GIFT LINK - My Toronto Star op-ed on the federal budget, and the failure to account for provincial action on post-secondary education. www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...

Happy Fossil Friday! Meet Glossotherium robustum, also known as “the tongue beast!” It roamed the pampas of Argentina some 30,000 years ago during the Pleistocene, just before the group’s extinction. Spot it in the Museum’s Hall of Primitive Mammals!

we will never cede the m-dash to the machine — not now, not ever — because it is legit good punctuation and I love interjecting with how I have ADHD — 6 thoughts a minute, nonsense and quality — thoughts

Make males live more than 400% longer and prevent sexual disfunction late in life?! We're down with it. Our latest preprint: Disruption of the insulin signaling pathway in C. elegans dramatically increases male longevity and enhances reproductive health late in life. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Hallucigenia sparsa, a small lobopodian from the Cambrian-age Burgess Shale, climbing on a sponge.

My favorite comment on the FT story

The Economist Says We Need to Invent Phrenology Again.

We are looking for new graduate students! Feel free to repost or pass along to prospective students

An update on my column: Parliamentary committee drops most contentious parts of its demand for data on research funding. It now wants aggregated, not disaggregated data. www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/arti...

Flying Squirrel Loves It Every Time

If you're looking for a faculty position at the intersection of ecology and computing (both broadly defined), please apply to this joint search between the CEE Department and the College of Computing at MIT: cee.mit.edu/people/share...

My lab at Indiana University is searching for a *postdoc* and *technician* to contribute to our work studying the evolution of social behavior using fruit flies as a model system. Details below, feel free to email me with any questions! More info on our research: saltzlab.com

Check out my third lecture at the Collège de France. On the origin of bones and teeth. Thanks to my host @denisduboule.bsky.social for the invitation and the community in Paris for a warm welcome! 🧪 youtu.be/4-UyXZTAgZc

TODAY 11 am CST!!!

The whole thing is stupid. Even with the mediocre funding environment, most Canadian unis have no problem getting high quality applicants and hires. There are so many well trained scientists in the world--the hardest thing about every search is we're spoiled for choice!

The different colors of the cells indicate pollen from different species of plants, packed away to be used as food for hungry honey bee larvae.

We’ll have an announcement about Fly School 2026, which will be shared here as well, but join in person or virtually if you can! @flygirlnhm.bsky.social @bertonemyia.bsky.social

Newest LLM tell/quirk in coding assignments this semester: instead of generating code based on the CSVs that I provide, LLMs have been inventing datasets with rnorm() and sample() (and an obligatory set.seed(42)) and then making plots with the fake data. I'm so tired.

Scientists, please come to Canada! We'll pay to bring you here, but you need to fund your own research!

With alt text (though incomplete as it is limited to 2000 characters.

Vote here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

The Econ Sci Fi Book Club Winter 2025 voting is now open! Click through from the homepage below, or hold out for the direct link in the last post of this thread introducing the nominees (note links may contain spoilers). sites.google.com/view/econsci...

Little puffins! #kidlit #picturebook

New paper out today in Ecology Letters! In this synthesis we dive into the equilibrium assumption in ecology - why it's everywhere in ecological theory, the evidence for it in nature, when meeting the assumption is important, how to achieve it in empirical research, and more! tinyurl.com/yh6kyysm

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... perhaps one of these papers that makes us stop and think how to approach our ecological (and evolutionary) research agenda from a philosophical perspective

Applications are currently being accepted for UBC's ✨️ Biodiversity Postdoctoral Fellowship ✨️ (two positions!!), due Jan. 15 Please share far and wide 🚀 (See thread)

Starting off a busy assay week for #BI499 honours thesis student Emily with help from #ScienceDoughnuts! #DrosLife

Willow, five-color multi-block linocut on 14x17” Awagami okawara paper

Starting off a busy assay week for #BI499 honours thesis student Emily with help from #ScienceDoughnuts! #DrosLife

Phd project on Climate Change Impacts on Sexually Selected Traits, lead by Alison Wright at Sheffield Uni, with supervisor team including @andrewpom.bsky.social and me. Application deadline 7th Jan

My latest project, More-than-human Illuminations, is installed at the Rare Charitable Research Reserve. The result of co-creation and partnership.

Very proud of #BI499 honours thesis students Emily, Ahmed and Harsukhman on some excellent presentations of their #DrosLife research projects!

NEW PAPER: Female wild turkeys produce fewer male offspring where hunting increases male mortality, suggesting adaptive adjustment of brood sex ratios to enhance reproductive success under harvest pressure. ➡️ vist.ly/4cff4 #ornithology #birds #adaptive #sexratio 🪶

When I say "I have a conflict with this meeting" I do not mean that I have another meeting at the same time. What I mean is, I take ubmrage against it. I have a feud with it on a historic scale.

Just here to brag like hell about Aisha, an awesome undergrad in my lab! www.buffalo.edu/ubnow/storie...

1/5: Interested in basketball? Disease ecology? Epidemics? 5 years ago, the NBA embarked on a great experiment in infection control: "The NBA Bubble." In a new preprint led by Dr. Yun Tao + Dr. Nita Bharti, we examine it's underlying disease ecology principles. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Really had to scramble to replace all my juvenile T. rex with Nanotyrannus

Curator of Birds job at the @romtoronto.bsky.social! royalontariomuseum.applytojob.com/apply/XBR2Yc...

🎃 Gourds and squashes (Cucurbita spp.) adapted to megafaunal extinction and ecological anachronism through domestication 🏺🧪 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Proposes link btw disappearance of megafauna, decline of wild Cucurbita, and evolution of domesticated Cucurbita alongside human cultivators.

Birds but they get spookier each time. 🎃👻 Enter if you dare...🚪

Did you publish part of your PhD work in Evolution or Evolution Letters this year? You may be eligible for this award! Papers must have been included in a 2025 issue to be eligible. Apply by January 30: shorturl.at/CnVo6 @journal-evo.bsky.social @evolletters.bsky.social

It's great to see the kids so excited and R and coding.

If you are a Canadian scientist 🧪 alarmed by the unfair targeting of academics working on research related to EDI in the US ➡️ Turn your attention to our own House of Commons' Standing Committee on Science and Research and consider signing this open letter: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

It's finished!! "My Avian Neighborhood": in total almost 100 hours of work in the span of 27 days to complete. So very proud of this one, it's going to be hanging in its first show over the next few months. Thank you to everyone who cheered me on, the species are in the alt text of the image! ✨

Canadian researchers should be aware the there is a motion before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Research to force Tricouncils to hand over disaggregated peer review data on all applications: Applicant names, profiles, demographics Reviewers names, profiles, comments, and scores

YOU GOTTA DO SOMETHING ✊🏾 m.youtube.com/watch?v=iX6L...

🎓 Calling Canadian grad students & postdocs! #VoicesForScience is a new campaign to spotlight advocacy for fair pay and better research support. Whether you’ve collected data, organized events, or driven change on campus — your voice matters. Share: forms.gle/neeWyHyMt7Zi... #SupportOurScience

Does Mesquite's phylogenetic adventure game look familiar to anyone? 🧪 #evolbio