🧵1/9 There are 35,000+ fish species, but we have formal social-behaviour classifications for a tiny fraction. Most knowledge lives in the experience of researchers, fishers, divers, aquarists, naturalists, and Indigenous communities, but almost none of it is centralised. So we built ShoalBase.org.

Up to 10 doctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology now open for application! Start date September 2026. More info here: www.evolbio.mpg.de/imprs

Woah, that R logo is absolute fire! Immediately set it as my application icon! (and also, the workshop looks really cool as well!)

This is wonderful. High-end Technology together with straightforward ecology.

Statistical and structural bias in birth-death models https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.02.691894v1

Play a little game and choose the right icon for each role in science. Play our CRediT Roles icon game/survey, and help make scientific authorship clearer and more accessible! creditsurvey.sciux.org #OpenScience #ScienceUX

Part 1 version 1 of my Malawi cichlid ID guide is out now. 2 more parts for follow, with my intention being to revise, expand and improve each over time. This one is essentially a companion to our whole genome sequence paper in Science (Blumer et al. 2025). ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

Congratulations to Dr @euantheyoung.bsky.social who defended his PhD yesterday on 'Family matters: The role of trade-offs in shaping human life-histories and health' research.rug.nl/en/publicati... @rug.nl supervised with @erikpostma.bsky.social @lummaalab.bsky.social 🎉

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

PhD position available in evolutionary genomics/bioinformatics (hoehnalab.github.io/job_adverts/...). Topic: analyzing gene expression evolution across several firefly species and linking expression changes to genomic architecture. The position is jointly supervised with @anaevolcatalan.bsky.social

Extremely proud of my good friend and colleague @euantheyoung.bsky.social whose work is featured in @nrc.nl. Read bellow for some excellent science and fascinating results. 👪🤰👶🧬

1/13 New paper out! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Historical records across thousands of women showed that mothers with more children had shorter lifespans during a famine, fitting an evolutionary explanation for why we age @hannahdugdale.bsky.social @lummaalab.bsky.social @erikpostma.bsky.social

Do you teach #rstats? Do your students complain about how lame and old-fashioned dplyr is? Don't worry: I have the solution for you: github.com/hadley/genzp.... genzplyr is dplyr, but bussin fr fr no cap.

The detectCores() apocalypse is creeping up on us 👻🐛 As more people are getting access to 128+ CPU cores, code spinning up parallel cluster with detectCores() workers fails - not enough #RStats connections available Friends, do *not* default to detectCores(), bc www.jottr.org/2022/12/05/a...

Potato-tomato

Congratulations to Dr @friggspeelman.bsky.social who was awarded a PhD yesterday 🎉 @rug.nl on 'Socially monogamous partnerships in birds: Causes, consequences, and pair-bond strength' research.rug.nl/en/publicati... A fantastic achievement!

Join Our Citizen Science Project! We are mapping the house mouse hybrid zone in Schleswig-Holstein, DE, and you can help. Visit our House Mouse Hybrid Zone Project website to learn more jwinternitz.github.io/mouse-hybrid.... Funded by @dfg.de at @uni-hamburg.de #DFG #musmusculus #wildmice

Muyuan Chen has turned structural biology into an immersive experience with his new video game Meowtabolism, now available on Steam. Try the demo here: store.steampowered.com/app/4045010/... Give Muyuan feedback: steamcommunity.com/app/4045010 #ScienceGaming #StructuralBiology #CryoEM #STEMOutreach

Very glad to share my first last-author paper, now published in iScience! 🎉In this study, we addressed a key challenge in virus-based cancer therapy: macrophage-mediated suppression, which limits viral infection and restricts T cell activation in tumors. Link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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

Even the cichlid fish eggs of Lake Tanganyika are highly diverse! Picture by Grégoire Vernaz and Anja Haefeli www.horizons-mag.ch/2025/09/04/f...

🚨 Our study investigating the relationship between evolutionary age and range size across plants and animals is out in @natcomms.nature.com! Delighted to be part of this great project led by @adrianaalzate.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🌐📈⏳️🐐🐋🐦🦎🐸🐠🌴🏝

🚨New paper led by @adrianaalzate.bsky.social showing that in most plant and animal groups the age of a species predicts its geographical range size, although the relationship is strongly mediated by dispersal ability and occurrence on islands 🧪🌐🪶 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Now published @natecoevo.nature.com with @annika-nichols.bsky.social, our latest on the evolution of 𝘴𝘭𝘦𝘦𝘱 across 𝟲𝟬 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘀 of cichlid fishes! doi.org/10.1038/s415... with members of the @schierlab.bsky.social and Salzburger labs, as well as the burgeoning Shafer lab @uoftcellsysbiol.bsky.social

🔥ADVANCE ACCESS🔥: Climatic oscillations, dispersibility and adaptability behind worldwide mountain radiations of the Helichrysum– Anaphalis—Pseudognaphalium (HAP) clade (Compositae) doi.org/10.1093/aob/...

To the paper: doi.org/10.1038/s414...

A new @natcomms.nature.com study led by iDiv alumna @adrianaalzate.bsky.social @naturalis.bsky.social uncovered that across >26,000 species evolutionary age is positively linked to range size, except in marine mammals. #Biodiversity #Evolution #iDivResearch www.idiv.de/older-specie...

An international study conducted in Eawag's experimental ponds demonstrates how indirect ecological effects influence the evolution of species. 👉 www.eawag.ch/en/info/port...

This study by @hoehna.bsky.social and coauthors seems very reassuring: where we often pick partition specific models rather ad-hoc, it appears these do not influence divergence time estimations. (I would still love to see a densitree plot though!) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🌍 Age and extinction risk Analysing 26,000 species, researchers found older plants and animals usually have larger ranges, while younger species, island dwellers, and poor dispersers face greater extinction risk. 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41... #SciComm 🧪

We now have protein sequences from rhino enamel that are >20 million years old! I am extremely excited and grateful to have been part of this project. The incredible thing: these sequences are informative enough to place this ancient species in the rhino tree! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is an amazing visualization of genome equivalence! (I do wonder to what extent such reshuffling of the genome impacts the phylogeny? Is this phylogeny really valid given so much reshuffling?)

❗️Our next workshop will be on June 13th, 6 pm CEST, on Using LLMs with ellmer by @hadley.nz! Register or sponsor a student by donating to support Ukraine! Details: bit.ly/3wBeY4S Please share! #AcademicSky #EconSky #RStats

🧵5 Top Free Alternatives to BioRender for Scientific Illustrations! These five websites offer free scientific illustrations for biologists. Great for presentations, research papers and other research communication needs. Save and share the post!

Exploring themes in {ggplot2}? 🎨 Check out: bit.ly/4d9jtbH It lets you preview different themes before adding them to your code - so handy for picking the perfect vibe! ✨ It features packages like: 🖌️ {ggthemr} 🌙 {ggdark} 👩🏽‍🔬 {ggtech} ⚙️ Setting an active theme globally #RStats #ggplot2 #DataViz

Some of you may be interested in this: academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

Really excited that our DFG grant on the Speciation Genomics of Eye Size variation in *Heliconius* has been funded :) In the next weeks, I will post an advert for a PhD, but if you know of good students, please suggest they get in touch. Please repost.

New paper alert🚨 We used calibrated Sentinel-1 backscatter coefficients to estimate grass biomass, woody canopy volume and tree basal area in the Greater Serengeti-Mara Ecosystem. zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

What would a PhD be without a side quest? 🦀🪸 Super excited our study is out in Frontiers in Marine Science! We tested if gall crabs affect coral algal symbionts using Imaging PAM fluorometry. Turns out—these tiny tenants don’t stress out the algae. 🔗 doi.org/10.3389/fmar... (1)

And no ORCID...

#Rstats is being rewritten in Rust, and the R Core already has a book coming out!

Presenting our poster on programming oncolytic alphavirus replicons with immunogenic signals at the Dutch Annual Virology symposium #DAVS2025 in #sunny Utrecht 🌞

When a cell divides, which one is the mother and which one is the daughter? Models of network structured populations usually assume that the potentially mutated daughter cell is moving to an adjacent site, but what happens if we change that assumption? 1/2

Survey: What makes a plant beautiful? Nice way to spend 5 minutes. www.biodiful.org#/plantiful_en

We have a 4-year fully funded PhD position available! Research topics include but are not limited to 1) Parallel evolution of climate adaptation in Europe and South America 2) The genetic architecture of temperature adaptation 3) The evolution of pathogenicity su.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

nloptr is awesome, having examples to get started with integrating this in your Rcpp package is great!

anyone have pictures of their recent poster using the #betterposter design? specifically related to eco evo or env sci? (looking for some examples to show future students!)

This would really open up publishing and the peer review process.

@lionelhenry.bsky.social and I are so excited to finally announce Air - an extremely fast R code formatter! 🎉 With Air, you'll never need to worry about styling your #rstats code ever again. All you need to do is save, and Air takes care of the rest. www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/02...