I just passed my 50,000th identification on @inaturalist.bsky.social! Identifying is a huge but often ignored part of the #iNaturalist community and dataset so I wanted to share why and how I identify. 1/14 🧪 #ecology #taxonomy #botany #CommunityScience

How to quantify the impact of AI on long-run cultural evolution? Published today, I give it a go! 400+ years of strategic dynamics in the game of Go (Baduk/Weiqi), from feudalism to AlphaGo!

Most of us use rDNA for community analyses of AM fungi. Intragenomic variation in rDNA of AM fungi can be pretty huge, depending on the region. nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Thanks to everyone who came along/tuned in to my PhD exit seminar! What a thing to do at the end of almost four years. So close to submitting, just need to tidy up this last chapter and I’m done! PS does anyone need a mycology/botany genomics/systematics postdoc? 👀

A meme for #phylogenetics people.

Australian universities are in a governance crisis. VC pay blowouts, scandals, mission drift — these aren’t random, they’re structural. This new working paper with @marijataflaga.bsky.social & Keith Dowding digs into why the system is broken, and how to fix it. doi.org/10.25911/MWW... A thread:

My final PhD exit seminar is fast approaching! Tune in if you’d like to hear what I’ve been up to the last four years. There’s something for everyone: fungal genomics and species delimitation (38 new Rhizoctonia genomes), orchid phylogenomics and popgen, fungal taxonomy, it’s gonna be fun 🤙

Join us on campus & online on Thursday, 31 July 2025 at 1pm for a seminar by Dr Darren Wong, Postdoctoral Fellow from the Peakall Group, RSB, ANU. Details: tiny.cc/gizp001

Thanks @westerdijkinst.bsky.social !

📢 The #BiodiversityHeritageLibrary is entering a bold new chapter – and we need your help! Today we release our official Call for Support. We’re seeking new hosts for BHL’s staff, infrastructure, and services. Learn more: blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2025/06/tran... #BHLTransition #ILoveBHL

In an unconscionable decision, the Smithsonian Institute has decided to no longer support the Biodiversity Heritage Library from 1 Jan 2026. Please someone step up and take it over.

so cool! academic.oup.com/gbe/article/... Nice work @martinsteinegger.bsky.social et al :)

At long last, our manuscript ‘Rise up, Rhizoctonia: moving to one fungus, one name in the Ceratobasidiaceae’ has finally been published in Persoonia 🎉 Here we resolve several longstanding taxonomic issues within Ceratobasidiaceae and present a unified Rhizoctonia www.persoonia.org/images/Volum...

#mycosky #mycology bluesky! I’m looking for some inspiration - what are some of your favourite recent (published within the last 1–3 years) fungal comparative phylogenomic studies that you’ve read?

26 freshly sequenced whole genomes of undescribed orchid-associated Rhizoctonia spp. 🤙 14 more genomes to go and then I’m on the home stretch for the PhD 🫨

After 372 days since submission, and 14 reviewers who committed to reviewing but didn’t wind up submitting a review, our Rhizoctonia nomenclature manuscript has finally been accepted for publication in Persoonia! 🥲

Had such a great time over the weekend talking with artist Keg de Souza and panel chair Richard Morecroft about fungi and the intersections of art and science for ‘Magic Mycelium’ at the Bundanon Art Museum - such an incredible art space and landscape.

At long last, the final typeset version of our Diurideae manuscript has finally been published in Systematic Biology! Check it out at doi.org/10.1093/sysb...

Australia’s university Vice-Chancellors are among the highest paid in the world. Australia’s PhD students are some of the lowest paid. That is not a sign of a healthy education system. Read more from @jack-thrower.bsky.social:

Out now in @nature.com! Our comprehensive meta-analysis of global terrestrial and marine genetic diversity demonstrates rapid loss of genetic diversity and identifies conservation interventions that could mitigate this process www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪🌍🦤🧬 #consgen #PopGen

“The PhD stipend is $33,511 … well below minimum wage of $47,627” “Universities can raise the stipend to a maximum of $52,352, but a ACGR survey found none have done so. The highest stipend is just over $40,000 … with the average at $34,244.” #RaiseTheStipend

In no particular order, here are my favourite books from 2024:

My entire team wrote an opinion paper about Common misconceptions of speciation research. Each section is written by 1-2 team members. The bulk of the writing happened during two writing retreats. It was a lot of fun and I am very happy with the result. academic.oup.com/evolinnean/a...

Finally deactivated my X account 🎉

Fascinating phylogenomic study of Oak Family by Shui‐Yin Liu et al. (including @carolsiniscalchi.bsky.social) showing that hybridization & ILS both generate gene-tree discordance in the family; ILS contributes ~3x as much as hyb'n to discordance in Quercus, but both matter. doi.org/10.1111/jipb...

Keeping track of new taxonomic changes and species descriptions can be tough, so I've created a living spreadsheet to document recent taxonomic works relating to Australian plants, and provide an easy to access central resource. It will be updated every week or two docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Very excited to see this tool come out (and just before Christmas). I've been following it on Github and it looks incredible. "Unicore enables scalable and accurate phylogenetic reconstruction with structural core genes" 📝 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 💾 github.com/steineggerla...

Interviewer: can you explain this gap in your resume? Well it all started when I tried to typeset this resume in LaTeX

Here is the Croatian cartoon from the 1960s that served as the inspiration for the ‘Worker and Parasite’ cartoon on The Simpsons. www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuOc...

If you are a researcher or academic, please make it easy to find your contact details! This is an old talk of mine for the WA Young Stats Event but the advice still holds (just replace twitter with bsky or mastodon). 👩‍💻 "What every young statistician should know" emitanaka.org/slides/YSW2020

Stumbled upon this Orthoceras while looking for Pterostylis in the swamps at Dharawal. A species-poor genus containing only two species (one being O. strictum, pictured), sister to Diuris in the subtribe Diuridinae.

Boy did I have to work for this one. I think swamp might be my least favourite kind of habitat. Here’s Pterostylis uliginosa, standing about 20cm tall.

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #BookSky💙📚 #Books #BookChallenge Day 16 / 20

Our last science contribution of the year Long-read genomics reveal extensive nuclear-specific evolution and allele-specific expression in a dikaryotic fungus www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #mpmi #plantbiology #plantimmunity #plants #fungi. This was led by very talented Rita Tam plus great support

Yessss love this, let’s see those resupinate fungi 🙌🙌

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #BookSky💙📚 #Books #BookChallenge Day 15 / 20

Discordance Down Under: Combining phylogenomics & fungal symbioses to detangle difficult nodes in a diverse tribe of Australian terrestrial orchids https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39657584/

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #BookSky💙📚 #Books #BookChallenge Day 14 / 20

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #BookSky💙📚 #Books #BookChallenge Day 13 / 20

Uneven distribution of prokaryote-derived horizontal gene transfer in fungi: a lifestyle-dependent phenomenon (mBio) journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.... Fungi with different lifestyles have different levels of bacterial HGT - mycoparasites with the most and ectomycorrhizal fungi with the fewest:

The first chapter of my PhD has finally been published in Systematic Biology! “Discordance Down Under: Combining phylogenomics & fungal symbioses to detangle difficult nodes in a diverse tribe of Australian terrestrial orchids” - advance access link below 1/🧵

A great starter pack for fungal taxonomists: bsky.app/starter-pack... let us know of any other mycology starter packs!

13 years ago I found this nice little marine fungus in the Coorong in southern Australia. It has distinctive wavy setae. I was new to phylogenetics, so when I found that it was not in a known family or order I shelved it because it was too hard and I was not confident enough to publish it. 1/3

We're going pollinator crazy this week! Here, the #Evolution of window-flowers in greenhood #orchids & their fixed orientation to the Sun appears to exploit their pollinators' instinct to escape confinement! 🧪🌿 academic.oup.com/bot...#Evolution#orchidslinneansociety.bsky.social

Some exciting new research on the flowering plant order Ericales based on genomic sampling of 2870 species, mostly from #herbarium specimens. open access nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #BookSky💙📚 #Books #BookChallenge Day 12 / 20

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #BookSky💙📚 #Books #BookChallenge Day 11 / 20

Went out looking for orchids, found bagworms instead 🤷🏻

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #BookSky💙📚 #Books #BookChallenge Day 10 / 20