Addressing convergence in the emerging era of structural phylogenetics https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42148154/

I got excited and posted but should clarify. While we figured out the oak was a clone and likely really old, the conservation win is thanks to years of effort by a whole bunch of other folks. Attending meetings, organizing, filing lawsuits, and plain old not giving up.

When your field is not particularly large...

Happy International Museum Day! I’m so proud to be the Director of the @lsumns.bsky.social (Lousiana State University Museum of Natural Science) one of the most important museums for zoology, palynology (fossil pollen), genetics/genomics research and more! #naturalhistory #evolution

Happy International Museum Day! Museums have had such a profound impact on my career and I can't say enough good things about them! So pumped that I am starting as Curator of Fishes at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in a few months....

Substitution rate variation, not hidden paralogy, drives false hybridization signal in phylogenetic network inference https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.11.723986v1

New publication out today on the systematics of cleaner wrasses! Led by the talented @kaithefishguy.bsky.social

WGNO's very own Wild Bill Wood paid Tulane's Royal D. Suttkus Fish Collection a visit! Check out the resulting video featuring some of the most superlative specimens in the collection, and our even more superlative collection manager, Justin Mann. wgno.com/only-on-wgno...

The Pacific spiny lumpsucker, an inefficient swimmer but a highly efficient suction cup. The pelvic fins have evolved into a strong suction disk on the belly, giving it the ability to anchor itself to substrates. Plate-like structures called "tubercles" provide defense against predators.

Julia Wood and I made it to the wonderful Fish of the Week podcast! Hear us talk about our new species descriptions from the Gilt Darter (Percina evides) complex. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/g...

Pop genomic people: Are there factors associated with lcWGS that can artificially inflate Tajima's D? Google scholar has not been helpful.

First real post on the new blog! If you follow human genetics, you've likely of "missing heritability". If you look at twins to estimate heritability, you get values much larger than what molecular genomic methods produce. IQ, for example, goes from 50-80% heritability to 10-15%. Which is right?

I am recruiting Ph.D. students this cycle. Students interested in deep-sea fishes and phylogenetic comparative methods are an especially good fit.

Amazing speed from the teams in Uganda and the DRC - impressive! Three genomes released so far - a few quick takes: 1️⃣ New genomes ~equidistant from 2007 and 2012 outbreaks. 2️⃣ Represents new spillover from reservoir. 3️⃣ Limited diversity, so too early to speculate on timing. Great work ⭐!

What is "AI for libraries" beyond a catalogue chatbot? IMO: design patterns (OCR, extraction, classification, search), and agents that both run them and develop the small models behind them. As part of work with @natlibscot.bsky.social started a book on this: danielvanstrien.xyz/ai-patterns-...

Please enjoy baby Alligator Gars feeding on brine shrimp (Artemia), set to a Bluey instrumental 🙂 🐟🧪gars are planktivorous at this stage (20 mm, 12 days post-hatch), but will soon switch to eating insects and fish! They’re also already breathing air!

Male Featherfin Rainbowfish showing off

My first PhD chapter is out! How do related fishes adapt to eat different foods? And how do they change as they grow? 🧵 doi.org/10.1002/jmor...

Evaluating two preservation methods, six DNA extraction protocols, and two post-extraction clean-up steps for their effects on DNA quality and PacBio HiFi sequencing yield www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #biodiversity #genomics

We’re hiring a herpetology curator @nhm-london.bsky.social - come join us! jobs.nhm.ac.uk/internal/Job...

Myxini Petromyzontida Holocephali Elasmobranchii Sarcopterygii Actinopterygii

New rule: no more Mac OS X programs can have blue icons. Please.

Come join us! I'm recruiting postdocs and lab techs to study the functional morphology and biomechanics of walking in fishes and salamanders at the University of Virginia, with option to work at Mountain Lake Biological Station. 2 of 4 job ads are posted on my website: sandykawano.weebly.com 🧪🐟🦎

Booking the Amtrak to NOLA for JMIH. Even though we're supposed to get there about 2 hours before the rental car place closes I'm still anxious that it might be late, lol.

Scientists, for the love of anything, PLEASE speak with museums before designating type specimens. The ones from NHMUK in this paper are (once more) with incorrect museum abbreviations and registration numbers. Sigh.

This is the first ever video footage of the larval stage of an extremely rare Groenveld’s Stingfish (Minous groeneveldi). Shot on scuba, over very deep water, far offshore, while drifting with the plankton, at night. #groenveldsstingfish #blackwaterdiving #larvalfish #tulamben #stonefish

We museum curators usually want to know * any * and all uses of specimens we oversee in the scientific literature. It's particularly important if a specimen is figured in a publication and * especially * if there's a change in type status!

If anything at all, I'm guessing it would probably be the phylogenetic classification of Cypriniformes. www.biotaxa.org/Zootaxa/arti...

What finding have you published where your paper is the definitive citation?

Scales from a large Permian actinopterygian collected from the Phosphoria Formation of Idaho in the Smithsonian collection. Specific locality info is lacking, but shows the ornament really well.

Super cool work @epigenci.bsky.social ! academic.oup.com/genetics/art...

Our Evolutionary Biology graduate program at SDSU is drafting an AI policy that all grad students must adhere to and sign in order to turn in their thesis to the grad college. Does your grad program have an AI policy? I’d love to see examples if you’re willing to share! arxiv.org/abs/2604.04721

These are an interesting group. They lay their eggs on leaves; eggs hatch and hitch a lift on caterpillars, when another wasp parasitises the caterpillar they parasitise the wasp larva. Thought to be almost absent from the tropics. But we found three wasps in Uganda and two in Cameroon.

Happy to finally share with you this amazing manuscript, where we present the first chromosome-level genome assemblies for three hybridising Cobitis species 🐟🧬🔬 academic.oup.com/gigascience/... #gigascience #sexchromosomes #loaches #hybridisation #evolution #asexuality #rapidturnover

Not clear to me that any university team unless granted a ton of independence could qualify to do #NSF x-labs; from sam.gov/workspace/co...

Good morning.

Excited to share our new paper on Thinking Outside-the-box: a Perspective into Non-traditional Invasive Species Management Practices, which introduces the special issue of the same topic in @sicbjournals.bsky.social, led by current MS student in my lab, Liam Hanley! academic.oup.com/icb/article-...

Invertebrate palaeontologists of Bluesky, I need you to tell me which species in your study taxon would look best on a band shirt, and the genre of that band, for an Art Project Reason

Another Thursday at the collection, so here's the holotype of the river dolphin Pomatodelphis bobengi (UMMP VP 15117) from the Miocene of Florida.

I think a major disconnect in conversations surrounding AI is the amount of information that isn’t digitized. Pro-AI people I’ve spoken to seem to think almost everything is digitized, whereas at least in my field almost all the information is in specimens and books that are not digitally available

Enamel proteins from the teeth of six Homo erectus individuals that lived in China around 400,000 years ago offer insights into how ancient genetic material might have made its way into modern humans, according to a paper in Nature. go.nature.com/3PmzHXA 🏺🧬🧪

News that @greenleejw.bsky.social will find reely interesting! blockclubchicago.org/2026/05/14/a... cc @solomonrdavid.bsky.social @moxostoma.bsky.social @drkatfish.bsky.social @drfishsg.bsky.social

Sitting in my office in darkness because a single one of my ceiling bulbs is intermittently flashing and giving me a headache.

One of my dream projects, ever since joining here in Basel, out now in @nature.com : single-cells 🤝 eco-morphological proxies rdcu.be/fiyso How cells and tissues adapt to dietary niches... Thanks and congrats to Antoine, Walter, and all the other co-authors for this great collaboration!! 🙏🥳

My new paper with @gdarlim.bsky.social and @hoehna.bsky.social is now out in Proceedings B! We set out to compare two different approaches to time-calibrate a molecular phylogeny: traditional node calibrations, and unresolved FBD... @royalsocietypublishing.org doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

Help needed! Does anyone have experience extracting nuclei from flash frozen tissue? Especially helpful if it is fish skin or tail tissue! We are trying to get some precious melanoma samples processed for snRNAseq but are having issues with either nuclei number and/or quality

We are excited to release the BAT!🦇🚨 We've used this phylogenetic analysis pipeline in our lab for years, and grad Ben Sheppard now presents a Github release and preprint. I run BAT analyses almost daily. It makes exploring gene families routine, customizable, and fun🧵

New preprint from the lab, led by Bradley Cutler. With the @james-gagnon.bsky.social lab we use zebrafish to show that fever is not a reduction in the perception of warmth. Immune signals instead increase the valence of warming stimuli while cooling turns aversive. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

#ERGAReads | Evolutionary causes and consequences of gene duplication 🧬 🔗 rdcu.be/e4SiW #genomes #geneduplication #evolution @natrevgenet.nature.com

Some grow bigger than trucks. Others live longer than grandparents. A few appear like aliens from another planet. But giant fishes also expose some real truths about extinction, overharvest, and conservation in the modern world. 🐟🌊🦈 New Edge Effects Essay 👇 open.substack.com/pub/tnature/...