🌸 FLOWERING NEWSLETTER REVIEW 🌸 🧬 Since the discovery of the first plant sex-determining gene, more than 20 other genes have been identified. Here Marais et al. review what this tells us about the evolution of separate sexes (dioecy) in angiosperms 🌸 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/jxb/... #PlantScience 🧪

Anyway, we found the opposite pattern: longer moms tend to have slightly more *female* calves in baleen whales, suggesting that the cost of pregnancy and especially lactation makes it better to have big female offspring if you can. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

And of course I have to thank the amazing field assistant Wallace the Wonderdoodle. Like his namesake, he is fascinated by natural selection, particularly in the context of beautiful courtship displays.

What a summer it’s been! We built our Drosophila experimental evolution mesocosms and are running our first experiment! I’m ecstatic to be able to pair our study genetic and neural mechanisms of behavior evolution in the lab with how behaviors evolve in nature!

🧪 🪰 Happy to see this large data release and analysis of decades of #tachinidae collected by #DanJanzen, #WinnieHallwachs and the #parataxonomists of #ACG @gdfcf.bsky.social in #CostaRica. So much diversity! Paper here: doi.org/10.3390/d170... Data here: doi.org/10.5683/SP3/... 🪰 🧪

The Goose That Stopped Migrating: A Lovecraftian Paper Summary jenteottenburghs.wordpress.com/2025/09/23/t... While reading a story by horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, a curious idea struck me: why not retell one of my recent scientific papers in his voice? You can read the result in this blog post.

**PhD POSITIONS** I am recruiting 1-2 PhD students to work on sociality and cognition in Monk Parakeets, starting Fall 2026. Full ad is here: hobsonresearch.com/index.php/20... (please help spread the word!)

I wrote this piece on China’s bike share tech bubble back in 2018 and remain very proud of this piece. The imagery of piles of abandoned bikes, I think, is very representative of genAI as toys, and how they will always get abandoned because the novelty is greater than the utility.

Part of me thinks I should just change this meme in tomorrow's lecture, since students rarely get the joke, and the percentage that do is only going to decrease with time. But it makes me laugh, so I'm going to keep it. Plus, I can do a bit of cultural education to go along with the biology.

Dua Lipa takes #sqrlpix ❤️ Stars, they're just like us

ACOG reaffirms that acetaminophen is safe for managing pain and fever during pregnancy. No reputable studies support suggestions like those in HHS’s recent announcement linking acetaminophen use in pregnancy to autism; in fact, high-quality studies show no such risk. https://bit.ly/47Wxc59

💫 Management of caribou threats may benefit wolverine, but a complete management strategy for wolverine would rely on effective caribou conservation actions that have meaningful on-ground impacts and the management of additional wolverine-specific threats.

🔍 For wolverine, current conservation objectives are not well defined. Only four conservation documents list recovery actions for wolverine, and the most recent national document (2014) does not list any. This leads to a disconnect between identified problems and proposed solutions.

🌿 Many threats relevant to wolverine and caribou may be addressed through effective management of caribou critical habitat,which implicitly involves managing for the cumulative effects of industrial disturbance. Is this being effectively done in Canada? Probably not.

🏭 We found considerable overlap between wolverine and caribou in listed threats and recovery actions. Habitat loss, hunting and trapping, sensory disturbance, and linear features were all key threats to both species.

🍁 We systematically reviewed conservation documentation and scientific literature to investigate the extent woodland caribou-focused conservation is likely to benefit wolverine. Writing this paper, I learned so much about how conservation works in Canada. Here’s a few things that stood out to me:

Our new paper ‘Wolverine in the slipstream: A systematic review of caribou-focused conservation benefits, gaps and uncertainties for wolverine in Canada’ is out! 🌠 🌠 🌠 conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... @stewartresearch.bsky.social Matt Scrafford @wcscanada.org

It has been an absolute pleasure working with Dr. @rhohnen.bsky.social Honen and @wcscanada.org on this piece. Congratulations Roșie! #WILDlab #wolverine #caribou #conservation

1 week left to get your image in for Evolution 2026 logo contest! www.evolutionmeetings.org/2026-logo-co...

Why do plants produce male and bisexual flowers simultaneously and shift its gender between male and hermaphroditic phases among seasons? Chen and Pannell study sex allocation and reproductive success in Pulsatilla alpina. Now open-access ahead of print! www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

A super-busy Monday in the #DrosLife lab, with the start of mating assays for directed studies student Rimsha (with help from Haleigh and Owen), plus culturing and a fly food cook!! Fortunately there are #ScienceDoughnuts! #Drosophila

Yet again, machine learning — even gussied up via the transformer architecture — encodes and reinforces societal biases. This study reveals that LLM-based peer review relies heavily on author institution in its decisions. arxiv.org/abs/2509.15122

Very important paper and resource. Bryophyte genomes expanded by one order of magnitude. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I'd never seen a sooty grouse before. Then a little flock of 5 just calmly hung out by our campsite at Lassen this weekend #birds

Red bird-of-paradise (Paradisaea rubra) by Jacques Barraband for ‘Histoire Naturelle Des Oiseaux De Paradis Et Des Rolliers, Suivie De Celle Des Toucans Et Des Barbus’ by François Levaillant. Paris: Chez Denné le jeune, 1806. University of Chicago Special Collections #naturalhistory #rarebooks

It's interesting that anyone would be surprised by this. They are large language models, not large fact models. They are very good at language; it's unsurprising that they aren't terribly good at facts.

Look at how round this bird is!!! Bird of the year!!

Tenure-track Assistant Professor in Computational Ecology and/or Evolution @columbiauniversity.bsky.social. Deadline to apply September 30. Reach out if you have questions. apply.interfolio.com/172496

Correcting myself since I didn't read carefully enough in my haste; this doesn't go into effect immediately, it goes into effect in 29 hours, at 12:01 AM on Sunday morning.

SAVE THE DATE - Nov 29th, 2025 (Sat) CSPB Eastern Regional Meeting at Wilfrid Laurier University! @cspbscbv.bsky.social @laurierbiology.bsky.social Featuring outstanding scientists as Plenary Speakers - Dr. @edelplopez.bsky.social and Dr. Eliana Gonzales-Vigil! Registration details coming soon!

Today #LaurierBiology students, staff & faculty are kicking off our departmental seminar series by learning about local flora through the perspective of Indigenous knowledge systems led by Medicine Guide Peter Isaacs, a respected Six Nations elder who works with the Crowshield Lodge organization

Bright colors and elaborate displays, rather than physical strength, often give animals an advantage in mating, with both males and females using conspicuous signals to improve reproductive success. doi.org/g935wb

NEW Just-In Red squirrel gestation length is unchanged by maternal traits, litter composition, or future food availability doi.org/10.1139/cjz-...

Organs cannot simply be classified as male or female www.mpg.de/25425064/091...

bioRxiv partners with Dryad to enable easier, better linking to curated datasets connect.biorxiv.org/news/2025/09...

I like this piece, and I like doing sci comm. But I also think it’s not fair to demand every subject matter expert also be public-facing. Some people are really good at doing and that’s enough. We need more economically viable jobs for full-time sci comm to bridge findings from experts to public.

It looks like a) the Dairy Bush squirrels have been busy, and b) the foxes won’t be using this den for a little while! #DairyBushFoxDen #Guelph

I do a "which __ are you today?" clicker question at the beginning of most lectures, mostly for fun, but also to give me an idea of the general mood/stress level of my students. I don't even know how to go about interpreting today's "which medieval fish are you?" results.

Shoutout to Dr. Tierney Brosius for her feature on Arts Midwest! The article talks about how she uses art to build curiosity around insects and talk about their conservation. Read more (and see some of Tierney's wonderful knitted vests) at artsmidwest.org/stories/dr-b...

🎉 openRxiv & @datadryad.bsky.social are excited to announce our new partnership & integration, streamlining data sharing with preprints. 📊 Now while posting to #bioRxiv you'll have the option to upload data to Dryad at the same time. Read more openrxiv.org/dryad-integr... #OpenScience #OpenData

The paper: the genetic program that enables digit formation in limbs is derived from the system that drives cformation of the cloaca. Me, the headline writer:

👇🎯 Once again, the answer here is that there are exactly <zero> societal institutions more protective of free speech, viewpoint diversity, & the marketplace of ideas than universities, least of all these places EK & RD think liberals don't go bc of their "bunker mentality" bsky.app/profile/mcop...

The last political column I was allowed to write in the @washingtonpost.com was a criticism of Obama. His people took issue with my piece, but we were respectful. Now he is tweeting in support of me. This is how free political speech and respect for debate *actually works*. Or used to work.

Not all art hangs in museums. Across 1 trillion web pages it lives in sketches, fan sites, & web design. The Wayback Machine keeps this digital gallery open for all to enjoy. 🎨🧑‍🎨 📝 Tell us what irreplaceable works the Wayback Machine saved for you! ⤵️ forms.gle/c3XqotHUToKe... #Wayback1T

A comprehensive guide to help the unwitting visitor avoid falling victim to the various and nefarious crimes abound in early 19th-century London: publicdomainreview.org/collection/t...

Citations he dropped, for folks who’d like to read more (and have more things to worry about. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.) Lethal trifecta of AI capabilities: simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/...