Fascinating talk on the history of peer review from Melinda Baldwin at @icssi.org, with some parallels to current crises. Also I hadn't realized peer review was such an American thing.

📚Meta-analyses!⚠️Key pitfalls! 🔬Improved methodology! 🖥️Reliable syntheses! Our #EditorsChoice for the #AnimalBehaviourJournal: “Biological and methodological pitfalls of meta-analyses in ecology and evolution: Lessons from eyespot function studies” Read here: doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2025.123448

This study published in #ProcB shows that comparing cancer across animal species can be misleading if researchers ignore popularity bias doi.org/10.1098/rspb... | #Evolution #Epidemiology

Excited to share our new paper in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social on data and code archiving at @britishecologicalsociety.org journals. TL;DR: Data archiving rates are high, code archiving rates are low, documentation needs to be improved! besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.....

Please improve acknowledgments sections to better credit research contributors! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... Our new paper on this topic begins by summarising three pathways to improve crediting of research contributors – 1. Loosen authorship restrictions.

🪼 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.

🕷️Wolf spiders! 💌Courtship! 🦠Infection! 👀Visual receptivity! Our #EditorsChoice for the #AnimalBehaviourJournal: “Infection stress and mate assessment in wolf spiders: female mate choice varies with sensory mode of male courtship” Read here: doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2026.123540

Out today in @royalsocietypublishing.org - we show that crab spiders (the ones you usually see ambushing pollinators on flowers 🕷️🌸) get worse at hunting if their eyes are covered!🫣 Sounds obvious? It's actually quite surprising, here's why... 👀 (1/8) royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article...

@chrislhayes.bsky.social ICYMI, a piece that reminded me of Twilight Of The Elites, for obvious reasons. "a world with universal basic income is more meritocratic than a world without one" www.scottsantens.com/the-angine-d...

Three concrete recommendations that we make in our manuscript (osf.io/preprints/me...) on Acknowledgment sections: 1. Include ORCID numbers in parentheses after names of individuals in Acknowledgments. This will disambiguate their identities so that scholarly databases can index them.

New preprint out! 📢 We analysed 1.38M papers across 612 journals in ecology & evolution. We show the field is dominated by vertebrates: they’re studied more often, in higher‑impact journals, and get more citations + media attention than invertebrates, with little change in decades😵

Do people react to animals in photographs in the same way as to real, live animals? To find out, more than 560 participants rated 62 invertebrate species for fear, disgust, and beauty: royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article... #RSOS

📢 New preprint out! tl;dr: Publish your code, add clear README's! 138 participants assessed data & code archiving practices across 1861 papers published at 7 @britishecologicalsociety.org journals, identified gaps & offered recommendations for improvement 🔗 doi.org/10.32942/X26...

New paper out! Why do ecologists study some taxa way more than others? 🐛🐠🐦 Surveying 868 researchers, we show that organism choice isn’t just about logistics, it’s also about emotions and context!

Differences between M & F are pervasive, but we often focus on #SexDifferences in the mean. @pietropollo.bsky.social @danielwanoble.bsky.social @itchyshin.bsky.social &co present #stats tools that allow comparison of #skewness, #kurtosis & correlations b'n groups @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4093nJs

Please contact me if you want to be nominated for a postdoc via this scheme - you need to live outside of Canada and I need to do so by 9 Feb (and need to start by March 2027) - www.ualberta.ca/en/graduate-... (I think you do need to have a competitive CV etc) Please email me if you are interested

We've got ISSUES. Literally. We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do? arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 A 🧵 1/n

Scientific funding is a net negative: "European taxpayers will have spent more on the funding process than on the funding itself, and the scientific ecosystem has been drained" www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I forgot to share that our paper came out a few months ago! We synthesise decades of research showing that conspicuous traits consistently predict attractiveness, condition, and fitness across animals. Check it out if you’re into sexual selection and signalling! doi.org/10.1111/ele....

🪰 Fruit flies! 🌡️ Temperature changes! 💋Mate attraction! 👃Pheromones! Our November #ASABEditorsChoice for the #AnimalBehaviourJournal: "Effects of natural temperature variation on male perception of female scents in Drosophila melanogaster" Read here: doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2025.123352

Our new preprint! The Acknowledgments problem, and what to do about it. With @martonkovacs.bsky.social, @pietropollo.bsky.social, @philobolobstime.bsky.social, Losia Lagisz, & Mohammad Hosseini.

🌙🔊 How do we perceive light and noise pollution? Your experience matters! ✨ Take part in this survey 👉 app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/salford/pl... Your input will help better understand these growing problems. The survey is part of the European project PLAN-B. #lightpollution #noisepollution

"The statistical fragility of animal cognition findings: a meta-meta-analytic reappraisal" doi.org/10.32942/X2Z...

Do you get confused when reading meta-analyses? Our new paper offers a practical guide to help researchers understand, interpret, and use them properly. We also show that the insights meta-analyses provide are often overlooked by those who cite them.

UPDATE: I saw it happen! At the Birds Canada research station at the tip of Long Point I watched an expert ever-so-gently and carefully put one of these tiny tags on a monarch. Let me walk you through the steps (1/4)

Size does matter for mating success in two species of seed bugs in the wild. #sexualselection #lygaeidae #mating #naturalselection #malematechoice #sicily doi.org/10.1093/jeb/... @opheliasfritsch.bsky.social and Shuker

Absolutely nobody asked for this but I reformatted my animal yeetability thread into printable poster & zine files. Introducing, the "Pocket Guide to Responsible & Sustainable Animal YEETING" featuring a revamped rating system. Download links below.

I wish there were more posts like this

Insect populations are rapidly declining even in relatively undisturbed landscapes, raising concerns about the health of ecosystems that depend on them. esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Following funnel-web spiders — amazing work by Caitlin Creak: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Study initially by @braxtonjones.bsky.social, Danilo Harms and I (funded by NatGeo and AusGeo), taken up by Caitlin with Russell Bonduriansky and Mike Kasumovic. Congrats all, especially Caitlin! :)

🕷️#Arachnews alert! 🦂 New Foelix (the definitive reference for general spider biology, a must-have for every arachnologist & arachnophile) just dropped. Now called Spider Biology, this is an completely rewritten & updated version of the Biology of Spiders (2011). link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Sabine Hossenfelder: "Scientific research is broken. This has been going on for decades, and the situation is not improving. It's getting worse." youtu.be/9yPy3DeMUyI?...

All three books I've co-authored are freely available online for non-commercial use: - #Bayesian Data Analysis, 3rd ed (aka BDA3) at stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/book/ - #Regression and Other Stories at avehtari.github.io/ROS-Examples/ - Active Statistics at avehtari.github.io/ActiveStatis...

Our study, conducted with great care and attention, is out! It went through a meticulous community peer-review process under open science practices, and I’m proud to be part of it. The results may not be what we hoped for, but they are what we need to move toward real inclusivity in science. 💜

No one does fancy appendages quite like treehoppers. Here's a particularly spectacular one, likely in the Genus Hypsauchenia. 📷 sukal on iNaturalist 📍 Thailand 🔗: www.inaturalist.org/observations... #ObservationOfTheDay

The behavioural research literature is concentrated on certain taxa. Last chance to help us find out why by participating in a survey that takes only 5-10 min: unsw.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_.... Participation is voluntary and there are no negative consequences for choosing not to participate!

The thing about entomology is, there are always weirder bugs than anything you could imagine on your own. Here's Cysteodemus wislizeni, a blister beetle from west Texas.

"Ungeneralizable generalizations? A meta-meta-analysis of the influence of taxonomic bias on the study of behavior." - doi.org/10.32942/X2X...

"Productivity reform starts with public science" by Nathan Garland @n8sci.bsky.social has some worthy suggestions for improving productivity. In news we all know – but the Government seems to like ignoring – it'll help to fund more basic science research! nathangarland.substack.com/p/productivi...

Are you a behavioural researcher? Participate this survey from the University of New South Wales. The research aims to learn more about why researchers choose organisms for research. For more information, please contact [email protected] #science #ecology unsw.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Reminder: Nobel-prize winning PCR (1983), used in basically all genetic tech today, was only possible because of extremophile bacterium discovered in 1964 in Yellowstone funded by a small ~$80k NSF grant with no obvious application at the time. #science 🧪 www.richmondscientific.com/how-a-discov...

#NextGenSci asked young scientists to write a rule that all principal investigators should be required to follow to improve the experience of young scientists in their lab. Check out their answers on #NationalHigherEducationDay: scim.ag/45zsFEr

Systematic mapping and bibliometric analysis of meta-analyses on animal cognition doi.org/10.32942/X2X...

Help us find out the potential factors behind the choice of research organisms by ethologists and behavioural ecologists by participating in this quick survey (5-10 min): tinyurl.com/xbnu254h. Participation is voluntary and there are no negative consequences for choosing not to participate!

Massive piece of work by @pietropollo.bsky.social and colleagues! Really encouraging paper showing that many EcoEvo meta-analyses are largely reproducible and replicable! doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

Since we've moved platforms, I thought I'd make a new explainer thread for our (Aamir Sadiq, @vishuguttal.bsky.social, Rohini Balakrishnan, and I) recent paper on tree crickets. Meet Oecanthus henryi. Like in many cricket species, O. henryi males call to attract mates. #science #evobio 🌍 🧬

Happy Easter from Chemistry Cat 🧪

Legs for days!

In our new preprint lead by @pietropollo.bsky.social we show how to use meta-analysis to compare not sample means but also kurtosis & skewness, as well as within-group covariance between multiple groups. The era of meta-analyzing whole distributions is here ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

Handy link to check out APC for different journals: apc.simon.net.nz Pulgar_Panda h/t @simongreenhill.bsky.social & El Pulgar del Panda #OpenAccess #openscience