Good grief! I've had an alphabetic list of US visas (F2, F1, J1, H1B and two green cards) over the years. If I had happened to have been out of the country on my H1B, I would have had 1 day to get back to the USA. Also, I or my university would have to have paid $100K/yr. From immigration lawyers:

Molecular Ecology | Molecular Genetics Journal | Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

first eight days in #Berlin

How many convergent switches in Müllerian mimicry can be explained by parallel evolution at ivory and optix genes? Amazing work by Ben Chehida, Dasmahapatra, Meier et al.! doi.org/10.1101/2025...

I just got the notice that all the FlyBase people at Harvard, including me, will be laid off on October 12. I'm devastated.

Shh! No-one mention AI! (Headline from the FT).

The brief adventures of Wavy Dave: defector.com/the-brief-ad...

The Evolvo

Will Harvard, or will it not, make a deal with the Trump Administration?https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/8/3/garber-500-million-trump/

Apparently it’s World Embroidery Day so maybe you’ll enjoy this aerial landscape I made of my beloved childhood haunt - the White Horse of Uffington. An @nationaltrust.org.uk site from the later Bronze Age or Early Iron Age. Find out more here www.oxfordarchaeology.com/uffington-wh...

I think you'll like this when Monty Python suddenly digress from organ donation to travel into deep space! www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ig9...

<ding-dong, ding-dong> "Can we have your liver?" youtu.be/5ig9wr8517E

Owch!! A spiny green gummy: how about a chestnut fruit?

@heliconians @chrisjiggins.bsky.social BUTTERFLY MADE UP BY AI! Why oh why? When you are dealing with the most diverse butterfly fauna on the planet: the neotropics! The scientific article mentioned is about Melinaea and Mechanitis (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae: Ithomiini). doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

This is so cool. Kanchon Dasmahapatra, Alaine Whinnett, Ryan Hill, Fraser Simpson, Gerardo Lamas, and I have been working on these species for years, before genomics. In Melinaea, mtDNA barcodes fail spectacularly; in Mechanitis, barcodes mislead badly. As usual, genomics clarifies!

Our paper, led by Eva van der Heijden, shows the work of an international team combining phylogenomics, hybridisation tests, population and comparative genomics and pheromone analyses to resolve the taxonomy and evolution of two rapid radiations of glasswing butterflies. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

A fascinating study! Over 100 potato species radiated out from a single homoploid hybrid speciation event around 8-9 My ago. The parent taxa were ancestors of the "Etuberosum" roup of Solanum (with 3 spp. today), and of the tomatoes (16 species today). www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Motherfucking wind farms…

"Trump’s interference in the sciences is something new. It shares features with the science-damaging policies of Stalin and Hitler, says David Wootton, a historian of science. But in the English-speaking world, it has no precedent, he told me: “This is an unparalleled destruction from within.”

Many thanks to great collaborators, including researchers from @sangerinstitute.bsky.social, @camzoology.bsky.social, Ikiam, Ecuador, Uni Campinas, Br, UNMSM, Peru, @floridamuseum.bsky.social, @cnrs.fr Some media releases: www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/geno... www.sanger.ac.uk/news_item/re...

Elephant seal near-extinction caused bottleneck but ?luckily led to deleterious variant purging. See Hoffman, J.I. 2024. Genomic and fitness consequences of a near-extinction event in the northern elephant seal. Nature Ecology & Evolution 8:2309-2324. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

In Beijing recently, almost all cars, and even the little motor scooters with boxes on the back for restaurant food delivery, were electric! We in the west are way behind!

For anyone wondering, global sales of internal combustion vehicles peaked in 2018. 🧪🔌💡☀️💨🔋 ourworldindata.org/data-insight...

@aidanwshort.bsky.social Nice talk on channel island mimilus hybridization @official-smbe.bsky.social !

21 years ago!

This is mental! But what a good idea for Harvard! www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUCy...

A nice unauthored tribute to Henry Walter Bates, who was born 200 years ago. Bates famously discovered "Batesian mimicry" - between palatable and unpalatable species. However, his paper "Contributions to an insect fauna of the Amazon valley" had many other firsts! doi.org/10.1038/s415...

This phylogenetic study is wonderfully complete and shows a real appreciation of the biology of one of the weirdest families of moths! Congrats, Epstein et al!

When the FT almost explains everything in a headline but ends up explaining nothing.

How we made it: Deadly heat domes https://on.ft.com/3TqLwud

Using simulations and empirical data, Thawornwattana, Flouri, @wtf-r-species.bsky.social & @zihengyang.bsky.social ‬ et al. evaluate the performance of the MSC-M model for inferring gene flow. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf121 #evobio #molbio #geneflow

Taxonomy: how we try to stabilise species names (I still don't understand why the species isn't still Perrhybris pyrrha, rather than the milder-sounding Perrhybris pamela). Incidentally, this is an ithomiine-mimicking female. The males are different. I'll post below ....

In this commentary article, Logan T. Edvalson and Amanda M. Larracuente discuss recently published #GENETICS and #G3journal papers that offer new understandings into the consequences of drive in genome and species evolution. Read more: buff.ly/JowkdFt

Pulling up to #Evol2025

Grinch: I'm gonna take away all your money, and foreign students, because you're woke! Harvard: Let's party at the summer solstice like nothing's happened! Harvard Museums of Science & Culture in Divinity Avenue, just outside Biology Laboratories hmsc.harvard.edu/calendar_eve...

A new paper in Nature Ecol & Evol by @rosafernandez.bsky.social et al. shows a #punctuated burst of genome evolution in #annelids as they transitioned from marine to land and freshwater habitats.

Nice title! "For sea slugs, bright colours may warn off predators—but only in the daytime" by Hannah Weller and Alison Davis Rabosky doi.org/10.1111/1365...

Allah be praised!

Eh? "In the vast majority of studies [in 2008-2023], punctuated equilibria continued to be strongly validated." See: Lieberman and Strotz in Paleobiology 2025: doi.org/10.1017/pab.... 1/2

OK, so having established that Springer has over 4000 scientific journals (see other post), of which 215 are Nature family journals, I wondered about other "mainstream" publishers. 1

I just found a new paper about the niche concept in a journal I'd never heard of "Nature Reviews Biodiversity." It was behind a paywall. So I logged into Harvard's university library to try to get the subscription. Nix. So I logged into the University College London library to get THEIR copy. Nix. 1

Big shout out to the Universidad Nacional de Rosario in Argentina, who let Charles Darwin keep his email account for 143 years!

I am so proud to work at this place, and prouder still of my friends and colleagues featured in this peace. We are “ground zero” for the assault on science and objective reality now underway. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/u...

Just noticed this in last Sunday’s Observer, a week in the life of an Orange-tip as told to Simon Barnes. Brilliant.

When lepidopterist Michael Braby spotted something odd on a rare butterfly specimen, an old case was re-opened: a heist involving Scotland Yard & a forgery that created a flutter throughout the taxonomic world. cosmosmagazine.com/nature/butterfly-heist-70-years-ago-is-still-causing-flutter/

bsky.app/profile/dave... The impossible echinoderm: