A very unusual nest! A pair of Wood Warblers Phylloscopus sibilatrix feeding young Wrens Troglodytes troglodytes. I presume the warblers' nest was predated and they found this similar looking nest nearby and began to feed the young even though the adult Wrens were too! Dartmoor, Devon this morning.

Come on! 20 years ago my institute wouldn’t let me invite APM for a talk because of the reputational risk.

Saw this and immediately thought: ‘they made a movie about Spidergate? And Hemsworth is cast as the diminutive anti-hero?’ youtu.be/BfsNfFoA0J0?...

I woke at a research funding agency and I can’t access a Science paper. When is this insanity going to end?

anyone have a pdf of Models of adaptive behaviour Houston, Alasdair.; McNamara, John (John M.) Cambridge, UK ; New York, N.Y. : Cambridge University Press, 1999 ?

Both were after the limits of human potential. Both hippies. Both on the other side of the law at times. One forgotten. The other not so much. HOWIE: www.amazon.com/Search-Al-Ho... LAZ: www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0DV...

obsessed with this extensive and bizarre list of collective nouns on wiktionary. love that it starts with a warning not to use them

This obituary headline for the climate-denying ExxonMobil CEO deserves an award.

Overheard in work today on a Teams call. "I love your backdrop. The Golden Gate Bridge - I wish I was there!" "It's the Forth Rail Bridge."

Been looking forward to this, the obvious sequel to the excellent The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs.

Look. At. This. (!). A fungus spore landed on this weevil. Grew inside and caused it to climb to the top of this plant- while the fungus killed it. Consumed its body. Used that energy to shoot up a red fruiting body to release more spores. To zombify more weevils. A mind controlling killer fungus.

"A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself."

Note: no "T. rex cells" were used for this. Collagen sequences synthesized from osteological collagen from a Tyrannosaurus fossil were used. The resultant artificial leather lacks the actual microstructures that would have been present in actual T. rex skin. But biotechbros gotta biotech.

Bizarre level of precision in The Guardian. Did a human copy edit this, let alone author it?

I was watching a spider making its way across my office window when it was plucked off the pane and swallowed.

Adorable young kestrels surprised by a butterfly.

Having shifted to a job at an academia-corporate crossover, I thought I’d start a thread of the specialist terminology I encounter. Starting with “solutionise”: to develop an effective response to a problem.

Excellent opportunity here: a 5 year senior research fellowship in Life Sciences (broadly defined) at All Souls College Oxford. Many opportunities to work with the diverse & inclusive community here in @biology.ox.ac.uk here in the brand new Life & Mind Buiilding www.asc.ox.ac.uk/post-doctora...

Delighted to hear about the evolution of trees & how they have transformed our planet. And even more delighted to hear two of our Fellows discuss the brilliance of tree evolution on 'In Our Time', with William Baker and Christopher Berry! You can listen below. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

🪼 Your tax dollars paid a scientist to squeeze jellyfish through cheesecloth. Osamu Shimomura processed tens of thousands on an NSF grant to understand why they glow. He found a protein that glowed green under UV light. Called it "green protein." Nobody cared. For decades.

What’s *really* cool about insect migrations like this, is that - in my opinion - individual animals are *not* migratory because they spend their lives moving one way. But their genes *are*, because the circuit is completed by their descendants.

This deep sea creature is as sharp & clear as broken class, & can grow as long as your hand. This giant amphipod, (Cystisoma) only has two colored body parts: the dense orange stomach/egg pouch, & two MASSIVE eyes, which are a glittering holographic orange layer completely covering its head. 📽️ MBARI

Have you, like me, spent the last 26 years worrying if the Canadian Potato Museum STILL has the display of various potato diseases with potatoes in little coffins? Stop worrying. I checked today. Still there.

Chris Perrins is an exceptionally wonderful figure, unassuming despite being a giant of mid-to-late 20th century ecology. His 1965 opus is a masterpiece, yet he’s so modest about it, as with all his contributions…which span ~2 normal research careers.

A male Whinchat Saxicola rubetra singing a Stonechat Saxicola torquata song. So perfect it fools @merlin.bird.id Maybe it was reared by Stonechats? Buckfastleigh Moor above Mitchelcombe Dartmoor early am today.

Our (Jenny Dunn, Carolina Chagas, @willjsmith.bsky.social) paper on the evolution of island Wrens is finally out @evojlinnsoc.bsky.social! We describe the evolution of island gigantism in the St Kilda and Shetland subspecies. academic.oup.com/evolinnean/a...

Forget all the annoying stuff in the world for a few moments and enjoy the natural beauty of Brazil’s Seven-coloured Tanager (Tangara fastuosa) Photo: Luiz Cavalcanti Damasceno

Oxford, the longest running continuous weather station in UK history, with temperature observations stretching back to 1815, has preliminarily broken its maximum temperature record for May yesterday by OVER 3ºC with a temperature of 33.7ºC. Unprecedented in its 211-year history.

The UK’s strangest avian couple at the Long Nanny, Northumberland this morning - the female American Black Tern with the same male Arctic Tern she bred (unsuccessfully) with in 2024. A small nest scrape but no eggs as yet. #NEbirding #rarebirdsUK

I honestly read this text and first understood it to be about Open Data.

SUPERMAGNETIC MICROPHAGES 🤯

Exciting news! In the meantime, anyone curious about the book should check out this BioScience review of the book, penned by @asgriffin.bsky.social. academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...

Very excited to see that Rosemary Grant is narrating an audio version of her autobiography, due out in early November.

Characteristic leadership from @wadhamcollege.bsky.social (as the most clearly outspoken of the vast majority of dissenting colleges, to be clear)

I love libraries. Lucky enough to have lived in the city that apparently has (had?) more per unit area than anywhere else in the world. And this is a very beautiful example.

Peacock Spider (genus Maratus), a group of tiny Australian jumping spiders famous for their vibrant colours and elaborate courtship dances to attract its mate. They are very tiny in size only between 2-5 millimetres ( the size of a pea)

#FossilFriday: In July 1824, Lord Cole (later Enniskillen) bought this, his first fossil, from Mary Anning. But it was missing the tip of its snout. In 1827 she found the tip, recognised that it belonged to the specimen she had sold to Cole 3 years before, and sent it to him and he stuck it on.

Last year I found a wild strawberry with white fruit. I planted a stolon and am delighted to find it’s not reverted.

How cool is this? The pocketbook mussel (Lampsilis ovata) has a mantle that looks like a minnow. When a predator comes to eat it, the mussel blows larvae into the fish’s mouth. The larvae attach to the gills before dropping off someway away. Image by Peter David Scott/The Art Agency.

Robin landed on my knee as I was gardening ❤️ It’s got chicks to feed over the fence.

You may have noticed that the word for ‘night’ in many languages appears to be that language’s word for ‘eight’ with an ‘N' in front of it. English: N + eight = Night German: N + acht = Nacht French: N + huit = Nuit Spanish: N + ocho = Noche Italian: N + otto = Notte Portuguese: N + oito = Noite ⬇️

Someone ahead of me asked for the same bus ticket as their friend. The bus driver said 'You can't have the same. You can have similar.'

My beloved father in law Ranjith Chandrapala drove a bus that stopped at Ealing Hospital. He continued to do so throughout the pandemic’s first wave until he caught covid himself and died, in that very same hospital. Many very ordinary heroes risked their lives for things others took for granted.

The collapse of the UK HE sector will destroy what remains of the profession of librarianship here. (Swathes of academic staff and others are having their careers destroyed too.) Academic librarianship was the last viable bit remaining. Shame the professional body's always been politically impotent.

#FossilFriday The sail-backed herbivorous synapsid Edaphosaurus @ummnh.bsky.social

Even AI is in thrall to him.

Look forward to this featuring in the next ‘What animals can teach us’ books

For your Monday, here's one of the JWST Deep Field images. This is a portion of the sky about one-fifth the size of a full Moon. And it contains THOUSANDS of galaxies—some of which extend back to when the Universe was a couple of billion years old. The redder a galaxy, the farther away it is.

Going through the first batch of sounds collected last week by the Biophones ... both were located on mires on N Dartmoor, and this is a lovely example of what these places sound like at first light at the moment - the spectrogram shows a grasshopper warbler "reeling" and a "drumming" snipe.