Happy St. Patrick’s Day 🍀 from the emerald bowfin! It’s not easy being green! How does it do it? We don’t know for sure, but suspect it is biliverdin. More research in the works… 🧪 #EndlessFishMostBeautiful

Join us for the inaugural #EvoDevoMondays webinar! Come for the exciting talks 🐦 🐌 - stay for the great @evodevopanam.bsky.social community! #PASEDB

Holosteans for the win! Happy to have contributed. #EndlessFishMostBeautiful

A Short History of Pi Day 3/14/1879 Albert Einstein is born 3/14/16 - Super Pi Day 3/14/2018 Stephen Hawking dies

A group of Grooved Razorfish swim vertically, using their thin bodies to blend into coral and avoid predators. Original post

The rarest of the rare! This holy-grail dream fish is a larval-stage #monkfish, aka #goosefish. Shot in the wild, using scuba, while diving at night over water several thousand feet deep, several miles offshore from Kumejima, Okinawa. #larvalfish #blackwater #gug #deepseafish

Post your favorite Lord of the Rings character. Wrong answers only.

Post your favorite Lord of the Rings character. Wrong answers only.

Post your favorite Lord of the Rings character. Wrong answers only.

Polypterus???

On International Women's Day, we are very grateful to all the strong female researchers that made our lab a success story over the last decade! 🙏 🙏 🙏 #WomenInScience

Remembering Barbara McClintock on International Women's Day! She discovered that genes aren't static, they can actually "jump" around on a chromosome. Her discovery of transposons ("jumping genes") fundamentally changed how we understand evolution and the complexity of DNA! 🧬🌽 #WomenInScience

#OTD 10 years ago we published the spotted #gar genome. 600+ citations later, we are proud of its impact on vertebrate genomics. @jpostlethwait.bsky.social Check out the new assemblies generated with @vertebrategenomes.bsky.social www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/datasets/gen... #EndlessFishMostBeautiful

Oh no, then we’d actually have to do the work!

Back at the Beach -YAY! #AquaticModels

Cambrian Carnival

Based on available data for living species, there are 37,520 species of non-tetrapod fishes vs. 33,281 tetrapod species. 🤓 #TheMoreYouKnow Source for non-tetrapod fish species data: researcharchive.calacademy.org/research/ich... Source for tetrapod species data: zenodo.org/records/1053...

Thanks @patyschneider22.bsky.social for a wonderful visit to @michiganstateu.bsky.social and a great talk in our #EEB seminar series! Check out her lab’s recent preprint on the four-eyed fish retina: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #EndlessFishMostBeautiful

Happy Birthday to Abe and Chuck! #OTD

As we count down to #DarwinDay, we're re-visiting some great pieces on why we teach evolution! "Evolution isn't just a story about where we came from. It's an epic at the center of life itself." https://ncse.ngo/why-teach-evolution-1#DarwinDay

Midwest: the best!

Congrats @jeffreyafarrell.bsky.social !!! He is doing some of the most important work bringing Dev Bio to the 21st century... (the other winners are pretty good too I hear)

I just learned the history, and current significance, of red knitted hats to resistance movements: www.npr.org/2026/01/31/n... Makes these gar stickers I received (years ago) from @drandrewthaler.bsky.social even more relevant today, especially here in Minnesota!

❤️

Why would Switzerland dissolve its Science Council? Saving no money and losing expertise which Swiss education, research and innovation need. swr-web.vercel.app/en/blog/stel...

And of course, the gang had to check out the new @msumuseum.bsky.social exhibit on fish X-ray vision diversity. All three main lineages of “fishes” on one wall, what more can you ask for? Ray, coelacanth, and yours garly represent. 🐟🐠🐡 #EndlessFishMostBeautiful

#Zebrafish 🐟 meeting klaxon🧨 The registration period for the 1st German Zebrafish Meeting (16-18 Sept) is open www.germanfishmeeting.org with Sessions on Development, Pharma, Behavior, Omics, and more. Deadline for Abstracts at the end of April. Hope to see y'all there! 🧪 (1/n)

Our project on molecular convergence in teleosts is published in MBE. This study involved analysing over 2 million genes, and combining multiple data modalities to uncover some surprising insights behind the evolution of adaptations in teleosts. Thank you @hfspo.bsky.social for the funding!

Our Fish EvoDevoGeno Lab @michiganstateu.bsky.social has its 10th anniversary today! 🐠🐟🧪🧬🔬 Thanks to all lab members - present & past, pictured or not - for making the last decade a success! & thanks to our partners in crime of the @brainyfishguts.bsky.social Lab, too! #EndlessFishMostBeautiful

#ImmigrantStoryoftheWeek 🔬 Meet Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, a Venezuelan molecular biologist whose curiosity was sparked by his grandfather’s ranch. His research reveals how organisms regenerate themselves, offering insight into treating human disease. Watch the full video: https://vilcek.co/3YPdH8W

It’s out! 🐟 We compared three regeneration superstars—axolotl, zebrafish, and Polypterus—to ask how animals regrow limbs and fins. We find shared core processes, and other programs fine-tuned by evolution in surprising, lineage-specific ways. tinyurl.com/mpftkn7y

A distinguished visitor in our Ancient Fish Facility today: @fishguy.bsky.social in da house!

I need to wash my car…

So 80 sticks or 8 binds: bsky.app/profile/gree... It’s hard to get even get half a stick of American eel for research these days…

OTD 1908 Willhelm Weinberg gave a talk to the Society for the Natural History of the Fatherland in Württemberg giving the population genetics equations GH Hardy would independently publish 5 months later. It was 35 years before his work was recognized in the Anglophone world. 🐋🌱🥢🧪 #EvoBio #HistSTM

Exciting genome news! For those interested, there is a prerelease of the Ensembl gene models for the new reference genomes GRCz12tu (GCA_049306965.1) and GRCz12ab (GCA_05204075.1) at ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/database... You can download gff and gtf files there as well as softmasked genomes.

When you meet your scientific nemesis at a conference...

So you're a medieval landlord, collecting property rent from your peasants in eels. How do you count them? Eels were usually counted in units called sticks (25 eels) -- possibly from the number of eels you can smoke on a stick at one time. 10 sticks of eels was called a bind. 🗃️🧪

08-Jan: Born on this day in 1823, the man who independently of Darwin came up with the idea of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace. Here’s a post I wrote about Darwin’s and Wallace’s friendship… friendsofdarwin.com/articles/dar... #HistSci

Alfred Russel Wallace born OTD in 1823. He said he shared with Darwin “an intense interest in … the variety [of living things] that catches the eye of the observer even among those which are very much alike, but which are soon found to differ in several distinct characters.” 🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM #EvoBio

#ZebrafishFunFacts: Unofficially known as the Zebrafish Bible, "The Zebrafish Book" sought to standardize zfish husbandry in early days of zfish research. Originally published by Monte Westerfield, the book is now in its 5th edition. Previous editions are freely available: zfin.org/zf_info/zfbo... 🧪

New paper alert! ‼️

Also, Sam's looking for a postdoc! She's skilled in animal and microbe physiology, analytical chemistry, bacterial genetics, and bioinformatics. She’d like to keep studying symbioses but is flexible. If you have (or know of) postdoc opportunities, please find her and talk to her! #SICB2026

When at #SICB2026, check out Tony Zhou's @zzhou32.bsky.social talk on developmental multi-omics in the "living fossil" spotted gar on Monday. #EndlessFishMostBeautiful

Celebratory drink with @compbiologist.bsky.social to salute the new year AND to cheer for @yhbioinfo.bsky.social’s new article on cross-species comparison methods out in Nature Methods: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Motto for 2026: Yes, We coelaCANth! Thanks @drheathheckman.bsky.social for the nice Fishmas present!

Charles Darwin's voyage on the Beagle began #OnThisDay in 1831. The five-year trek around the world profoundly shaped his ideas about the natural world; he later said the journey was "by far the most important event in my life." #histsci

Happy Holidays and Merry 🐟-mas from the Braasch @fishevodevogeno.bsky.social Ganz @brainyfishguts.bsky.social and Thompson @xtremo-devo-lab.bsky.social Labs!

Happy Coelacanth Day!