In 'The Scientist's Guide to Writing', I offer this as an example of writing that's fairly technical (for public-facing writing) but also beautiful. Reading copyedits and just struck again by how lovely this passage is.

JOB KLAXON! The @nhm-london.bsky.social is recruiting a micro-CT specialist! jobs.nhm.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

Ghost shiners look *very* similar to and were even previously considered a subspecies of the mimic shiner (Paranotropis volucellus). Ghost shiners never have a stripe along the sides, while mimic shiners usually have at least a faint stripe along the sides + shorter fins #25DaysofFishmas

There’ll be scary ghost stories on Day 23 of #25DaysofFishmas - well, maybe not *that* scary! 👻 Call us Scrooge, because today we're visited by a Ghost of #Fishmas - a small, translucent minnow called the Ghost Shiner (Paranotropis buchanani) - as we continue exploring the Northeast + #GreatLakes

Dolly Varden line up below spawning salmon, picking off drifting eggs and chunks of salmon flesh. A natural spectacle, and one of the best fly fishing experiences. #25DaysofFishmas #flyfishing

🚨stop what you're doing and take a gander at this amazing Bolca reconstruction🚨

MERRY #FISHMAS! It was on this day in 1938 that Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer made a discovery which would change the world — the first (non-fossil) coelacanth ever brought to the attention of science

"… I share my story in the hope that others … will reflect on moments when trust mattered in their own career journey, and on the responsibility we each hold in ensuring that the next generation enters a scientific world where safety is actively protected." https://scim.ag/4sdMVof

Ant colonies prioritize quantity over quality when it comes to their workers, new #ScienceAdvances research finds. https://scim.ag/3L5oJUc

Keywords in scientific articles! We're asked to list 5-10 keywords for our articles. But should these be words not already in the abstract and title? How do you decide what to put down?

I guess also worth including that @vargaschavezc.bsky.social @rosafernandez.bsky.social preprint from last year's list came out in full version www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Biologists who teach: in what order do you teach the four forces of evolution? Genetic drift first or selection first? And I'm still struggling to smoothly fit in HWE so that its utility is emphasized (students focus so much on how likely it is that assumptions are violated). #iteachbio 🧪 #Evolution

Happy to highlight an essay I wrote together with @marcdemanuel.bsky.social, @natanaels.bsky.social and Anastasia Stolyarova, trying to think through what sets the mutation rate of a cell type in an animal species: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/n

Now accepted in Genetics! academic.oup.com/genetics/adv... We ask why and when rescaling of forward simulations in population genetics is not accurate. There are some interesting results for people performing simulations with selection.

Mushroom evolutionary biologist here. We’re well aware of the fact that sex and gender isn’t a binary. Happy to talk about the fungus with 28,000 distinct sexual identities anytime. Trans rights are human rights! 🏳️‍⚧️

Hey, fellow evolutionary biologists: If you support trans rights, like, comment, or repost this. I want to show that transphobes like Richard Dawkins are a loud minority that does not represent our community

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

suspect a big reason why many academics and others who work in areas where getting facts RIGHT is key are disinterested in using LLMs for research: they’ve tried it, they keep noticing major errors in output, and they conclude that having to verify all that doesn’t actually save them time.

For Day 21 of #25DaysOfFishmas we've got Cheimmarichthys fosteri, the panoko or torrentfish. This charming little labriform is the only member of the fammily Cheimmarichthyidae - especially surprising given there are >750 other species in the Labriformes, including the very diverse wrasse family.

For some reason, I just got an email from a bot that summarized one of my papers using AI. I’m not sure why they would do that, except to alarm and annoy me. Perhaps this is a service that wants me to pay them to do that for all of my papers? That they summarized it poorly isn’t helping their cause.

We need to get control of deer numbers (& exotic ungulates) in NZ before widespread forest ecosystem collapse ensues. This piece I wrote for @theconversationnz.bsky.social in 2022 is still very much true today especially with the push for herds of special interest theconversation.com/despite-the-...

I've often wondered why so many academic scientists want large labs (i.e., numerous graduate students, postdocs, etc). Today it occurred to me that we learn how to run a lab from our own advisors and statistically, at least, tend model our labs on theirs. (1/2)

Close-up of a mouthbrooding cichlid with a mouth full of already well-developed young. 🐟 #fishkeeping

From a serious-looking sculpin to the Arctic's only air-breathing fish, the Northwest leg of the #25DaysofFishmas road trip was full of surprises! Our trip's almost done, but not without a final stop in the Northeast + #GreatLakes region - because there's no place like H.O.M.E.S. for the holidays!

But it is also frequently over-estiamted. Thus I would suggest people look at this new paper (not by me) on this topic: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... "Reassessing Interkingdom Horizontal Gene Transfer Suggests Limited Influence on Plant Genomes"

Does more data solve the problem of deep support? A phylogenomic approach to clarifying evolutionary relationships in the Lecanoraceae https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.18.694902v1

As we get close to the end of the year I thought I'd repost some of my favorites. These aren't in any particular order, but how could I not start with my absolute favorite of the Kingbird riding on the osprey while carrying a fish? #photography #birds

"Amino acid" something or other product has wheat protein AND wheat amino acids. Technically correct but a bit redundant...

Longwood Gardens casually having the biggest Philodendron melanochrysum I've ever seen. Hoping I can grow mine at home a little closer to that look lol.

What do we think about Frontiers journals? I know as a whole they are generally considered predatory, but some seem to be legit; for example, Frontiers in Communication? 🧪 #Scicomm #Science #BlueSkyScience #AcademicBluesky #BioSky #Pseudoscience #ScienceCommunication

While in the Salmonid family and commonly called Dolly Varden trout, they’re not a trout at all! Instead, they're considered a char (genus Salvelinus). Other chars include the Dolly Varden’s closely related (and often confused with) cousins, the bull trout and Arctic char #25DaysofFishmas

String of Stratodus vertebrate emerging in the lab.

Reminder that similar mistakes can easily arise in Python.

Feeling grateful this holiday season for starting a new postdoc at NMNH using phenomics to study drivers of #freshwatermussel #plasticity

Bypassing the Batch Effects to Improve the Reusability of RAD-seq Data: A Case Study of Recurrent Hybridization in the Japanese Torreya Species Complex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.17.694994v1

Found a nest of one of my favorites! A true oddball. Leptomyrmex erythrocephalus, the red-headed spider ant.

Improved Phylogenetic Posterior Estimation through Regularised Conditional Clade Distributions https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.16.694737v1

Unraveling multipredator impacts in salmon-bearing rivers using quantitative DNA metabarcoding. A wonderful collaboration with @jwinkfish.bsky.social. @uwsafs.bsky.social @uwenvironment.bsky.social @uwfreshwater.bsky.social 👇 esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Yesterday @shimakiron.bsky.social took me to the Lake Biwa museum and it was absolutely fascinating to learn about this ancient lake, the largest freshwater lake in Japan. They had everything from fish to invertebrates, parasites, plants, fossils and giant salamanders.

only real gar nerds will get this you've heard of elf on the shelf, have you heard of...

Zero-shot deep learning for the annotation of unknown eDNA sequences using co-occurrences and phylogenetic embeddings https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41417866/

Demonstrating how phylogenetic trees can rotate around their nodes and still tell the same story! #BI111 #SciArt (ping @bbolker.bsky.social)

Playing around with plotting transitions from an ancestral state estimation....Pretty neat.

If you've wondered about Whitetail Shiner (Cyprinella galactura) female fecundity, here is GSI (gonadosomatic index) data over 2 consecutive breeding seasons. It varies, no surprise. A 100 mm SL 5/24 female carried 3200 oocytes, 1600 as a clutch. From Flint River, Alabama. 🐟🌿🌍 #TeamFish

I was told "if you don't use GenAI, you will be left behind". But the reality is people include GenAI slop in their work, and if you don't use GenAI, your work is already more careful, higher quality, and more authentic. I am not just talking about academic papers.

We have 526 scientists signed up for spring semester. We try to get that to about 1000 scientists before unleashing the teachers on the database. Wanna connect a class of kids with science this spring? Sign up!

It was really fun and hopeful, describing the potential for a better future with @nickdimonaco.bsky.social (QUB) and Martin Vickers (JIC). Although bioRxiv doesn't accept review paper preprints, here it is on Figshare figshare.com/articles/pre... 6/6

For Day 20 we have the magnificently ornamented & bizarrely named Old Wife, Enoplosus armatus. This striking character is native to temperate waters around Australia and, while it resembles tropical butterflyfish, it is actually more closely related to freshwater sunfish and basses.

🚨 Tenure-track professorship at Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany, with a focus on evolutionary ecology of social hymenoptera 🐝🐜 Initially for 6 years: www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/pr...

Don’t let the spiky appearance fool you - Day 20’s #25DaysofFishmas feature may be as cuddly as a cactus but it’s no Grinch! 🌵 We take a cruise along the Pacific Coast Highway to find the Prickly Sculpin (Cottus asper), a freshwater sculpin who's widespread in rivers and lakes across the West Coast