Need a break from EVERYTHING?? Come join our free public talk this evening, where NYU professor Dr. Samuel Church will tell us all about his hunt for new blue bottle (man-o-war) species 🪼🧪🌊🦑 7:30 PM (EST) Zoom link: u-tokyo-ac-jp.zoom.us/j/8337406906... Meeting ID: 833 7406 9068 Passcode: 430292

Applications are now open for the 2026 Workshop on Molecular Evolution (MOLE)! www.mbl.edu/education/ad... Claudia Solis-Lemus and I will be holding an informational session on Zoom next Wed (1/21) from 10:30-11:30 AM Central for those interested: lsu.zoom.us/j/4968115684 Deadline to apply: 1/26

Our eLetter github.com/caseywdunn/s... responding to a recent Science paper was just posted. The paper found more genes with consistent support for sponge-sister than ctenophore-sister. We found several technical issues that, when corrected, reverse the conclusions and recover ctenophore-sister.

The Church Evolution Lab (CEL@NYU) is hiring a postdoc! We have several new projects to study the genomic basis of biodiversity in model clades – especially Hawaiian Drosophila. apply.interfolio.com/179354 Come join our new group, you can study bugs and live in NYC! Feel free to share widely!

It was amazing to be part of this cool natural history project led by @patrickmckenzie.bsky.social, and I’m so happy I can now say I have worked on plants!

Our NY area population genetics meeting is back and "upgraded", as Simons Foundation @simonsfoundation.org generously agreed to host. Please save the date: March 9, 2026. Look forward to seeing many of you from NY and beyond.

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...

Still a few days left to apply for this Assistant Professor position in our department at NYU: apply.interfolio.com/175592 Please pass the word around, if you know of someone at the interface of ecology, evolution, and disease!

C. elegans is a real animal and we set out to understand how it comes to have its distinctive biogeography. Its ancestral center of diversity is in the higher elevation forests of Hawaii. Its closest relatives are spread across east Asia. Did they travel from Asia? [Preprint 🧵]

The Church Evolution Laboratory (CEL@NYU) will be official as of Sep 1st: shchurch.github.io. We are recruiting at all levels, including a postdoc to work on evolutionary patterns and processes via comparative genomics in Hawaiian Drosophila. Please share widely!

Such cool work by @rbabedon.bsky.social! These results came from his awesome senior thesis on Atlantic man-o-war dispersal. He found iNat (@inaturalist.bsky.social) records of young colonies, they look like tiny living bubbles before they grow into the sailing giants we sometimes see further North

Check out our preprint 🧪 on the origin & dispersal dynamics of a sailing ⛵ #siphonophore! We use #iNaturalist and particle tracking simulations to show that juvenile man o' war surface in the Gulf of Mexico & Straits of FL and disperse rapidly along the Gulf Stream 🌊 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A big blow to All of Science, not just Harvard, not just the Fly community, not just Genetics. All of Science. Turbocharge was just switched off. Flies gave us so many insights.

Marine biodiversity: Gone with the wind? Our dispatch out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social New research shows that wind and currents act as invisible barriers, reshaping our view of ocean connectivity. 🌊🪼 authors.elsevier.com/a/1lYLj3QW8S... @iramaegele.bsky.social @msarscentre.bsky.social

Wish I could be at #Evol2025 this year! I’ll be starting a new lab at NYU this fall, and will be recruiting at all levels. Please spread the word if you know anyone who wants to work on evo. genomics, phylogenies, and comparative development of inverts (like Hawaiian Drosophila!) shchurch.github.io

Excited to share our study on sailing siphonophores, AKA bluebottles or man-o'-war! 🌊 we received hundreds of samples from scientists around the world, part of a huge effort to sequence genomes and test for multiple species 🧬 out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... 🦑🧪📌

New preprint out today! A really fun collaboration with @shchurch.bsky.social and Robin Hopkins in which we study flower color variation in Monarda fistulosa using iNaturalist data. We process >40,000 images and use them to phenotype flower color in >16,000 observations: doi.org/10.1101/2025...