A pretty little cockroach (iNat suggests Euphyllodromia sp.) in Costa Rica. Only around 30 of the 4,600 or so species of cockroaches enter homes. Most are detritivores, important members of nature's cleanup crew. This one had cool chevron patterns and compound eyes like polished glass. 🐙🌿 #insects

The creative process in science has a set of thinking tools that we could do a better job teaching. Here are the 12 articles that Martin and I wrote about them, including "It takes two to think", "A hypothesis is a liability" and "The two languages of science". night-science.org/home/learn/r...

Duke appears to have lost NIH grants because they used the prefix "trans" in reference to disease transmission, transgenic genetic material, translational studies, or signal transduction www.dukechronicle.com/article/2025...

Kip Lacy (@mendelslols.bsky.social) of @danielkronauer.bsky.social's lab has won the W. D. Hamilton Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Presentation from @sse-evolution.bsky.social for his talk "Unselfish meiotic drive maintains heterozygosity in the clonal raider ant." Congrats!

"It’s hard to understand why the administration is pausing funding for medical research and clinical trials if its goal is to counter antisemitism." @megtirrell.bsky.social looks at how Northwestern's trials for heart disease and other diseases are collapsing. www.cnn.com/2025/06/23/h...

I am humbled and honored to have received this year’s Hamilton Award! Thanks to the @sse-evolution.bsky.social , to my advisor @danielkronauer.bsky.social and the @rockefelleruniv.bsky.social graduate program, and to everyone else who helped me along the way and made this possible.

My ongoing request: If your NSF or NIH grant was terminated--whether at Harvard or elsewhere--please report it here. NSF: grant-watch.us/submit-nsf.h... NIH: grant-watch.us/submit-nih.h... Our trackers are actively used in lawsuits and are often the only record that terminations ever occurred.

What happens to science under autocracy? The rise of the National Socialist Party in 1930s Germany provides an (admittedly extreme) example. Prior to the early 1930s, scientists at German institutions won a third of Nobels. 10 years later, that number was 5%, and has never recovered.

A Path Forward to Save American Bio-Medical Research r.mail.talkingpointsmemo.com/mk/cl/f/sh/1...

#fc7a17

Whip spider (Paraphrynus laevifrons) covered with chloropid fly puparia. The parasitoid fly attacks the eggs carried by the female. When done, the maggots climb on the "childless" mom's back and pupate. She protects them during this period thanks to her motherly instincts.

A male velvet ant, which is not an ant but a species of solitary wasp. Females are wingless. Males are stingless. (Montana) 🐙🌿

Doing science is mostly just realizing that what you initially lack in expertise, you more than make up for with excitement

In the second paper (currently a preprint) from my Ph.D. with @danielkronauer.bsky.social we expand the understanding of ant sex determination by mapping a candidate sex determination locus in the clonal raider ant. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

My lab has a new paper in @insectessociaux.bsky.social. We found that alleculine beetle larvae consume most insect prey collected by Florida harvester ant workers, and occur in up to 63% of nests. 1/n

I'm thrilled to be opening my own lab this Fall at the @maxplanck.de MPI for Brain Research in Frankfurt. The lab is going to investigate the neuronal and genetic underpinnings of behavioral evolution. We are hiring on all levels. Don't hesitate to share widely and reach out if interested.

If you are one of those interesting people who like sausage-like ants, you are in for a treat: we just published in @zookeys.pensoft.net a taxonomic update for Afrotropical Zasphinctus describing 5 new species! You read that right FIVE! Happy 2025 for you as well zookeys.pensoft.net/article/1312...

Another good color.

Have yourself a merry little Carboniferous. #Art #SciArt #PaleoArt #Inverts

The selfish fire ant social supergene achieves non-Mendelian transmission via several different routes. One previously described route was biased representation in queen offspring. This new work shows that this also occurs in new male offspring. Congrats to Dan and the team on this discovery!

My favourite lichen, again, because it’s fabulous. Teloschistes chrysophthalmus on a Hawthorn in nearby ancient wood pasture.

Do spiders wipe? This lil’ jumping spider sure did!

Good color

Friends don't let friends make bad graphs repo has been updated! Friends don't let friends use boxplot for binomial (bimodal) data. Is your box plot hiding something from you? #DataVisualization github.com/cxli233/Frie...

Sharing my new paper again since moving from the other place 🙂 We shed light on some of the most rapidly evolving animal behaviors—those surrounding mating.

76 #arthropod #genomes, five haplodiploid lineages tested have fast-evolving mitochondrial #genes & fast-evolving nuclear #genes related to mitochondrial functions --- with YY @gwct.bio fringy et al. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Our miRNA story is now in @science.org ! We found a microRNA, not a protein, that finally solved a long-standing evolutionary mystery of wing coloration in butterflies and moths. (1/n) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Big chromosome in ants has evolved large polygyny-associated structural variant systems in two highly diverged lineages. Nice work! Great opportunity to investigate convergence in evolutionary processes!

We found this ghost redwood tree this weekend while camping this weekend @jrossibarra.bsky.social . It's a rare chlorophyll mutant growing clonally off of the base of huge coastal redwood

If assortative mating is such a big deal, why am I so lonely

Nicolas Svetec, David Begun, and I wrote a review article about de novo genes. If you are interested in this topic please take a look at this final open-access version at AnnualReviews www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

In Joe McHugh’s insect taxonomy class at UGA, the pretest is filled with mimics like these. I probably scored 50% or less 😂. When we retook the pretest as part of our final exam, everyone was laughing and we all got near perfect scores.

Clonal raider ants leaving twitter to join blue sky

Clonal raider ants