🐻 Wild animals of North America Washington, D.C., The National geographical society[c1918] [Source]

I was a little spoiled the last few years of my PhD and had ~*~my own office~*~ and it worked out pretty well. But then I pop into the group office to help troubleshoot some code and see the whiteboard content (silly stuff primarily captured here), and now I have to rethink some things.

Great, now I can’t use the one pdf map I uploaded to Avenza nor can I add points, tracks, etc. unless I “upgrade” to a paid account. I used this app for free during my entire PhD field work. Anyone using alternative free mapping apps these days?

Finally found a local business where I can stock up on Trex feed 🙃

A recent study highlights the importance of genetic management and conserving downstream populations to bolster adaptive capacity amid climate change. Paper here: doi.org/10.1093/jher... Corresponding author: www.flinders.edu.au/... #JHered 2/2

Craig Smail wrote up a really nice Preview of @nikhilmilind.dev's paper where we try to explain why large effect variants tend to affect traits in the same direction on average, which we think about in terms of the non-linearity of gene dosage response curves. www.cell.com/cell-genomic...

"Three roles for background natural history in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology: (1) as spark (motivating research questions and hypothesis), (2) as scaffold (supporting the conduct of studies), and (3) as substrate (serving as raw material for new research)." www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

🔥 Does switching to a pangenome reference actually improve your association study? We tested it, and the answer is yes, measurably. Our preprint is online now: "Pangenome-based human genome analysis improves trait association and genomic prediction": doi.org/10.64898/202...

Until now, there has been no centralized, field-tested guide to help practitioners pick the most effective and cost-efficient approaches to conservation. Today, we’re co-launching the Conservation Monitoring Effectiveness Techniques (COMET) platform: comet.conservationmeasures.org 🌎

🚨 MANUSCRIPT ALERT 🚨 The VGP Phase I manuscript pre-print is now live on bioRxiv! 🧬 doi.org/10.64898/202... Over 8 years, the VGP generated reference genomes for more than 800 vertebrate species, spanning ~95% of vertebrate orders and delivering some of the highest-quality genomes ever produced.

Our paper is out! 📣 we find that molecular measures of genetic variation do not predict heritable genetic variation across species - important implications for the application of genomic data for conservation! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

UW summer course (hybrid format): Designing Evolving Nature-Based Solutions for Urban Climate Resilience malberti6.wixsite.com/nature-solut... Open to non-UW students and professionals - July 23-Aug 21 2026. If interested fill the form on the website or dm me.

Great apes may have been laughing with a similar rhythm to modern humans for at least 15 million years, suggests a study in Communications Biology. The findings also suggest that laughter has become faster, more variable, and increasingly influenced by the situation it occurs in. #evosky 🌎🧪

🌍 Cat colonies reshape the abundance and body size of lizards. This video by Javier Martín Carbajal is the best graphical abstract of this study! Watch It! doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

Reboosting this. More about the design (and full images) at www.scientificamerican.com/blog/sa-visu... .

The evolution of structural variation across 500 million years of vertebrate evolution https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.26.733778v1

Gotta say— the resemblance to my dad IS striking. 🤣

So happy and proud to see this paper out in @natcomms.nature.com today! We show that traces of human DNA can persist on cave walls for thousands of years. Absolutely fantastic work by the wonderful Alba Bossoms Mesa at @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social and a great team! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Bonar et al. reveal that ∼66% of the common octopus genome is made up of repeats. The authors' re-annotation of the genome indicates four TW expansions at 18, 25, 33, and 56 MYA, and identifies a landscape of TE hot- and cold spots. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evag137 #genome #evolution

🐻 Animal guide, North American wild animals Worcester, Mass.: C. K. Reed, 1915. [Source]

I haven’t used Tiktok in the last few years, but now that I’ve passed my defense & have a little downtime, I’m here getting teary over all of the Great American Sleepover content. Either it’s great or I still need a bit of a system reset 🙃 Also, I’m maybe burying the lede, but it’s Dr. Catnerd now

Never had I imagined when I was a kid that I would see images like this in my lifetime.

10 colour palettes I reach for in research charts — curated, and most are colourblind-safe. Categorical + sequential: Okabe-Ito, Paul Tol, Tableau 10, viridis, cividis, magma. Skip default tab10 and rainbow/jet. Which do you swear by? Anything I'm missing? #DataViz #ColorPalette #SciComm

People. @ksamuk.bsky.social and others have made this argument before. There’s good software to do this right. Here’s the argument again: Invariant sites matter! They’re not in your standard vcf and many programs pretend they are anyway. academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...

This poor dingdong is recovering pretty well so far, but seemingly immune to the intended sedative effects of his meds and cleverly trying to use furniture to pry his cone off 🙃

I guess emergency veterinary surgery one week before my I defend my dissertation is better than, like, the day of?? 😅😭 Prognosis is good, but c’monnnnnn

i can't choose just one fav but i love that most indo-european langauges have a word for bear cognate with "ursus" but proto-germanic speakers found bears so scary that saying the name became taboo so they just call them "the brown one"

Whole-Genome-Sequencing Reveals Demographic History and Patterns of Parallel Adaptive Evolution in Indo-Pacific Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops aduncus) Across Coastal Australian Seascapes onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Population genomics for biodiversity conservation: Insights from the Swiss pilot study for monitoring genetic diversity link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Ancient persistence and recurrent emergence of structural variants across divergent Atlantic salmon lineages https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.25.727466v1

What a great review of where we're at with integrating paleoenvironmental info into biological models 🌋🗻🌏 www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

Curiosity piqued— been thinking a lot lately about when proxies are/are not enough to identify conservation need & this seems like a different angle altogether

Are you interested in doing local ancestry inference (LAI) using imputed #aDNA? Take a look at our preprint, together with @bodkan.bsky.social: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

First real post on the new blog! If you follow human genetics, you've likely of "missing heritability". If you look at twins to estimate heritability, you get values much larger than what molecular genomic methods produce. IQ, for example, goes from 50-80% heritability to 10-15%. Which is right?

New DNA evidence shows dingoes are almost 90% pure – and fall into eight distinct groups 🧬 🐕 Write up based on our new research doi.org/10.1111/con4... in @consletters.bsky.social #popgen #consgen

A recent study analyzed how much space between houses is needed to keep wildlife on the move and created an online planning tool based on the findings. The study found clear evidence of indirect habitat loss between houses. www.uwyo.edu/news/2026/05...

We often mistake persistence for stability. Lemming booms. Lynx–hare cycles. Caribou migrations. But many northern “natural cycles” may be amplified remnants of ecosystems that lost their stabilizing mass long ago. What remains still functions, but violently. open.substack.com/pub/lylel/p/...

🚨 New preprint! How does noncoding variation drive complex traits? We built a massive atlas of cattle regulatory variants (>150k emVars!) and directly tested them in both bovine AND human cells. 🐄🧬🚶‍♂️ Read it here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

More evidence— cats are all cats

During undergrad, I had a period of fascination with affective neuroscience and found out the guy who *literally* wrote the book on it was at my university (albeit emeritus). Didn’t connect Panksepp with rat-tickling until later (This American Life?!), but happy to see work on this topic lives on!

In fisheries models, natural mortality (M) is often set to 0.2 per year. A detailed derivation of this result was provided by John Pope in 1975, see below:

This must be one of the most delicious figures we have ever published. In this primer Guoan Zhou, Zhixi Tian and colleagues introduce the domestication history and biology odyssey soybean and its many uses. www.cell.com/current-biol...

But wait, *I’m* a land vertebrate…

#caturday 😽

The eastern barred bandicoot has been extinct in the wild since 1991 but is now returning to mainland Australia. Conservationists have crossbred genetically distinct bandicoot populations to get a more fit and genetically diverse population and plan to reintroduce 500 animals to the wild. #goodnews

I know constantly saying goodbye is an occupational hazard of an academic career, but never expected to get misty at the gym during my last lunch time yoga class. Suffice it to say, I’m grateful for the unexpected pockets of community I’ve fallen into here and am writing some thank you cards. ❤️

Fixed human pangenome sequences reveal origins of common human traits https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.30.722098v1