Happy New Year to our community – wishing you all a positive and successful year ahead 🎉 As we reflect on a great year, we look ahead with excitement to the opportunities 2026 will bring 🌟

With the coming of the holiday season and the beginning of #InverteFest, we wanted to wish our followers Happy Holidays and highlight some reindeer parasites in the process!

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

I've slowly been reformatting notes from my population and conservation genetics course at Montana State University into a web book—a rough draft is now live here: elinck.org/popgen_conge...

If functional constraints limit the realm of possibilities in terms of allowed #gene evolutionary trajectories then recurring patterns should be observable for genes evolving under similar constraints academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Proud to have my photo essay out in the publication Current Conservation. I got really into photography during my PhD including using a film camera. I hope it conveys some of the visual experience of being in a bird market and the sense of place. Enjoy 🐦 www.currentconservation.org/visual-stori...

📖 Published📖 In our new application paper, Mestre-Tomás introduce GLOSSA, an open-source R package and Shiny application designed to make marine species distribution modelling more accessible 🌍 🧪 Read more here 👇 buff.ly/W3cemFv

🧬Do you work with eDNA—sampling, analysis, publishing, or storage? Help shape the eDNAqua-Plan Technical Blueprint & Roadmap! ⏱️ 10–30 min 📅 Open until 12/02/2026 👉 Survey: tinyurl.com/5n7phwdd ℹ️ More info: ednaquaplan.com/get-involved/ #eDNA #FAIRdata #Biodiversity #DataStandards #Science

Thousands of scientific references synthesized into one assessment. The IPBES #BizBiodiversity report will provide decision-makers with critical insights to measure business dependencies and impacts on biodiversity and nature's contributions to people. 💡 https://ipbes.canto.de/b/HJAGG#BizBiodiversity #IPBES12

How should the discipline of ecology and the community of ecologists respond to the ecological crisis? Is it time that these were put on something more akin to an emergency footing? www.cell.com/action/showP...

🦇 Two PhD positions available on our new ARC Discovery Grant: "From Diversity to Disease: Viral Ecology, Evolution and Persistence in Bats" The project will investigate how viral diversity evolves and persists, with a particular focus on recently discovered henipaviruses in Australian flying foxes.

The call for abstracts for #ECCB26 is now open! Researchers, policymakers + practitioners are invited to submit their abstracts for oral presentations, posters, or speed talks by 15 Feb, 2026. We hope to see you in Leiden! #conservation #networking #conference

Congratulations to Dr Charlotte Clay who has passed her viva with flying colours and very minor corrections! 🪸🎉

Excited to launch the new improved Reproducible Code guide from @britishecologicalsociety.org @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social FREE online here! www.britishecologicalsociety.org//wp-content/... Amazing work by some very talented ECRs. We hope it’s useful!

New @jappliedecology.bsky.social paper: SMRU researchers @mattidcarter.bsky.social & @djfrussell.bsky.social led a large collaborative team to map the distribution of grey and harbour seals at sea across the Northwest European Shelf 🦭 besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

🚨🐭🦠 New preprint! Monitoring wildlife disease is expensive, so we need to be smart about where we sample to get as much useful info as possible. We show how SDMs can guide adaptive sampling for zoonotic disease surveillance, using case studies in rodents.

For #NationalMonkeyDay 🐒: There are a lot of cute #monkeys in #JapaneseArt but this one may be the cutest 🥰 Kanō Sansetsu (Japan,1589-1651） 猿猴図（えんこうず) Monkey Figure (Enkozu), 17th c. Ink on scroll Tokyo National Museum commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pa...

When reviewers meet at a conference the person whose paper they just rejected

#Gig 14 of the year, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Leeds O2 Academy, Saturday 13th December. Howl 20th anniversary tour. Just wow... favourite show of the year.

996!

Foraging ecology drives viral community structure in New Zealand's aquatic birds www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Join the "Introduction to Population Genomics" online course from March 16-20, 2026. Learn key concepts and methods. For details and registration, visit https://www.physalia-courses.org/courses-workshops/population-genomics/. #course

When your entire PhD depends on dry ice, FedEx, and clearing customs

🚀 Big news in genome annotation! The latest Nature Methods paper presents Helixer. Developed as part of the @denbi.bsky.social infrastructure, Helixer makes high-quality genome annotations more accessible and efficient for the community. 🔗 nature.com/articles/s41592-025-02939-1

@debbiemleigh.bsky.social and I are inviting abstracts for our symposium S05 showcasing research at the interface of molecular evolution, population genomics, and biodiversity monitoring.

Ancient forest 🌳 in the Northern of Spain

A new study found that a majority of the total, combined range of land-dwelling carnivores falls outside of land designated for habitat conservation. Researchers determined that Indigenous lands are particularly important for supporting carnivore ranges.

Accurate Runs of Homozygosity Estimation From Low Coverage Genome Sequences in Non-Model Species #popgen #consgen doi.org/10.1111/1755...

Yesterday, we sent this message to the @viralemergence.org team, bringing a (hopefully temporary) end to our project three years into what started as a decade of planned work. /1

Our Editorial for our upcoming special issue in Molecular Ecology: Conservation Genomics—Making a Difference onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Cornetto v0.2.0 is now released for using programmable selective nanopore sequencing for genome assembly. GitHub: github.com/hasindu2008/... Paper: nature.com/articles/s41... Datasets: hasindu2008.github.io/cornetto/doc... ... and a banner made by Ira Deveson referring to ‘no boring bits’.

Not to mention… we just had our 4th ever sighting of Haliphron in over 35 years (7000+ ROV dives). Its arms were closed up but we followed it until we could see that it was again holding a jellyfish… m.youtube.com/watch?v=4_lt... See also: www.nature.com/articles/sre...

Check out our cover article by @timjanicke.bsky.social and colleagues about the role of sexual selection in animal speciation. academic.oup.com/evlett/artic.... The beautiful illustration is by Katharina Bóth.

Solar-powered LED buoys developed by U.S. researchers and Gulf of California fishers cut sea turtle bycatch by 63%. The rechargeable lights last days without sun and help turtles see gill nets. Co-designed with fishing communities, the tech could hit commercial production in 2–3 years.

This is the Sunburst Candy Spider from Thailand. Not AI (sucks to have to declare this). Very real and had been on my wish list for a long time. The taxonomic placement is unclear, so we are leaving it at Cyrtarachninae.

Girl on a space hopper, 1971, Byker series, Newwcastle, UK, by Finnish photographer Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen #womensart #FridayFeeling

(1/5)Thrilled to announce our paper on #ProjectPsyche is out! 🦋We describe how we’ve generated 1000+ high-quality genomes for European Lepidoptera, providing an unprecedented resource for biodiversity, conservation, and evolutionary research. #Genomics #Biodiversity www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

Happy to share our new publication exploring how eDNA fits into estuarine ecological indices.Our results show why it’s not a simple swap—and what needs to change. #eDNA #environmentalDNA @drangelborja.bsky.social @naiarare.bsky.social @azti.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

So happy to announce our new preprint, “A geothermal amoeba sets a new upper temperature limit for eukaryotes.” We cultured a novel amoeba from Lassen Volcanic NP (CA, USA) that divides at 63°C (145°F) 🔥 - a new record for euk growth! #protistsonsky 🧵

The November 2025 issue of Environmental Humanities is out now! Check it out for all the lastest #envhum scholarship read.dukeupress.edu/environmenta... Cover image: A Marshall Islands navigation chart collected by Thomas William Smillie in 1899. Smithsonian Institution Archives.

Real conservation action, guided by genomes! @ergabiodiv.bsky.social @biogeneurope.bsky.social Why go beyond the reference genome? Because population genomics reveals hidden risks — low diversity, genetic drift, and declining gene flow. 🌍 Wetlands are disappearing… and so is genetic diversity.

Unsurprisingly, the suspected cases of HPAI H5N1 in elephant seals on Australia's subAntarctic island (Heard Island) have been confirmed. 👉 minister.agriculture.gov.au/collins/medi...

#CFP: "The Ocean of Life. Humanities and the Ocean" International seminar, 3 July 2026, University of the Ryukus, Japan. Deadline for submissions: 19 December 2025 Info: international-seminar-ocean.my.canva.site #envhum #envhist #ecolit #bluehumanities

Half the breeding population of Elephant Seals on South Georgia lost to H5N1 (bird flu). The impact this will have on the species, the local food web, and even ocean fertilization is hard to comprehend.

Are you an ecologist? Do you collect biodiversity data for your role in a charity, research, a government body, or a specialist organisation? Read on for a thread that might interest you… 🧵 [1/6] #biodiversity #forests #darkextinction #ecology #research

when leaving comments on an early draft of Dr @sicilyfiennes.bsky.social amazing thesis, I described a sentence in it as “so good it should be embroidered on a tea towel”. As a end-of-PhD present, they gifted me this amazing tea towel, with that sentence embroidered on it! Best academic gift ever!

PhD tea towels!!!! Thank you to my amazing supervisors @katatrepsis.bsky.social, @georgeholmes.bsky.social & Chris Birchall. And thank you to Freddy of Dreadful Threads in Leeds for producing :)

📢 Save the dates Join @biodiversa.eu, @gbif.org @marco-bolo.bsky.social, @bioagora.eu and #AllianceForNature in Montpellier, France for the new European conference dedicated to advancing biodiversity monitoring - #BioMonWeek2026! 📅 4–8 May 2026 📍 Montpellier, France More information coming soon 👀

#Gig 13 for the year. English Teacher, sold out home town show at Leeds O2 Academy.