New TREE paper led by Jana Nickel on 'Hitchhiking of deleterious mutations within chromosomal inversions' doi.org/10.1016/j.tr... Broadly, if inversions are linked to an adaptive trait, homokaryotypes are at high frequency, and purging can reduce deleterious mutation load.....

Heidbreder et al. leveraged natural hybrids of wood ant species to highlight the underappreciated impact of Bateson-Dobzhansky-Muller incompatibility connectivity on the persistence of reproductive barriers over time. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag063 #evobio #molbio #speciation

Second preprint from my PhD! Using our whole lake transplant experiment in Alaska 🏔️ we test for assortative mating following secondary contact among divergent stickleback populations 🐟 and found the opposite of what we expected… 🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Our octopus population genetics preprint is up! This is Gabby Coffing’s final PhD chapter, and turned out pretty cool. Here’s a little explainer. 1/n

Disassortative mating in replicated secondary contact experiments in nature https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.28.721371v1

@topalwos.bsky.social et al. show that genotype imputation with a low-coverage WGS dataset showed very accurate results when over 500 samples were used and when accounting for missing data and low-frequency alleles. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag094 #evobio #molbio #compbio

Congratulations to the two winners of this year’s SSE Presidents’ Award for Outstanding Dissertation Paper, Amor Damatac II and Jan Laine! Each will present their work in award talks at virtual #Evol2026! shorturl.at/RnoBQ @journal-evo.bsky.social @evolletters.bsky.social @amordamatac.bsky.social

New preprint led by Hrushikesh Loya, me, and Simon Myers where we introduce GhostBuster! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... The idea is to find all the different ways a target individual relates to reference groups in genealogies, to "bust the ghosts" in our ancestry.

A really nice description of Roger Butlin's contribution to speciation biology in JEB by @ruimmfaria.bsky.social and colleagues. Roger is one of the good ones! doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...

Genome-wide genealogies reveal deep admixtures forming modern humans https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.17.719197v1

Complex Patterns of Hitchhiking Mutation Load Among Stickleback Populations. New paper led by Jana Nickel out in GBE @genomebiolevol.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/gbe/...

Happy to see this one out! Not only for the science, but because it was the first project we led as a group. This paper helped us establish a collaborative culture and good relationships, shaping how we want to work together in the future. I feel lucky to work with this bunch! #popgen #consgen

Looking forward to kicking off the seminar series of our special topic network on structural variants #SV in evolutionary biology. @eseb.bsky.social Join us in listening to Pr. Rieseberg on April 29

A great end to the week: One week after submitting his PhD thesis, Jan Laine found out he has been awarded the SSE Presidents' Award for Outstanding Dissertation Paper for his work on ancient stickleback genomes doi.org/10.1093/evol...

New preprint! We sequenced 175 'Alalā (Hawaiian crow) genomes to understand why >50% of eggs fail to hatch in a species recovered from just 9 individuals. What we found was a both exciting and surprising. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New postdoctoral position adverstised in ancient sedimentary DNA and palaeoecology: www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

New OA paper @royalsocietypublishing.org: What can we learn from bonobos and bottlenose dolphins about the evolution of between-group cooperation? royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article... Lovely collab with @lirsamuni.bsky.social Martin Surbeck and Richard Connor.

Hello BlueSky 🌞 my group has a large project growing arms and legs, and we've decided to graduate from post-its to a project management software (kanban or similar). Any recommendations from academics? Ideally with clear project roles, a task tracker, and as lo-fi as possible!

@ UiO masters students: Applications are now open for the field course “Use of Environmental DNA to Assess Marine Fishery and Fish-farm Health,” which will be taught in Brazil. www.forbio.uio.no/events/cours... Contact: @micahdunthorn.bsky.social if you have any questions.

Recently we're working with SNPs from whole genome assemblies to estimate ARGs. It's a pain to go from alignment files to vcf, keeping track of masked and invariant sites. So we wrote a snakemake/SLURM pipeline. Hope it's useful to others, and don't hesitate to post issues if there are problems!

David Marques was an amazing speciation genomics researcher, a passionate birder, and a wonderful friend, husband, and father. May he rest in peace. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Very excited to be advertising this project with the excellent cosupervision of Peter Mergaert through @i2bcparissaclay.bsky.social and @uniexecec.bsky.social. This position is open to international applicants and will involve stints in both Penryn UK and Paris France. Please share! Apply: adum.fr

Join the ESEB STN online seminar on March 3 at 5pm CET featuring early career researchers discussing speciation. Q&A with Mark Ravinet after talks. More info: https://speciation-network.pages.ist.ac.at/ #conference

2 PhD & 1 postdoc available at BioM in Oslo www.uio.no/english/rese... Interdisciplinary methods to model and govern biodiversity under uncertainty. Re-post widely! Work with statistical ecologists Olav Skarpaas (Natural History Museum Oslo @uio.no) @t-ergon.bsky.social

UPDATE: The application period for these (amazing, fun, really cool!) sedaDNA PhD positions in our group is March 2-27, but we will start screening applications after the first week. If you are interested, please try to submit *between March 2nd and 8th!* Not by March 1st as I originally wrote..

New paper on age-related reproductive tactics & success in humpback whales, published in Current Biology.🐳🧬 doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... #marmam @seamammalresearch.bsky.social @uniofstandrews.bsky.social @ellengarland.bsky.social @emma-carroll.bsky.social @clairenea.bsky.social @lrendell.bsky.social 1/7

Finally published! We first uploaded this preprint in 2022 but dropped it after frustrating reviews. It was well received and cited, motivating us to revisit it. We added new content, including simulations and a proof-of-concept genomic green status assessment. #consgen #popgen #PopulationGenomics

Our stellar 🤩 list of invited speakers #ExE2026: @danielbolnick.bsky.social Trine Bilde, Dan Nussey, @sevans.bsky.social @andrewfoote.bsky.social @cleliagasparini.bsky.social Sarah Knowles, @liamlachs.bsky.social, Lizy Mittell, @keesvanoers.bsky.social, Alex Popadopolous & Katja Räsänen. evoxeco.uk

Excited for this. Teaching popgen is one of my favourite parts of my job and I've wondered about doing an online version of the class for sometime. Teaming up with @jrossibarra.bsky.social to do this is wonderful.

Proud supervisor moment. The last chapter of @annaselbmann.bsky.social PhD is now published, well done Anna!! 👏👏 Find out more👇

Join us Sat, Feb 7 for a FREE virtual book launch of 'The Evolution of Cetacean Societies'. Live Q&A + cover BTS. 🕕 18:00 GMT / 10am PT 🎟️ Free with registration 🔗 www.eventbrite.com/e/book-launc...

I'll be talking about the use of genomic data for inferring and forecasting the spread of invasive pests 🐛 in conversation with Renata Retkute, who uses epidemiological models to tackle the same problem. This Friday at 13:30, David Attenborough Building & online www.tickettailor.com/events/globa...

Do you like your learned society and what it does for you and your research community? Then publish in their journal! This paper by @nicolasgaltier.bsky.social & Co shows that it will only do good, and comes with a handy database of academy-friendly journals. 👇

Last chance to apply - the deadline is tomorrow!

New paper on the social learning of bubble net feeding by humpbacks in British Columbia, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B 🐋 royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article... #marmam @bcwhales.bsky.social @seamammalresearch.bsky.social @lrendell.bsky.social @uniofstandrews.bsky.social [1/5]

If you haven't already done so, do fill out this EU public consultation about the future of the European Research Area. Everything that matters to us is in there - funding, employment stability, AI regulations, open science, etc. ec.europa.eu/info/law/bet...

We developed/optimised the protocol to enrich low aDNA content libraries using Twist panels. 🎣🧬👩‍🔬 #aDNA #Labwork

In a new GBE Review, @david-peede.bsky.social et al. overview the SMC model and extensions, discuss examples of discoveries made with the help of SMC-based inference, and comment on the assumptions, benefits, and drawbacks of various methods. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/... #genome #evolution #compbio

Musings on museomics (doi.org/10.1073/pnas...) in a commentary on Clark et al. (doi.org/10.1073/pnas...) who compared genomes of museum specimens of ponyfish collected in 1908, with samples collected in 2018, spanning anthropogenic habitat change. They found declines in genetic diversity and Ne.

Please repost: 🚨Field assistant position 🐧 We offer a 14-months field assistant position through the French Polar Institute to work on king penguin ecophysiology and behavioral ecology. Requirements: EU citizen < 30yo having experience with harsh fieldwork & wild bird/mammal handling/sampling.

Apply for Sepkoski Grants $1000 USD if you are a paleontologist from Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Central and South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia www.paleosoc.org/sepkoski-gra... deadline March 1 @paleosoc.bsky.social

This story is heartbreaking. Brenna Henn is a wonderful scientist, and the work their lab does is truly insightful. Anger and rage… www.nytimes.com/2026/01/02/s...

A new #ScienceAdvances study shows that commercial whaling in the Southern Ocean over the past century reduced the genetic diversity—and possibly the evolutionary fitness—of the region’s humpback whales. https://scim.ag/4anxPpM

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

demografr: A toolkit for simulation-based inference in population genetics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.18.694482v1

@cademirch.bsky.social @erikenbody.bsky.social TB Sackton & @russcd.bsky.social introduce Callable Loci And More (clam), a tool that leverages callable loci to accurately estimate population genetic statistics (π, dxy, and FST). 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf282 #evobio #molbio #compbio

🐬 Can friendship slow ageing? In wild bottlenose dolphins, strong social relationships aren’t just important for social life — they may actually influence biological ageing. @liviagerber.bsky.social #ScienceCommunication #MarineMammals #Ageing #MAVELab www.nature.com/articles/s42...

📢 #PhD opportunity! Interested in #eDNA and protecting our #rivers? We are recruiting a PhD researcher to tackle a very topical challenge: Empowering citizen scientists with an eDNA toolbox to safeguard #freshwater fishes. Deadline: January 16th 2026. #PhDPosition #CardiffUniversity bit.ly/49bl4gO

Our latest preprint revisits the classic model of mutation-selection balance. Do human recessive genes fit Haldane's 100-year old model? This work is by the wonderful @jonj-udd.bsky.social, and co-mentored by @jeffspence.github.io www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...