In our last thread, we left the jelly-enjoyers of Bluesky with a cliff hanger ending, in what one eager onlooker described as soap opera science 😜 ... wait no more, we are back! Grab your popcorn shrimp and come with us on a journey spanning more than... bsky.app/profile/iwan...

Do you work (/want to work) with caterpillars? Or sensory systems? Or BOTH?! Well good golly do we have the paper for you! We explain the senses that caterpillars have, what they use them for, and how anthropogenic sensory pollution might be messing it all up 🐛 doi.org/10.1007/s003...

We must debunk this crap. Preimplantation diagnosis is much safer than germline editing & w/o slippery-slope ethics in 99.9% of hered. disease cases. Only exceptions are dominant genet conditions where 1 parent is homozygous, with extremely rare occurences for Huntington's, some AD and BRCA

My hardworking Nerite

#FossilFriday Here are 3 beautiful Pentremites sp. Blastoids I collected from the Upper Mississippian (Lower Carboniferous, Serpukhovian) Lower Bangor Limestone in Russellville, Alabama.

This is fascinating because this is such a new field and somehow they are going to hire 100 tenure-track faculty in the next 5 years who specialize in it. And yet when asked to fill spots with faculty of color/women/marginalized groups, administrators often cry about how the pipelines don't exist.

Hey folks, as news of Watson's demise spreads, please don't set aside his weighty legacy of misogyny and racism. He was truly among the worst of us. www.vox.com/2019/1/15/18...

When DNA’s structure was in doubt & suspecting his competitor Rosalind Franklin knew more, James Watson goaded her, and Watson’s own memoir describes this in unbelievable condescension (he called her “Rosy” “Medusa” “Loathely Lady” “Wicked Witch of the West”, criticized her clothes as unattractive)

Ok, I got very curious about this tool, and tried it on a paper we already published. But I uploaded the first version of the paper we originally submitted (not the published version). I am VERY IMPRESSED. But based on this one paper, I don't think the tool replaces human peer-reviewers. Thread 👇

I talked with the @scifri.bsky.social peeps the other day for an episode on resolution and vision.

Imagine a drop of ancient resin. Inside is an insect, trapped for 53 million years, so well preserved it looks like it might twitch back into life. These amber fossils offer us a breath-taking glimpse into long vanished ecosystems. But there’s a catch

Parental care, and more complex cooperative systems of care, have independently evolved in hundreds of animal lineages. In an article published today, we explore how these behaviors evolve 𝘢𝘵 𝘢 𝘮𝘰𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘳 𝘭𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘭l shorturl.at/g5OPw /1

#Evolution of complex adaptations can involve changes in multiple traits that lack standalone function. @benitoexplains.bsky.social &co show that leaf masquerade in #katydids evolved via concurrent modification in wing colour & shape, driven by evolutionary synergy @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4oUE741

I've unlocked a new science badge!! 🎉🛡️🎉 This thoughtful piece by @meganlinnay.bsky.social expands beautifully on a short review I wrote, citing 'the Sumner-Rooney cost-benefit model' of eye loss 🥲 honoured! For anyone interested in evolution in low light, have a read! 👉 doi.org/10.1111/1365...

Excellent seminar today on the ups and downs of a scientific career and how to do research fairly and ethically by @drkatieg1.bsky.social

What looked like a hearing organ on a tiny stinkbug’s leg turned out to be something far stranger: a fungal nursery that mother bugs use to coat their newly laid eggs in protective symbiotic hyphae, shielding their offspring from parasitic wasps. Learn more in Science: https://scim.ag/4nDrDNm

Cool rotifer feeding with it's cilia beating 🐙🧪

Obsessed with Tillandsia plants

Want to set up your own photo-stacking imaging system for under $3000? This post which outlines all the off-the-shelf items I used this year along with some recommendations for how to use it. Planning to talk about this at @entcollnet.bsky.social this November, too! www.insectid.org/post/focus-s...

Ozempic, MRI machines and flat screen televisions all emerged out of fundamental research decades earlier — the very types of study being slashed by the US government go.nature.com/47hn0n5

Yet another AI feature forced down our throats that NOBODY asked for

Happy Halloween and #invertober 🎃 May this SEM of the terrifying visage of a sunburst diving beetle haunt you this spooky season 👻

Happy Halloween! 🎃 🦇 🧪

When all your PCRs fail, except for the negative control 😱

1/5 🦖 Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990) turns 35 in November. In a new preprint, I argue that it was a prescient meditation on evolutionary genetics, complexity, & control. I also examine analogous efforts of today (e.g. “de-extinction.") Select points below: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

Today’s speaker in our DRN external seminar series is Dr Ryan MacDonald @macdonaldlab.bsky.social (University College London) Sponsored by the Physiological Society @physoc.bsky.social Host: Emily Noël @noelresearchlab.bsky.social All welcome!

Do flies feel pain? Spooky new preprint from our lab on the cells and circuits that mediate nociceptive behaviors in adult Drosophila, led by graduate student (and newly minted PhD!) @jonesjes.bsky.social. 🪰⚡👻🎃 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

50 years ago, King & Wilson published a foundational paper that underlies the cis-regulatory paradigm (CRP) of #DevoEvo #EvoDevo, i.e., that *almost* all morphological evolution is driven by mutations in regulatory elements, rather than proteins, and it all arose from simple misunderstanding 🧪 🧵

Today in accidental data art: selecting the wrong chart type.

🪸 🪸 🪸 Postdoc position in my group at Bristol to study the role of venom in surviving environmental stress in corals! 🪸 Interested in venom biochemistry and coral ecology?Please apply by November 24! @bristolbiosci.bsky.social www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

What are these? You are looking at embryos of a sea squirt. Each of the 'soap bubbles' is a living cell, about a fourtieth of a millimetre in size. The outlines of the cells are visible thanks to fluorescent markers identified by Hitoyoshi Yasuo @hitoyas.bsky.social see doi.org/10.1101/2024... 🧵

🦀 news (with apologies for subjecting you to that horrible pun in the headline...) www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

happy #fossilfriday! this is panderodus, a jawless fish that lived between the middle ordovician and the late devonian. the species p. unicostatus was one of the few vertebrates of the silurian period to hunt large prey (art by mightyfossils)

This got to me. Haunting and beautifully written. news.mongabay.com/2025/10/in-m...

Spiders are precision hunters, not just creepy crawlies. 🕷️ This PNAS Science Sessions episode dives into cutting-edge research on spider webs that hear, silk-powered lifts, and REM sleep-like states in jumping spiders. Tune into this Halloween Special: https://ow.ly/W5NO50XhCZ7

My main PhD work @monteirolab.bsky.social is now in @natecoevo.nature.com! We found a Hox gene promoter that helps butterflies🦋adjust their wing eyespots in response to seasonal temperatures🍃🍂, shedding light on the evolutionary origin of phenotypic plasticity. 1/9 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Meet the real rainbow fish 🌈🐟 Using Cre-mediated recombination, each zebrafish cell expresses a unique fluorescent color, creating a living rainbow of developmental history 🎨✨ Image by Bret Pearson #FluorescenceFriday #Zebrafish #DevBio

There is still “an urgent need for donations from the community,” says Eric Lai, president of the Fly Board. By @callimcflurry.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/community/fl...

🧠🌟🐭 Excited to share some of my postdoc work on the evolution of dexterity! We compared deer mice evolved in forest vs prairie habitats. We found that forest mice have: (1) more corticospinal neurons (CSNs) (2) better hand dexterity (3) more dexterous climbing, which is linked to CSN number🧵

Why are some species smaller than a paperclip while others grow longer than a school bus? How is body size evolution governed in animals? Out now in @pnas.org we tackle these longstanding questions through a genetic lens using my favorite group of fishes as our model!! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🚨 New paper out in Proc. R. Soc. B @royalsocietypublishing.org "Better safe than sorry: leg amputations as a prophylactic wound care behaviour in carpenter ants" by Seiji Fujimoto et al. @etf1989.bsky.social ↘️ royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... ↙️ 🐜⛑️

Supervisors who invest in positive mentoring relationships with their PhD candidates also reap the benefits for their own research go.nature.com/4hriohE

The first article from last year's expedition on the famous Polarstern that I participated in has been published. The amphipod species Amathillopsis spinigera was found for the first time during this expedition in the 25 year sampling history of the Fram Strait. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

📢 #CFP: Wild Animal Initiative is accepting grant applications for projects studying wild animal welfare. 🗓️ Submit your EOI form by November 14 to be considered. 🧪 #wildlife #biology #zoology #ecoevo #animalbehavior #animalbehaviour #physiology #conservation #science

The redhead larvacean is a deep-sea climate hero 🌊💙 These tiny animals build mucous houses to filter marine snow sinking from the waters above. When their filters clog, they abandon their homes, which sink to the seafloor packed with nutrients and large amounts of carbon: youtu.be/7swiAc8rZbk?...

Zebrafish embryo undergoing gastrulation. Credit to Dr. Gopi Shah at EMBL. #ZebrafishZunday 🧪

New biology: stink bugs inoculate their eggs with a fungus that protects them from parasitoids www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagaz...

Latest work out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social We find the fly development gene bicoid is much older than previously thought (~20 million yrs older!) 🪰🧬 To pinpoint its origins we tackled the Diptera phylogeny, providing some resolution (many open questions remain). 🔗 tinyurl.com/2vyuevpy

Big-headed flies just hit that fine combination of magnificent and very, very silly and I love them. 🌿🪰

Big-headed fly sex. Real acrobatic stuff #BugSex