Another risk on bsky: people trying to turn you into an amber fossil. “Go ahead, put your face on the tree! Wedge your nose right in there. Yup, where the resin is dripping. Now, do you smell something improbable? No?! Ok, just try staying there longer. Any minute now…”

For #TrilobiteTuesday, here’s the aptly named Kayserops megaspina, a Devonian trilobite. First printed in castable resin, then cast in sterling silver and oxidized to yield blue highlights. Sculpted from scratch, no scans. #paleoart #sciart

once again Crystal just giving away the tricks and habits that many of us have had to learn the hard way

Also, there’s lots of ways to track this info but if you use #rstats, {tidylog} is one nice way to see this info. typethepipe.com/vizs-and-tip...

For searching, I’m happy to have switched to duckduckgo. You can turn off AI and even ads in the search. It’s far better than current Google, though not as good as like 2019 Google. I should try kagi but I’m cheap

1 week left to get your image in for Evolution 2026 logo contest! www.evolutionmeetings.org/2026-logo-co...

Please repost -- The Univ. California Davis dept of Plant Pathology is hiring a Fungal biologist / Mycologist Applications due Dec 1 Application portal: recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07339 Screenshot shows part of the job posting (with alt-text of the same text)

We planted native beautyberry (Callicarpa americana) in our backyard a few years ago and have done nothing since. They are very happy

Three exciting #PostDoc 🧑‍🔬👩‍🔬🧕 positions on #Ecological #Synthesis at TU Darmstadt @tuda.bsky.social for Reassembly #rainforest 🇪🇨 🌱🌴🦜 & #Biodiversity Exploratories 🌲🐄🚜🪲🐝🥀@bexplo.bsky.social Please spread widely ✉️♥️▶️ & apply quickly 🙃 www.reassembly.de/the-team/job...

Was just sent this photo: the oldest-documented Loblolly Pine (Pinus taeda) is still kicking. First scientifically aged in 1992, this lovely is now rapping up its 260 year (260 years at being 1/2 m or so tall; phot by J. Scheff)

I'm very grateful to environmental scientist Sam Matey-Coste showing me these Our World In Data charts when we had a chat recently. (sammatey.substack.com/p/a-conversa...) Yes, so much is a worrying, enraging mess right now. But the bigger picture is a little more reassuring.

I'm considering writing a proposal for R Consortium ISC funding to write a free & open source book on LLMs/AI in R. Advice out there is scattered between different resources. Wondering if this is something the wider #rstats community would be interested in, & what folks would like to see in there?

✨My first science feature is out in Chemical & Engineering News!✨ I interviewed and wrote about Dr. Shana V. Stoddard, a brilliant disabled scientist changing STEM. Disabled scientists deserve visibility and celebration. cen.acs.org/synthesis/me... #DisabledInSTEM #SciComm #RepresentationMatters

If you dig a hole on the beach. Fill it before leaving.

Fun vacation activity: do the next prime number of holes each night. Let a British maths society get some BBC attention after 3, 5, 7, 11 holes…

Do you know someone who has contributed to strengthening the evolutionary biology community by promoting inclusion and diversity? Nominate them for the IDEA award! More info: www.systbio.org/idea-award.h... You may self-nominate!!!

UPDATE: The 2025-2026 list of faculty and postdoc positions in ecology and evolutionary biology is out! Be sure to check out this active and helpful community run resources! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Awesome: Undergraduate and professor discover several new species of violets in the mountains of Virginia. “Put very simply, we looked." #iamabotanist #plantpeopleFTW www.ohio.edu/news/2025/09...

Cool... a global focus on three core traits of ectotherms: metabolic rate, development time and fecundity. ShareTrait: Towards interoperable and reusable individual trait-based data in ectotherms #OpenTraits #FunctionalTraits besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1... 🧪🌐

Super-excited to speak about Oak Origins on Saturday at Polly Hill Arboretum! Join us if you are near Martha's Vineyard... you can get your book signed by the author AND the illustrator. www.pollyhillarboretum.org/event/oak-or...

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

Quick - apply for this job as manager of our #Biodiversity lab at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences and NCSU to work with #tech and #biodiversity including camera traps, #AI and student mentoring Deadline is 9/23/2025 www.governmentjobs.com/careers/%7B0...

I dare people working on mass extinctions to apply. “Organisms respond to rapid environmental change by dying. In large numbers.”

The Dept. of BioSciences at #RiceUniversity, in Houston, Texas, invites applications for a tenure-track assistant professor position in Evolutionary Biology, with a preferred focus on organismal responses to environmental change. Please RT! Apply: apply.interfolio.com/173889

Nice article by the local Nantucket paper on the endangered right whales. No paywall. Includes species specific information on their prey and solid scientific terms like predictor variables. nantucketcurrent.com/news/follow-...

In honour of "Postdoc Appreciation Week", a plug for a paper I was involved in 5 years ago (w/ @bjmjarrett.bsky.social, @muriellealund.bsky.social and others) in which we highlighted how academia could better support postdocs. There is much here that remains relevant! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New Tansley Insight in New Phytologist: The path toward a unified plant trait space: synthesizing plant functional diversity. Why a common trait space matters, how to build it, and what it enables. With @e-beccari.bsky.social doi.org/10.1111/nph.... #PlantTraits #FunctionalDiversity

That's a great idea. Outside of York in northern England (where I studied my BSc) there's a cycle-path with scale models of all the planets in the Solar System: www.york.ac.uk/physics-engi... Depicting scale like that really stirs the imagination!

Neolithic Great Auk capture ILLUSTRATED. Mind is blown.

Are you thinking of this? zoology.ubc.ca/article/new-...

Informative article on the state of the NSF GRFP this year. Here's hoping they're able to get the solicitation out soon! Here's last year's, though no telling how it could change: www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

whenever people get fatalistic about the ecological threats we're facing, i like to bring up some of these examples. we *can* do things that cause positive change! we have in the past! if we make the decisions to try and fix things, we can actually do it! we aren't in fact doomed until we give up!

Paleo professorship/Museum Curator appointment at College of Charleston. The department has a paleontology concentration so would be great for a paleontologist able to safely live in SC. www.higheredjobs.com/details.cfm?... #EarthScience #Paleobiology ⚒️ #GeoscienceJobs #geoscience

📖 🎉 Honoring the the 2025 Grady L & Barbara D Webster Structural Botany Publication Award winners: Jacob S. Suissa, Andrews A. Agbleke & William E. Friedman (Harvard) for "A bump in the node: The hydraulic implications of rhizomatous growth." Details: botany.org/home/awards/... #BSA2025AwardsBlitz

I have funding for a 2-year dry-lab postdoc to join our team @humanevouu.bsky.social 🧪 (Deadline Oct 21st) The project will utilize modern and #aDNA data from humans and sheep to study environmental adaptation (including method development and simulations). Please share! www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...

Checkout our new preprint with the @rokaslab.bsky.social!: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... doi: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

I'm excited to share with you all a conference I'm planning Oct. 10-12: Dialectical Biology Today: Legacies of Richard Lewontin. It will be hybrid in Toronto and on zoom, so please join us however you can! Register for zoom link here: ihpst.utoronto.ca/events/diale...

@gbif.org is amazing. And so is Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle (Paris), for photographing and putting online so many of their African wasps. I can sit at home in Finland, and get a first impression of how well my Ugandan wasps fit a Madagascar species whose type specimen is in France. 🧪

JURASSIC NURSE LOG. A 150 million year old Scottish conifer log shows the same processes of white fungal rot, insect boring, then growth of new seedlings seen in modern forests. nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... Research by @sandyheth.bsky.social & co-authors.

Incredibly proud and also very emotional to see this new paper published in @systbiol.bsky.social. The study was lead by Pierre Cockx, who sadly passed away in July. academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

🪻Congratulations to Dr. Pamela Diggle (University of Connecticut), the recipient of the 2025 Donald R. Kaplan Memorial Lecture Award! Learn more about this award here: botany.org/home/awards/... #BSA2025AwardsBlitz #IamaBotanist #BSAKaplanAward

Very exciting to see my first edited submission for @openpalaeo.bsky.social finally published! Check out this excellent contribution to experimental paleontology:

Aimee Picchi & Peter Sheridan Dodds celebrate the Vermont Complex Systems Institute. (Chris Danforth in the background.)

In many cases, crowding results in greater disease transmission. However, in monarch butterflies high host density can reduce per capita infection risk. This happens when caterpillars gobble up parasites on milkweed, removing them from the environment.🧪 royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

An undergrad in my #EvolutionaryMedicine class contacted me after this weeks' disease phylodynamics class, asking about what careers exist at the intersection of phylogenetics and epidemiology & what entry level jobs exist for undergrads. I told her the little I know... any suggestions?

🙂 We all make mistakes.

New York Times obituary for one of New York’s greatest characters. RIP Mark, and you’d enjoy the Romanian palinka we’re toasting in your honor tonight! www.nytimes.com/2025/09/13/s...

I think it shows the development of both language and tenured professors at that time. “This axe greedily and quickly gets into the heart of a tree trunk… because it’s shellfish! Get it? Like ‘selfish’ in our modern proto-proto-proto-European, but…”

Silky field ants tending black locust treehoppers for honeydew. Gatlinburg, Tennessee.