New Cambrian mystery keychains just dropped! 🦐 shop.fossilforager.art #sciart

3-year Independent Post-doc in Animal Behavior based at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama! Three positions, each including salary & a research budget. Applications due April, 15th. DM if you are interesting in developing a project with us! stri.si.edu/academic-pro...

My advice to biologists tempted to use AI/LLMs to code their analyses: don't. (I'm continuing with reviewing the analyses for our article, and it's taken me all morning to figure out what the code is trying to do.)

i love m-dashes. i use 'not only but also' type of constructions in certain kinds of writing. i am not ai. i find the implication that i might be depressing. just as i dislike defensive academic writing targeting reviewers, i'd regret having to adopt defensive writing habits to prove i'm not a bot.

today's nice #invertebrate is her rotundness the dark-edged bee-fly

This is one of the most important issues with the global food system, yet it is often ignored. Put simply, we don't actually grow much *food* in our farms around the world. Instead, we grow grossly inefficient animal feed and biofuels. drawdown.org/news/only-ha...

Two PhD positions available in our lab! www.senckenberg.de/de/stellenan... a) "Genomic Mechanisms of Olfactory Adaptation and Plasticity in Wasps, Ants, and Bees." 🐜🐝 REF.11-26010 b) "Evolutionary Genomics of Transcriptional Regulation in Beetle Sociality."🪲🪳 REF.11-26011

Strong recommendation to teaching faculty to just say no to this stuff, even if you are AI curious/enthusiastic. This is meant to reduce faculty autonomy and capture human labor with automation. You're selling out your future self and the profession as a whole. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

Job alert! PhD position "Evolutionary Genomics of Transcriptional Regulation in Beetle Sociality" with @bfeldmeyer.bsky.social in collaboration with me and the fantastic burying beetles!

Ants are social creatures and so they are no strangers to social exploits. Kidnapping! Coups! Slavery! Hi-jacking! Highway Robbery! Protection Rackets! Wars of Territory Conquest! Wars of National Security! Wars of resource extraction! Wars of stealing your house! You can find ants doing […]

hey biology people, do you remember reading a paper about "folklore" in bench biology procedures? Stuff like how exactly you grow up your cells or whether you put lids face up or face down? At the moment, I can't find it because I keep getting like anthropology literature about fairy tales

'If everyone were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as beauty.' - C. Darwin

Small is beautiful! In a new pre-print in @elife.bsky.social, a team led by Alexey Polilov do the first-ever 3d electron-microscopic analysis of a miniaturized eye: the 29-lens compound eye of a 0.2-mm-long parasitic wasp! elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre... (whole wasp image by Andrew Polaszek.)

You could say that Rock n Roll was born 111 years ago today in Arkansas, but probably not where you'd think. Before there was a Chuck Berry or Little Richard, there was those who wanted to be like her. Rosetta Nubin better known as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the godmother of Rock was born on this day

Applications are open for the LinnéSys Systematics Research Fund: we offer up to £1,500 for research in taxonomy & systematics - from fieldwork to equipment, specimen prep, and more. Open to researchers at any stage (UG+). Deadline: 27 March 2026, 23:59 Apply now: buff.ly/8eryOMN

‘Alpine Scene,’ Gustave Doré, circa 1865

New research from MSU Entomology shows honeybees can “swim” across water and orient toward dark areas that likely mark the shore, but a commonly used insecticide disrupts this life-saving behavior. Read the MSUToday feature: msutoday.msu.edu/news/2026/03... #Entomology 🧪🌍🍁

Ant/An't (Colobopsis gatekeeper ant, and a little Synageles noxiosus jumping spider lad)

Undergrad and graduate students! Could your work benefit from visiting one of the NHMLAC’s collections? Apply for our Collections Study Award, due Apr. 1. I’d love to have students make use of our Entomology collection! Details here: tinyurl.com/bdduefsy

Really happy that a moth made it to the cover of @nature.com! Thanks to my co-author Gunnar Brehm for this great photo 📸 Find our study on thermal limits in this week's issue: www.nature.com/nature/volum... @ecoresearchzoo3.bsky.social @biologie-uniwue.bsky.social @uni-wuerzburg.de

We’re excited to share our seminar line-up for Women in Natural History Museums & Collections. Please join us and help circulate! First out: Wednesday 6 May – 15:00–16:00 (CET) Luisa Kapp (Senckenberg Nature Research) “Everywhere and Nowhere: Women in the Making of Natural History” 🧵#histsci #HPS

The “writing is thinking” posting will continue until a single freaking person in Silicon Valley has figured this out

One thing that AI evangelists seem to assume, particularly legal AI evangelists assume, is that the thinking and analysis is quick, and the writing is just tedious busywork that slows us down. But the writing IS the thinking and analysis. You work out the thinking and analysis by writing it down.

Are you a researcher studying Hymenoptera, and based in a country not in the top 30 human development index (HDI)? Here is your chance to join the @hymenopterists.bsky.social society for free! The application closes on March 31! Please share widely 🧪 www.hymenopterists.org/apply-for-sp...

New #OpenAccess work by Z. Griebenow in #RESSystematicEnt explored the #phylogeny of the #Leptanillinae (Hymenoptera: #Formicidae) ant family using high-throughput sequencing & Bayesian total-evidence inference, with accommodation of systematic bias. doi.org/10.1111/syen.70038 #UCEs #Phylogenomics

We're thrilled to announce the Ctrl-Z Award, a US$2,500 prize for researchers “who discover substantial errors in their published work and take meaningful steps to correct the scientific record." Covered by @nature.com today; read more here: centerforscientificintegrity.org/2026/03/10/a...

So what's the most interesting, or weirdest, application of hidden markov models (HMMs) that you've seen? I once built an HMM for sage grouse mating behavior, fit to data collected by a robotic grouse (pictured doi.org/10.1086/703518). Looking for other examples for a new lecture on HMMs.

‪ 🌳 Do you want to contribute to research on how humans perceive forests? Take this quick, anonymous 10-min survey 🌲 👉 www.biodiful.org#/forest This will help us explore how people experience forest biodiversity! Please share on 🦋 & tag @biodiful.bsky.social to reach more participants 🙏💚 🌐🌍🦤🦑🪴🍁🧪

let's all take a moment to consider the Thief Weevil and his outrageous pantaloons

🥞

Giant Clothespin by Mehmet Ali Uysal

With @saramitri.bsky.social, @sonjalehtinen.bsky.social and L. Lehmann we’ve launched the UNIL Center for Theory in Ecology and Evolution @unil.bsky.social🇨🇭 To kick things off, we’re offering short visiting fellowships for theorists in ecology & evolution. Apply & pls RP 😀 tinyurl.com/2wem36zz

This could be your dream job! PhD in ecology, and English and Japanese language skills required... working for POKEMON!!! www.ign.com/articles/the...

Remembering Barbara McClintock on International Women's Day! She discovered that genes aren't static, they can actually "jump" around on a chromosome. Her discovery of transposons ("jumping genes") fundamentally changed how we understand evolution and the complexity of DNA! 🧬🌽 #WomenInScience

Luckily, I was in the company of fantastic tropical ecologists (and friends). @mattgreenwell.bsky.social and Paddy Cannon, poined out that the colours of this katydid closely matched that of delayed greening leaves which many tropical plants produce as a defence against herbivores… 🤔🤔 4/n

Yes, the French booksellers association forced the Paris Book Festival to drop Amazon sponsorship due to Amazon "seeking to flood the market with fake AI-generated books, promoted by fake reviews, written by fake readers [which rise] to the top of fake rankings"💥 MORE OF THIS, PLEASE 💥

#NewSpeciesAlert! We discovered & described a new species of gall wasp, Belonocnema mesoamericana, on the central American live oak, Quercus oleoides. Great collaboration between Alejandro Zaldivar & lab at #UNAM, @ymilesz.bsky.social at #EdinburghUni, and my lab at #RiceUniversity. #biodiversity

TAXACOM is being reborn. After the mailing list was abruptly discontinued (and its archives apparently deleted) it is being relaunched in Google Groups groups.google.com/g/taxacom Let us rejoice knowing there is once again a place to endlessly argue about “what is a species?” I’ve missed it.

This is cool. Our researchers have "grown" muscle fibers in bioreactors. This and similar tech should replace petrochemical materials used in manufacturing and textiles. The time to scale up biomanufacturing is now. 🧪 #ChemSky #ScienceSky #ClimateSky #AgSky source.washu.edu/2026/02/putt...

Ooh I like this game! My underrated life hack suggestion for academics, including graduate students is: pick an organization system and use it. Getting Things Done, Full Focus Planner, Bullet Journal, something. Academia is not a place for trying to do things haphazard.

We're excited to announce registration is open for the 19th Dipterists Society Field Meeting, to be held June 15–19th at the Itasca Biological Station in northern Minnesota! For more information & to submit talks please visit: dipterists.org/field_meetin... We look forward to seeing you there!

Trump’s Department of Education has moved to strip nurses of our professional status and make school more expensive — but there's still time to push back. From now until March 2, we need you to raise your voice and submit a public comment in opposition: www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

Acanthogammarus from Lake Baikal #amphipodstoday www.inaturalist.org/observations...

Sticky Feet: How Insects Inspire Technology 🐜 Join us & @amentsoc.bsky.social for the Young #VerrallLecture, where Prof. Stanislav Gorb will explore how insects’ adhesive abilities inspire innovation & design. 📍 Staffordshire Invertebrate Science Fair 🎟️ Free buff.ly/LXW0q5V #BritishScienceWeek

We are thrilled to announce that, thanks to the support of our institutional subscribers, all Royal Society subscription journals will be open access in 2026 through #S2O. Researchers can read all articles and publish #OpenAccess in our eight subscription journals for free buff.ly/4Lu9VpW

Air pollution isn’t just bad for us—tiny increases in ozone can scramble ants’ chemical signals, making them misidentify nestmates and unraveling their social order. 😮🪲 In Smithsonian Magazine: https://ow.ly/jYcx50Yh6vI In PNAS: https://ow.ly/EW2T50Yh6r4

Using our bee-tracking drone, we discovered that honey bees 🐝 have highly precise and individual routes. Now published at @currentbiology.bsky.social : doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...

one of the few bad bunny facts i know is his incorporation of said toad in his music led to a boost in awareness and popularity and therefore funding for conservation projects for it! my local zoo has been helping w it for a while and talked about it! share.google/SqYuqRVsLEmp...

The cutest wasp in the whole world! It attacks spider eggs