Kazakhstan battles shrinking Caspian Sea to keep key sectors churning https://asia.nikkei.com/spotlight/environment/climate-change/kazakhstan-battles-shrinking-caspian-sea-to-keep-key-sectors-churning

Free download of the full sheet (and past archive) at the March Mammal Madness Hub! HAPPY VALENTINES DAY! libguides.asu.edu/MarchMammalM...

How could a simple self-replicating system emerge at the origins of life? RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but existing ones are so large that their self-replication seems impossible. Could they be smaller? Excited to share our latest work in @science.org on a new small polymerase. 1/n

It’s an RNA world. RNA is posited to be the first genetic material, arising 4 billion years ago. It can store information and act as an enzyme. Eventually, it duplicated its information into a more stable form, DNA.

The deadline to apply for our Communicating Your Science workshop (15–17 April) is this Sunday! Don’t miss your chance to sharpen your science communication skills & apply now: genetics.org.uk/grants/comm-...

Mark Blaxter from @sangerinstitute.bsky.social describes the ambition of the @ebpgenome.bsky.social to #Biology26 in Switzerland

Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

A simple 45-nucleotide RNA molecule that is able to perfectly copy itself... Wow! 🧪🧬 doi.org/10.1126/scie...

TONIGHT AT 7PM ⭐ Guardians of the Small celebrates ZSL’s 200th anniversary by telling the story of how we’ve been working to save the partula snail from extinction for almost four decades. Leading the way for all that time has been long-time colleagues, and friends, Paul Pearce-Kelly and Dave Clarke

Call for Proposals for #IMCC8 now open! Have an idea for a symposium, workshop, training course, that can move marine #conservation forward? Now’s the time to shape the program with bold science, practical solutions + inclusive perspectives. Due by March 6th. Learn more: conbio.org/mini-sites/i...

This is a beautiful case of how real science happens & serious scientists work. Kudos to both set of authors: “This has been a humbling experience, but one that speaks to the self-correcting nature of the scientific endeavor.” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

More than 80% of flying fox colony wiped out as January heatwaves kill thousands of bats

Read the accompanying News & Views commentary from Martina Dal Bello 👇 "From death comes diversity" www.nature.com/articles/s41... Free to read: rdcu.be/e2fBU

Preprint alert: We adopt a cheap & rapid WGS protocol for vertebrate sized genomes, and use it to sequence nearly 1K whitefish genomes to low/med coverage for lake-wide pop genomics of adults + larvae for species assignment, habitat use, decline & selection: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #PopGen

Chromosome-scale #genomes from newly sequenced spiders & the whip scorpion, the genetic basis of spinneret emergence in spiders & the complex history & functional importance of arachnid genome #evolution www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #biodiversity #genomics

Major #ProudSupervisor moment! Congratulations Lauren, this is so very much deserved! #eDNA #whales #population-genetics

Last few days until we close the abstract submission! See you soon in Puerto Rico. www.smmconference.org/abstract-sub...

my Ph.D. student Lizzy & I contributed to this perspective on range-wide signatures of local adaptation in American Pika—her first coauthuored paper: doi.org/10.1111/mec....

🌡️ Our director, Piers Forster CBE, features in a @newscientist.com.web.brid.gy article commenting on the 1.5°C warming limit goal that transformed global climate policy and 'created a sense of urgency'. Those with a subscription can read the article here: www.newscientist.com/article/2508...

You may’ve seen coverage of a new report on the threat to national security from environmental collapse. A common response that’s got my goat is: “Look, it’s not just tree-hugging enviros saying this, it’s hard-nosed spooks!” A short thread on why this framing is bad history & bad politics🧵😡😉

New paper is out 🔓! We reconstructed the 145-myr diversity of sharks & rays using deep learning, unveiling hidden patterns: - modern diversity levels by the Cretaceous 📈 - small decline in the K/Pg 🤏 - a peak in the Eocene 🌄 - a long-term decline towards the present � www.cell.com/current-biol...

New paper out today in @natrevbiodiv.nature.com by the #GlobalSharkTrends team: Bending back the curve of shark & ray biodiversity loss; Read the paper here: rdcu.be/eZ9n9 @sfu.ca @sfubiosciences.bsky.social @earth2ocean.bsky.social

This is 𝘈𝘯𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘢 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘶𝘢𝘯𝘢. He is going to be convicted of being a vital pollinator, after being caught yellow-headed at the scene of the crime 🌼 🦇 Peruvian tailless bat 📸 Antony Rivera

GENCODE doubled human gene annotations through targeted long-read sequencing of lncRNAs across matched tissues. 17,931 new human genes added—the largest expansion since the genome was first sequenced. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.29.620654

orthogene: a Bioconductor package to easily map genes within and across hundreds of species www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #Rstats bioconductor.org/packages/ort...

✨ Let's celebrate a new BGE research paper! ✨ 🥳 K. Reichel et al. wrote a paper about the challenges on generating high-quality reference genomes. More information on our website 👉 biodiversitygenomics.eu/2026/01/21/c...

🎯 Marine sites wanted! Join eDNA Expeditions, an OBIS-led project mobilizing environmental DNA to support local marine biodiversity monitoring and increase global ocean knowledge. ☑️ Kits, training & support provided ✅ Don't miss the opportunity! ➡️ ednaexpeditions.org

🧬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 #eDNA #FAIRdata #Biodiversity #DataStandards #Science

Ice Age art! A lovely little horse figurine sculpted from mammoth tusk around 15,000 years ago! Known as ‘The Little Horse of Lourdes’ it was found in 1886 in the cave of Les Espélugues, Lourdes, Haute-Pyrénées, France. 📷 by me. #Archaeology

Hats off to whoever did this (and the beautiful model).

Not a single day in 2025 was cooler than the 1991-2020 average, on a global scale. @copernicusecmwf.bsky.social

Hey! Are you going to @wildlabs.bsky.social 's International Conservation Technology Conference in Lima, Peru? If so, we got a cool workshop you can sign up for where you will get hands-on experience building and using automated insect monitors! and we will play with data! whova.com/web/YBLOiSDZ...

Just sharing new tool written by Vincent Ranwez to view and manipulate sequences and alignments directly in your terminal github.com/ranwez-searc... Pretty convenient!

✂️ Yesterday I finally responded to @agakowalska.bsky.social’s challenge to make a collage from a single piece of packaging. I present to you a green (tea) woodpecker, made from a big Yorkshire Tea box. It was fun and I’ll be rooting through our recycling bin for more materials later on ♻️

#FossilFriday Holotype of the phocid pinniped Pliophoca etrusca, exhibited at the Natural History Museum (University of Pisa). It comes from the Pliocene of Tuscany, and was likely related to Mediterranean monk seals. It was described by Tavani (1941) and reevaluated by Berta et al. (2015).

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

Read the full statement by Dr. David Obura here: www.ipbes.net/node/95839

A must read for conservation geneticists on the utility (or not??) of using molecular diversity to predict adaptive potential 👇🏻

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.