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Thrilled to have made it to Kolkata for #Behaviour2025! It’s a full circle moment for me as my interest and career in biological research started right here at a KVPY camp I attended just about a decade ago. And grateful for the nicest conference swag! 🐅

Beautiful documentary covering research from all over the US on bee declines and conservation. Our work on the combined effects of pesticides and extreme weather on bumble bees is featured at ~45:45. Incredibly cool filmmaking by @neillosin.bsky.social and team! 🐝🥵📹🧪

ICB's #Foraging Under Fire: A #robotic flower system incorporating multimodal signaling and aversive stimuli Joshua Foley , Skylar Mathieson , David Zollinger , Melissa R L Whitaker doi.org/10.1093/icb/... #pollinators #bees #insects #research #scientists

Please share! Do you work at the intersection of plant volatiles and insect management? 🌿🪲 Submit to our special issue in Enviro Ent: Plant Volatiles in Insect Pest Management and Sustainable Agriculture. MS drafts due Aug '25, anticipated pub. Feb '26; DM for details! @entothompson.bsky.social

NEW PAPER, JUST OUT! 👀 Insects from the '70s and '80s were already collecting microplastic, decades before the term microplastic even existed. 🤯 A thread on the surprising history of this pollutant and the incredible insect larvae that helped us uncover it. 🐛 Let's dive in! 🧵👇 1/x

Happy #WorldWildlifeDay. A friendly reminder that livestock cannot replace native biodiversity, despite what you may have heard.

Our new paper, based on data from 1,705 studies, shows that pesticides are toxic to organisms they are not intended to harm, including fungi, microbes, plants, insects, & vertebrates such as ourselves. Questions the wisdom of applying over 3 million tonnes of them every year...

One of the neat things about owls is that you can see their eyeballs through their ears, if that isn’t superb I don’t know what is #SuperbOwl

Happy Year of the Snake everyone! 🐍🧧 新年快樂， 萬事如意！祝大家今年「蛇」麼都好, 「蛇」麼都順！ (+ Enjoy this stunning photo taken by Andreas Kay of a Snake-mimic caterpillar, Hemeroplanes triptolemus. flic.kr/p/FKqQA4 - cus bugs are just awesome like that 😎) #LunarNewYear #YearoftheSnake #Bugsky

We still need to figure out whether this pollen reaches any flower stigma and fertilization takes place. But this is as much as we could get from citizen science data for now 😉 Read more about all this reseach here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Excited to be heading to my first #SICB2025! I'll share my work on "Automating bumble bee tracking to study sublethal impacts of pesticides on behavior" on Mon, Jan 6 at 10:30 am in International Salon 4 as part of a complementary session to the plant-pollinator symposium 🧐🐝🌺📊

Happy Christmas Eve. Every year I inflict this upon you, one of my least popular comics ever. Enjoy!

Know any promising students interested in plant-insect chemical ecology? The Whitaker lab at ETSU has two open master's positions for the 2025-2026 academic year! Apply here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

I’ve found a ton of Instagram insect sellers who slap “sustainably sourced”, but never seem to elaborate what they mean by “sustainable”. Curious! So I checked their pages to see what I can find. This one didn’t even try to hide it. You can see labels stating origin country and collection date. 1/9

What is common knowledge in your field but shocks outsiders? Pollinator ecotoxicology edition: Not just insecticides, but also other pesticides like fungicides and herbicides can hurt bees! Even organic ones!

missing #EntSoc24 but hey there's a new #insectart mural in Madison 🦋

Since XKCD’s “Types of Scientific Paper” is making the rounds again, here’s the Entomology one I made a few years ago.

Reminder that if you ever need a meal for whatever reason and have a gurudwara(sikh temple) near you, they are obligated to give you free food if you go during the langar( free community meal) Or most times. You don't have to do anything except show up with your hair covered and say thanks after

Happy birthday to Indian botanist E.K. Janaki Ammal (1897-1984), a trailblazer for #womenInSTEM in India, expert in cytogenetics, phytogeography, coauthor Chromosomal Atlas of Plants, 1st Indian woman PhD & 1st woman in US botany PhD, environmental activist who wrote about need to 🐡🧪#histsci 🧵1/n

What are you favorite tools/resources/tips for making a poster for a scientific conference? 🌏