How do courtship dances evolve? Paper out now in Behavioral Ecology 🪰 "Courtship choreography is stabilized among genetically isolated populations" doi.org/10.1093/behe... Video of our study species the dancing dune fly (Apotropina ornatipennis) below.

If you click through to the 'contact' info for this program you'll see the contact email is "[email protected]" and the contact phone number is "(blank)". The actual text of this solicitation is barely coherent. 100% a scheme to funnel critical NSF money to private companies with no oversight.

This is basically harassment of scholars willing to question the Trump administration’s targeting of Chinese colleagues. Innes already had the FBI investigate his lab and was given the all clear. Now USDA is shutting down the Lab, which focuses on making fungus-resistant plants.

Research from the lab on the evolution of size and plumage dimorphism in birds! Grad student Catherine Alverson examined how species move between size and plumage dimorphism categories. While those results largely recapitulated previous work, there was an intriguing new finding [1/3]

More details on the firing of the National Science Board. The NSF now has no director, deputy director, or board. They have issued almost no new awards in 2026. The plan appears to be to completely destroyed the agency. The details are horrifying and have Russ Vought written all over them.

NSF LTER program “archived”. LTER=“Long Term Ecological Research”. This program has been incredibly successful, incredibly frugal for what they accomplish, and…of course…targeted by evil know-nothings. My heart is breaking.

It was.

Are you (or something you know) looking for a PhD? Like trait macroevolution but also yearn for an applied topic? Think plants are neat? Want to live in beautiful northeast Scotland?! 🌊🐬⛰️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 I'm advertising a PhD in my lab! Deadline April 22, email me any questions. www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

🚨 Hiring a postdoc (2 years)! We’re looking for someone with skills in data science, remote sensing, or computer science: 🛰️ Build next-gen nighttime light products 🦅 Link light spectra to migration & collision risk Apply or reach out! aeroecolab.com/opportunities

In the last two weeks, 1% of new NSF awards were in biology. Just one grant of 97. One. Biology in the US is on hold until there’s a regime change.

Well damn, this is cool. Birds That Don't Exist: Niche Pre-Emption as a Constraint on Morphological Evolution in the Passeroidea | Chia et al., 2026 | Ecology Letters onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Russ Vought hates American innovation and scientific leadership and is committed to destroying it

Hey Buffalo!! Despite the fact that we have been relegated to the “& MORE” category while Madison gets two mentions, we are going to be LOUD as hell!! Join us March 7th, 1PM, Niagara Square! 😂😂

This is why Democrats rightly didn't stand in response to Stephen Miller's gross pledge of mindless nationalism at the State of the Union last night. When these crimes are being perpetrated by the state, the citizenship status of the victims is irrelevant. www.investigativepost.org/2026/02/25/b...

But, as they say, there is no time like the present [OK, maybe the 1930s if you want to nitpick] But, with some data wrangling, my first NSF Funding Curves! 2/3

If you thought regular bird listing was for nerds, wait til you get a load of phylolisting. @snacktavish.bsky.social

executions in the street.

"Renee was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” her mother said. “She was extremely compassionate. She’s taken care of people all her life. She was loving, forgiving and affectionate. She was an amazing human being.” www.startribune.com/she-was-an-a...

Y'all, I just got out of the NSF-BIO webinar where they explained changes to peer review. It's not good. 🧪 scienceforeveryone.science/changes-to-n...

A good time for a reminder that the BIO Directorate will hold a Virtual Office Hour on Thursday www.nsf.gov/events/nsf-b...

NSF - Forced reorg - POs down ~ 40% (DRP, most rotators not renewed, retirements) - Forced move (and we have to pack and clean) to a building with no furniture, little to no conference space for panels, inadequate 🛜, …) I personally love the boxes they gave us for packing. “Details matter” 🙃

New paper out now in @jexpbiol.bsky.social! Led by star PhD student @miaryras.bsky.social, we tested the effects of winter warming (a constant increase as well as fluctuating temps - see pic) on common wall lizard behaviour and physiology. journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

I’ve released a tool to sketch and edit phylogenetic trees! yawak.jp/PhyloWeaver/ Load a Newick file and intuitively add/remove/resize branches. Useful for quick conceptual trees, extracting subtrees, or turning ideas into Newick.

Looking for a PhD opportunity? I'm hoping to recruit someone to my group at Durham University to work on a project combining fieldwork and labwork to study speciation in rubyspot damselflies: iapetus.ac.uk/studentships... Get in touch if you want to chat!

New paper on deep-sea fish diversity out now in @sse-evolution.bsky.social, with @cmartinez.bsky.social and @sarahtfried.bsky.social academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...

Ornithology is all about the process. #GoBills | #BillsMafia

What do you get when you cross a blue jay with a green jay? That’s not the start of a joke, but the subject of a new study that aims to describe a hybrid bird never encountered before in the wild. https://cnn.it/3WcFnDd

The first Aguillon Lab paper is officially out in early view at Evolution!! Led by postdoc @devonderaad.bsky.social, we’ve explored the hybrid zone between black-headed and rose-breasted grosbeaks in the Great Plains. #ornithology #hybridization #speciation #evolution doi.org/10.1093/evol...

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN. It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package. Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

our paper on how light pollution affects bird vocal behavior is out today in Science!! w/ @brentpease.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🥳 New paper out in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society! Manakin’s moving melody: the interplay between courtship dance display and vocalization as a predictor of hybridization in manakins (Aves: Pipridae) academic.oup.com/biolinnean/a... #ornithology

Further consolidating control over federal research funding under Russell Vought and a cadre of apparatchiks. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

New bird tree who dis. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Devastated to see the NSF postdoctoral research fellowship in biology archives. This is a transformative creative opportunity and a path to the professorship for many (including myself). Postdocs are highly trained and often in the newest techniques which spur innovation. www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

“With these considerations, we expect to fund through the 4th percentile.” There it is, in black and white, the destruction of cancer research in the US.

NEW: In an unprecedented move, the NIH will soon disinvite dozens of scientists about to take positions on advisory councils that make final decisions on grant funding. NIH staff were told to select others aligned with the Trump administration and told to expect placements by political appointees.

String manipulation is a critical daily task for bioinformaticians. Here is a cheatsheet using stringr: rstudio.github.io/cheatsheets... I probably use stringr::str_replace() once every other day... to clean up metadata (of course!) #rstats

A couple presentations from the lab at #ABS2025! The first is a poster by Catherine Alverson during the first poster session, tonight (07/09). Catherine will be discussing her research on the evolution of dimorphism across thousands of bird species.

NEW: NSF will be kicked out of their building. Announcement will be made tomorrow by HUD Sec. and Governor of VA. HUD will take over the NSF building over the next two years. NSF staffer: "There is no planning for NSF, no identified future location, appropriation for a new building or a move."

ooooh new paper out today. a couple of years ago a big group of us were like "hey let's spend a few weeks painstakingly looking up the sources of every official bird common name" and as of today, you too can join us in our ornitholetymological (yes i made that up) rabbit-hole:

RFK Jr's "MAHA" report is filled with references to studies that literally do not exist, or that completely misinterpret the studies' findings. “We did not publish a paper.. on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title,” says one cited researcher. www.notus.org/health-scien...

Divergent selection and plasticity increases reproductive isolation early during incipient speciation. Find our new meta-analysis on experimental speciation studies here: rdcu.be/ek019 🧪 @EvolOdonata.ecoevo.social.ap.brid.gy @pipdowning.bsky.social

*** Academic BFD alert *** We just published a new global bird phylogeny. It synthesizes the work of thousands of researchers before us, and it will grow and improve over time. @snacktavish.bsky.social @birdsoftheworld.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The current #FeederWatch interactions dataset has grown to include just under 500,000 pairwise interactions! So many cool projects waiting to be done with this unique resource. FeederWatch data is always freely available feederwatch.org/explore/raw-...

A complete and dynamic tree of birds - out today in PNAS! Teamwork with @eliotmiller.bsky.social and others at @birdsoftheworld.bsky.social and Open Tree of Life to put together current relationships across all birds. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Now published!!!! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My NSF PRFB on the genetics of female polymorphism in hummingbirds was terminated yesterday. I don't have much to say, I'm just sad. We've discovered so much, and could have gone so much further. If anyone else is in the same boat, esp postdocs, please reach out, it would be good to connect.

🥳 New paper out in the Journal of Raptor Research! A short commentary on the incidence of vulture hybrids. I found only three cases in the genus Gyps. The rarity of vulture hybrids is due to their old evolutionary age and strong social bonds. #ornithology #RaptorResearch