“It’s like claiming to have brought Napoleon back from the dead by asking a short French man to wear his hat.” A short piece in The Conversation by me on why “de-extinction” is nothing of the sort, and bad, bad conservation. theconversation.com/why-de-extin...

resjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... New paper - England’s Biodiversity Net Gain policy could easily and inadvertently harm invertebrate populations because it doesn’t value habitats, condition, connectivity, or scale in ways that invertebrate populations respond positively to.

OK, this looks fascinating: Marder et al in Science this week: www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....

I’ll happily die on the hill of academic freedom of speech. But I’m damned if I’m sharing it with the Oxford Union who have absolutely nothing to do with it.

Just breaking my own Twitter embargo to congratulate @johnmittermeier and colleagues on refinding Otidiphaps insularis after 146 years, and also on outrunning pirates. We need to adjust the postgraduate research skills training accordingly :) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-63672501

My use of Twitter is paused pending future statements by the company about changes its policies on disinformation and promotion of violence on the platform. Please use email as I won’t see DMs.🤞

This isn’t a new government. That seems like a strategic error.

The perfect time for the government to spend a zombie month while the Brexit ultras try a last power grab and we all pay. “…my lifeless two-year-old wasn't enough of an emergency to get the help of the ambulances. The cuts to the NHS are just so scary.” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-633256...

Quick check of the ne… oh.

I spent the summer off Twitter, pretty much. I’ve returned to it this week. And honestly, I think I need to fundamentally rethink whether and how I use it. I’ve curated my feed intensively, and professionally and politically it tells me a lot of things I want and need to know.

Amazing-looking paper in Nature on the new @IUCN ecosystem typology. It’s a hugely ambitious idea, with profound and quite hard-to-predict consequences for monitoring: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05318-4 It’s also got an eye-opening (presumed) response to a reviewer…

Yes, a screenshot of a retweet. But the UN just retweeted to the world a warning from major conservation bodies about the Conservatives’ plan to destroy three fundamental legislative pillars of nature protection in the U.K. without clear replacement. It’s bad on a global scale.

One of the saddest things about the ongoing attempt to pack the council of the @nationaltrust with conservative fundamentalists is that the great West Country work of @TheRestoreTrust and indeed their whole hard-won public image is being stolen. If there’s a trademark lawyer…

For anyone wondering how all their water got onto the ring road last week - I don’t think they’re meant to look like this normally.

Good run down of NAO modelling and outlook for this winter, as well as consequent gas demand and consequences thereof. In short - 🤞😬https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/will-a-cold-european-winter-exacerbate-the-energy-crisis-part-2

Those notorious Jacobins, the National Trust. https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/press-release/our-response-to-recent-government-proposals-

Helpful context if the new government’s gamble isn’t making much sense. https://www.niesr.ac.uk/blog/inflation-slows-energy-price-cap-mitigating-further-rises

This seems appropriate today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3f-vypUPPs

Really quite a contribution to ecology by New Road, North Ascot…

I’m not particularly skilled at presentational politics, but I can’t help thinking that “Shall I publicly associate myself with pumping actual human shit onto beaches and rivers in August?” only has one answer, and it isn’t yes. https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/sewage-vote-how-my-mp-dumping-raw-...

A new strain of avian flu is decimating wild birds. Humans should worry https://on.ft.com/3QTFUWa “Good” summary article if you need one for non-technical types. I wish it was clearer on was the need for mitigating other threats, especially food supply, during recovery.

I’ve just found out that 20% of Thames Water is owned by the USS. 🙃

Is there a name for assorted digital cruft that builds up in your life but to which you are strangely attached? One of my accounts still gets promotional mails from a limo company I used once in NYC in 2004. I was even worried about them during lockdown.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02057-4 hands up anyone who had “easier crime” as a consequence of a fossil fuel economy

There’s an amazing post on the B&I wild flowers FB group with some photos of a fasciated Echium pininana that looks straight out of Geiger https://www.facebook.com/groups/735961066428140/permalink/5724515527572644

A perennial favourite link that seems to be standing up to the test of time very well. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1218703/boris-promises-cheaper-household-gas-bills-if-brits-back-brexit/amp/

https://labs.openai.com/s/sNrRfeqJ9xkLryc5pKKXxDJ4 #dalle2 It is basically like this all day.

I pre-emptively resign from this government, just in case they get that far down the list by tomorrow.

When people calculate the carbon footprint of motor sports, they include all this stuff, don’t they?

Super follow? Really?

A really lovely short read: Female song can be over-looked in even the most intensively studied songbirds. “In blue tits, dawn song is associated with males seeking within- and extra-pair copulations.” https://academic.oup.com/beheco/advance-article/doi/10.1093/beheco/arac062/6613584

Academics ‘undervalued by billions of pounds’ https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/uk-academics-undervalued-billions-pounds-says-report

I love dog ownership

What’s do you need? You need my favourites from the 1065 dog names from ~1450AD given in https://www.brepolsonline.net/doi/abs/10.1484/J.VIATOR.1.103488 #marking #beste-of-all #terry

An interesting read from Davos. Conflates two processes: an internally-consistent [sic] argument re ESG and profit-seeking (ie ROI horizon / discounting rate), and the ability of MAGA populism to feed off any power structure https://on.ft.com/3wVj0Gv

New paper out in @PLOSBiology from the lovely folks at GARD @ReptileMaps and collaborators. 🟩 We have some #XGBoost #ML magic, ~4500 DD #reptiles and simulated @IUCNRedList assessors (kind of!) 🟥 We find a lot of those DD species are probably in trouble. https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/arti...

I’m not sure now is a very propitious time to announce something about #reptiles because social media seems to be half full of #PrehistoricPlanet and half full of David 😱 𝕀ℂ 𝕂𝔼 loons but I’ll do it anyway.

I don’t know what a Federal ICAC is but I think we need one here too.

1.Nothing is worth normalising a legal silencing of academic discourse. The populists & the hydrocarbon industry would love it. 2.A reflection on positionality != a conflict of interest statement. It’s a heuristic for better research in many contexts and redundant in others.

Nightmare fuel. Highly mobile and pretty pissed off, too.

Safari knows what’s up.

The most amazing, horrifying footage of a storm I think I’ve ever seen. https://youtu.be/lxdFh8nYMgM

The original and still the best visualisation of biomass. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/29/17386112/all-life-on-earth-chart-weight-plants-animals-pnas

If anyone needs me I’ll be over here, waiting for a man who won’t acknowledge his own children to do the right thing.

#GPT3 has no time for your old male bullshit. I asked it to evaluate a hypothetical research proposal by a senior male academic. Somewhat unexpectedly…

Well, this will be fun. #GPT3 does undergrad essays pretty well! Instruction: “write a technical paper on Latour’s Actor Network Theory and its relevance to environmental policy” gives you https://pastebin.com/DuCKtvKd (to which Turnitin gave a score of 2%…)

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my walrus can reach, when he wants to try. I love thee by the acres of his blubbery skin, I love thy tusks that show his strength within. I love thee for his blundering, slow-moving grace, the way he rolls in mud to hide his face.

What have I been doing, you ask? Well, mostly I have been playing with #GPT3 and asking it to make up natural history. This has been sufficient fun that I shall probably continue doing it, possibly in place of my day job, or eating. So, without further ado: mating walruses 🧵