels of recreational harvest on willow ptarmigan, black grouse and capercaillie populations. www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

Whaaat?

Why do males and females often differ in traits? The expected answer: selection. But our new paper in GENETICS shows that genetic drift alone can generate sexual dimorphism — even when male & female optima are the same

Please enjoy the absolute perfection of the egg of the Common Ringed Plover

This seems like a great idea. Of course it’s lovely to see everyone but it is v v strange that >1000 scientists fly in to agonise about the biological impact of climate change.

With #eseb2025 coming to a close, it is time to start making plans for 2026. Interested in the interface of evolution 🧬 and ecology 🌳? Come to our #ExE conference hosted by @uniexecec.bsky.social in beautiful #Cornwall. Leave your email address at tinyurl.com/EvolxEcol to join our mailing list!

👋 Interested in working on the evolution of genetic architecture 🧬 of complex traits using linked-read sequencing of thousands of common lizards 🦎 from a wild population and common garden experiment? #evolution #genetics Well, I have a PhD offer for you 👇 devillemereuil.legtux.org/erc-funded-p...

Bird place-name of the day 82: GREAT FINBOROUGH (Suff). OE fina + beorg. ‘Woodpecker hill.’ www.birdsandplace.co.uk/spottedwoodp... #birdsandplace #naturewriting

Hahaha, I love this photo of a snake nerd researcher from the Phoenix Herpetological Society using a fake leg to step on rattlesnakes & see how likely they are to bite. He "stepped" on 175 of them, and was bitten by only SIX. Snakes desperately want to just get away! 🐍🧪 www.npr.org/2024/05/17/1...

Each year the Museum runs a club for key stage 4 students. Investigators interested in the natural world have an opportunity to meet in the Museum and pursue an extended project of their choice. Investigators meet on Saturdays from 10:30 to 12:30 for 10 weeks, and work on their personal projects.

We urgently need a moratorium on coining any more ‘omics. academic.oup.com/icesjms/arti...

My son has just suggested keeping a fly as a pet and I’m terrified this is an early sign of an entomology career.

I suppose this means his cat is dead.

Empty yet also full. Must be Schrödinger’s flat.

A new preprint showing strong evidence of peer reviewers engaging in transactional peer review as some only approved a manuscript after requesting and then getting cited osf.io/preprints/os...

Hmm. I think there are separate--but perhaps a little overlapping--things going on here that are being somewhat conflated...

"Evolutionary ecology is a fashionable interest." Berry 1979.

Actually my favorite bird etymology is that in 1400s England they gave human nicknames to birds (Jenny Wren, Tom Tit) but some of them stuck. Jack Daw became Jackdaw, Maggie Pie became Magpie. With Robin Redbreast they just dropped the original name of the bird entirely.