New paper out of our team at Defenders of Wildlife today in Oryx on the implications of nonhuman animal culture on conservation: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... 🌎

Animals don’t necessarily avoid human structures, but they do avoid us… well, apart from a couple of deer in Pennsylvania apparently. This study looking at animal movements during Covid is certainly interesting! 🌍🧪 besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Another human wildlife conflict being "solved' by killing the wildlife. Removing from a population means another will take its place. It's about changing the cost/ benefit of baboon house raiding. It won't change unless human behaviour and attitudes change. 🧪🌍

Really nice paper from @tiff-ki.bsky.social & co. shows no overall decline in butterfly species richness in Sulawesi over 166 yrs, but changing communities with endemics & forest specialists declining. Short-term trends unreliable measures of long term. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... 🌏

Large carnivore recovery in Yellowstone is often quoted to show ‘large trophic cascades’. Yet the evidence is far more complex, and underscores the importance of analytical rigor and ecological context in evaluating the consequences of large carnivore recovery. 🌍🧪

Can anyone help me identify this tiny little mystery? Found in Cambridgeshire in the U.K. within a pine forest 🍄 #fungifriends

In the presence of lions, other species forage during hotter parts of the day. “Such a trade-off may become increasingly costly under the hotter and drier conditions predicted to become more prevalent as a result of climate change” 🌍🧪

Wood anemones (Anemonoides nemorosa) are some of the first spring flowers. They’re an indicator of ancient woodland as it grows very slowly via rhizomes – horizontal underground stems. The flowers close up at night which folklore says is because faeries hide from the dark or bad weather in them

Animal movements and behaviour are different in human dominated landscapes 🐺🐻🌳 Behaviours studied in less human impacted systems are often applied to novel ecosystems, but species interactions can be very different when humans are around 🌍🧪

Fear of snakes leads many people to kill them on sight without knowing if they actually pose any danger 🐍 This could lead to a significant increase in the number of snake species becoming threatened as human populations increase 🧪🌍

New research suggests that bottom trawling stirs up large amounts of carbon from the seabed and releases 55-60% of this carbon into the atmosphere 🌎 This is nearly 2x the annual diesel emissions of the entire global fishing fleet of about 4 million vessels, @elizabethalberts.bsky.social reports:

For all interested in the tipping point of the Atlantic overturning circulation : here's Henk Dijkstra's recent talk. The tipping point has been confirmed in a state-of-art climate model, and a novel early warning indicator suggests we're heading there. www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDZp...

New research. 🧪🌎 We introduce the concept of the 'sentinel node' as a landscape connectivity indicator for Protected Area networks, and demonstrate with a case study in Ontario. Out today in PeerJ peerj.com/articles/163...

This is an interesting paper of interest and relevance for anyone using models to inform environmental decision-making 🌎: Poorly designed biodiversity loss-gain models facilitate biodiversity loss in New Zealand newzealandecology.org/nzje/3548

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New paper using Species distribution models to generate relative abundance information of six wild felids inhabiting territories in Mexico that are inaccessible or politically unstable 🐆🧪🌍 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Unknown unknowns: "The primary component of uncertainty may reside not in what is reported (the 'known unknowns'...) but in what is not reported, either because it was unflattering or because it was never explored in the first place (Donald Rumsfeld’s 'unknown unknowns')." #metasci #philsci 🧪

Are you an R user who is interested in learning Python? This blog from Rebecca Barter introduces Python from an R user's perspective 🧪 www.rebeccabarter.com/blog/2023-09...

A study found that sharing memes of unappealing animals (in this case, the proboscis monkey) significantly increased public interest in the species and people's reported willingness to donate money towards their conservation. 🧪 🌍

Following the devastating Morocco earthquake, this article highlights the geopolitic elements of Disaster Risk Reduction: 🧪⚒️#AcademicSky #Geography www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-a...

Here it is! >9000 word essay I've been working on for months with Siddhartha Haria and Rachel Glennerster: The century-spanning history of malaria vaccine development; what went wrong; major funding struggles; the need for AMCs. worksinprogress.co/issue/why-we...

A brief sketch of the history of the magnet, magnetism, and the magnetic compass from its beginnings to the late sixteenth century #histsci #histtech thonyc.wordpress.com/2023/09/06/m...

Scientist? ✔️ New to BlueSky? ✔️ Wanna get your posts seen by people in your field? ✔️ Check out this list of 42 science-related feeds 👇 You can add specific feeds to your timeline to see their posts, and you can include your own posts in a feed by including a feed-specific tag. #AcademicSky 🧪

New paper considers how to formulate hypotheses, including how broad or narrow a hypothesis should be (i.e., its "scope"). Open access: doi.org/10.1098/rsos... Few quotes follow 👉 #MetaSci #PhilSci 🧪

When did frogs first evolve?? 🐸 It's long been thought that they first appeared at the end of the Triassic, but researchers have now created the most detailed frog family tree ever and found that they probably appeared 30 million years later in the Jurassic! 🧪 www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/new...

Are you a STEM professional (including grad students, obviously)? Would you be willing to write 4 personal letters to a grade school student about life in STEM, to encourage and inspire them? This program needs more pen-pal volunteers this year! It’s so much fun! prescientist.org

Can barnacles help find flight MH370? Barnacles found on the recovered debris could be used to reconstruct drift patterns by combining the barnacles shell chemical composition and growth patterns, along side oceanographic modelling 🌍🧪

“hey what should we call our new space laser project?” scientist who has never been social media once: “idk call it illuminati”

Lectures from my short course, "Very Little Evolutionary Game Theory". https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDcUM9US4XdPtHR9OZdjhYKVMv_RR42yk Topics: 1. Evolution of conflict 2. Evol of cooperation 3. Evol of relationships 4. Evol of Families 5. Evol of societies Watch at x2 for maximum effect!

It seems to me that the time is ripe for a Bluesky thread about how—and maybe even why—to befriend crows. (1/n)

Welcome to BlueSky! Here's a little intro for scientists that @steveharoz.com and I put together: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aPddaH-d7N53jZm1S3vUrfjVVy5nykPQz6qd7QpPCQE 🧪 #AcademicSky #WomenInSTEM

Original post by @MRhelmus Big data on invasive species spread are rare. @SebaDeBona developed a framework to make such data open access. This Rstats package has >600,000 spotted lanternfly occurrences. Use for research and teaching. 🧪🌍 https://neobiota.pensoft.net/article/101471/list/11/

Recently moved to a terraced house on a main road. After removing the fake grass in the tiny front 'garden', I dug a hole, put a tub in it and filled it with water. Been less than week but there is a frog! 🐸 as well as invert friends! But have I accidentally built a bit of an ecological trap? 🌍

Alan Turing devised a test to assess if a machine could be classified as intelligent. However Weizenbaum suggested that a test should instead assess the public value of AI, evaluating them according to their real-world implications rather than their proponents’ claims or perceived intelligence. 🧪

My latest paper (& 1st lead author paper) was released earlier this week on applying the CARE Principles of Indigenous Data Governance in ecology and biodiversity data 🥳🥳 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-023-02161-2

“Effective regulation of AI needs grounded science that investigates real harms, not glorified press releases about existential risks”

Fences can impact across ecological scales. Can virtual fences reduce impacts, cost effectively, and benefit farmers? While facilitating rotational grazing, the infrastructure required has environmental costs elsewhere + removing old fencing can be labour intensive and might need public funding. 🌎🧪

How many of us use Jupyter Notebooks? This is a long, but important read on how to make our notebooks more accessible to blind and visually impaired people. Lots of good recommendations, not just with infrastructure, but authoring practices in here. Pass it on. 🧪🔭

Check out the amazing scales on this springtail! Did you know, springtail scales such as these used to be prized test subjects to assess the optical quality of early microscopes? (Species: Lepidocyrtus sp., possibly submontanus)