New paper is officially out! Ratfish have a second jaw on their foreheads - CT + histology show they’re real teeth, built from the same tissues and signals as oral teeth. www.washington.edu/news/2025/09...

IT'S ADORABLE! New fish species just dropped: the bumpy snailfish at 10,000 ft down in the ocean gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/s...

Seven countries currently get 100 percent of their electricity from renewable energy. Norway and Costa Rica are at 98 percent

A common type of ant in Europe breaks a fundamental rule in biology: its queens can produce male offspring that are a whole different species go.nature.com/4mOb5T9

very nice article by @afreedma.bsky.social at @cnn.com about our comment on the DOE report www.cnn.com/2025/09/02/c...

How are these students, who are paying to be here, unfairly using tax payer money? Their (higher) tuition and fees are bolstering public institutions which actually benefits taxpayers! Thinking about UCD which gets very little CA taxpayer $$.

Expertly led by @claudiafontsere.bsky.social now published in Molecular Ecology! 🥳 Learn why from a genetic perspective whooping cranes should remain protected due to loss of genetic diversity and accumulation of inbreeding and load #popgen #consgen onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

NEW: As the Trump GOP higher ed agenda of funding cuts and fines weighs down on University of California, a new poll finds common ground among California Republicans and Democrats: 75% of Republicans have positive views of UC health centers and 58% favor UC research: www.latimes.com/california/s...

Love this!!

Just tried a google AI search for some information in my field. Super impressed by its ability to combine things I already know that are not related to my question with incorrect information that is.

🎉 Another exciting contribution from our lab this summer! 🧬 Nearly complete, gapless genome of the sex-changing central bearded dragon (Pogona vitticeps) shed new light on the mystery of reptile sex determination. Proud to be part of this collaborative effort! academic.oup.com/gigascience/...

I really hope UCLA is not left to fight this alone. At a minimum, the entire UC system needs to close ranks around UCLA. Better still, the California state government should step up to defend this major institution. We have to fight somewhere. Why not here? Why not now?

Three-spined sticklebacks recognize familiar individuals by facial recognition - read the paper: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... #RSOS

A PR company working for Colossal Biosciences is sending AI generated pieces to respected science journalists & asking them to publish the articles under their own names. This is so dodgy & just goes to show our critical expert scientific commentary is working. Sci comm failure 101 for Colossal.

The #EcoPond pilot being trialled on 25 dairy farms in this piece is able to reduce #MethaneEmissions in farm #EffluentPonds by over 90%. Encouraging the growth of certain microbes in the ponds they crowd out the methane producing microbes. Amazing stuff. #agsky www.nzherald.co.nz/the-country/...

Are a few people ruining the internet? www.theguardian.com/books/2025/j... by @jayvanbavel.bsky.social "Just 10% of users produce roughly 97% of political tweets." "It amplifies the loudest & most extreme voices while muting the moderate," "...distorts how the rest of us make sense of the world."

McMullen at #JMIH25 #AES25 : There are 37 species of Guitarfish, one of the most threatened groups of elasmobranchs. Most are mesopredators (mid level, not apex). Atlantic guitarfish are common from North Carolina to Nicaragua, but there have only been 13 studies about them ever. 🦑🧪🌎🦈🐠

Yes!!!

everyone! look at this baby sturgeon! literally the cutest creature to ever exist but unfortunately we have less and less of them in BC with juvenile recruitment issues it’s always so awesome to find lil untagged bbs - this trip 5/14 of our sturgeon were untagged! #sturgeonsaturday everyday🧪👩🏻‍🔬🌎🌐

Woohoo!!!

A rare carnivorous caterpillar, previously unknown to biologists, stalks spiderwebs for food whilst dressed in the remains of its prey. This unique new species, dubbed the “bone collector,” is found only on a single mountainside on the Hawai’ian island of Oa’hu. scim.ag/3GBDcV7 #InsectWeek

New paper out from our crew on using #eDNA to detect the pathogenic chytrid fungus (Bsal) and characterise the surrounding amphibian community from pond samples in the Netherlands. Small number of samples but highlights the potential of eDNA for routine monitoring of both. bioone.org/journals/jou...

Stunning video of this Antarctic gonate squid caught alive on camera for the first time. Before this, no one had ever seen this creature alive in the wild. Read more: www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/s...

This is delightful news! I had a feeling that ICE might have a tougher time following their MO when surrounded by priests accompanying immigrants.

Super impressed by the integrity shown by this NGO. May we all have similar courage to stand up for our principles when pushed against a wall by this admin.

Ha!

Happy to share that our study is now out today, revealing that a 7-day interval between sperm collections is insufficient for full recovery, resulting in reduced sperm motility—regardless of male age—in the endangered delta smelt. Interested? Find it: doi.org/10.3354/esr0...

Also, "why don't we just get members of the public to chip in a few bucks" is literally taxes. That's taxes. You are talking about taking a small amount from everyone to fund important, societal needs. Taxes. And it has to be done at the scale of... taxes.

10 million acres of public lands in California alone would be up for sale. Huge pieces of the Sierras. The amazing public lands of the West are one of the best things about America.

It has been awesome to see so much excitement about Sidney Woodruff’s dissertation research!

Anya Brown - @dranyabrown.bsky.social, marine scientist at @ucdavis.bsky.social & Nat Geo Explorer, studies how coral microbes shape reef resilience. “It’s the kind of thing that unites so much of life on Earth,” she says. 🌊🪸🐠 Read more in Nat Geo: www.nationalgeographic.com/impact/artic...

Cockatoos have learned to operate drinking fountains in Australia. The behavior—never before seen in birds—may be a developing cultural tradition among one population: scim.ag/4kIi12G

The university of California is a powerhouse of innovation, healthcare, and social mobility for California and the US.

Delivering a peacock egg for science!

Stories about really smart animals make me happy.

My new best friend - mink seen at @ucdavis.bsky.social this AM #california #wildlife #omgamink

This is a lawsuit for us to watch! Can lack of funding/staffing to support a National Wildlife Refuge be successful (when it imperils a species)? Any lawyers out there? This seems like a stretch but may still help highlight how staff cuts are impacting our conservation work. #Resist

for some reason the nytimes article neglects to mention the inclusion of "oaicite" tokens in some of the urls referenced in the report, which is a quite clear marker that not only was AI used to generate references, but an OpenAI model specifically

"To understand who is in control, observe who you are not allowed to criticize." -Voltaire

I find this very concerning… Rubio says U.S. will 'aggressively' revoke visas for many Chinese students www.npr.org/2025/05/28/g...

Word.

Geez I’m getting old. Does anyone else remember way back when — I dunno like December? — when we had freedom of speech? Or is that just an old man’s wishful reimagining of the distant past?

#Paddlefishing #Polyodon #EndlessFishMostBeautiful

I’ll be there!

Interested in evolution in the Anthropocene? In a paper out today we use a mechanism-guided approach to predict & show that evolved resistance to urban pollutants offers cross-resistance to oil in killifish, via adaptive change in AHR signaling doi.org/10.1111/eva.... @evolappjournal.bsky.social

This is so cool!

🧪 ICYMI: $25,000 bridge funding for terminated NSF grants. Major props for to the Spencer, Sloan, W. T. Grant, and Kapor Foundations for their swift action, even though we (and they) know this is a band-aid fix. Due May 30. Applications are brief: a 2-3 page memo of 6-month plans & other docs.

This needs to be litigated immediately, not just on the basis of unfairness to the fired employees, but on the basis that it’s a fraudulent destruction of public resources. A fraudulent mismanagement & misappropriation of funds that only Congress can direct. It is based on animus & animus alone.

That’s definitely what they want, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how the ESA works.