How are Pacific NW mountain birds responding to climate change? I got up at 4:00 am for a month to find out. but first the backstory, or "how I spent seven years telling everyone this project wasn't possible" new paper here: esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Maybe Duke should spend less money on higher administration and a football coach who no longer works there... and use the money for basic research, including an herbarium. Some pretty shocking salaries on this list, including from people claiming the Uni lacks $. dukechronicle.com/article/duke...

Applications are currently being accepted for UBC's ✨️ Biodiversity Postdoctoral Fellowship ✨️ (two positions!!), due Jan. 15 Please share far and wide 🚀 (See thread)

TWO curatorial positions at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, ON, Canada. Curator of Birds, and Curator of Plants and Sustainability... please pass the word and amplify! royalontariomuseum.applytojob.com/apply/XBR2Yc... & royalontariomuseum.applytojob.com/apply/Sf2iAO...

Amazing profile of the new facilities at @ksrjokershill.bsky.social designed by Montgomery Sisam Architects. azuremagazine.com/article/koff...

I had such fun thinking, reading and writing this Tansley Review on #arbuscular #mycorrhizal #fungal mycelia. We need a more fungal-centric view to better understand not only the AM fungi, but also their many ecological roles. @newphyt.bsky.social 🔗 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/DHGB3S....

"The foundation for our current understanding of how phenotypic evolution operates in natural populations was laid by Lande (1976, 1979, 1982) and Lande & Arnold (1983)." 1. What a topic sentence from Vriend et al.: academic.oup.com/evolut/artic... 2. What a collection of papers in a 7 year span!

Sharing our new paper, "Distinct haplotypes and reversed dominance at a single-gene balanced polymorphism controlling heterodichogamy in two genera of wingnuts". Genomics & evolution of a mating type system involving two morphs with alternating sexes in walnut relatives www.cell.com/current-biol...

Congratulations to @jeffgroh.bsky.social on the publication of his paper on an ancient balanced polymorphisms controlling heterodichogamy in two genera of wingnuts. The paper shows the putative turnover & reversal of dominance of a mating type polymorphism www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

My only quibble is that @ent3c.bsky.social is far too kind when noting that twin studies "offer little insight." I think @sashagusevposts.bsky.social had it right when he wrote "twin heritability models can tell you whatever you want to hear."

Check out our new Tansley review on climate, plants, and microbes! I enjoyed working with a team of friendly and knowledgeable scientists. @meafkhami.bsky.social @kerricrawford.bsky.social @aclassen.bsky.social @johnstinchcombe.bsky.social @damianmicroeco.bsky.social doi.org/10.1111/nph....

Cool stuff, featuring our EEB colleague Shelby Riskin: www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

The genomic response to drought across spatiotemporal scales in Amaranthus tuberculatus https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.02.679894v1

New paper by former MSc student @christeinecke.bsky.social! ⭐ A behemoth effort to apply artificial selection on clonal reproduction in #Mimulus guttatus. We show that clonality evolves quickly, but not symmetrically in both directions, and multivariate life history traits are altered too! 🧪🌾

Fun to synthesize some exciting future directions for spatiotemporal genomics in this Tansley perspective. Check er out!

A stunning day to be in the field in Southern Ontario today, at the Koffler Scientific Reserve, @ksrjokershill.bsky.social

High-throughput developmental assay of cold tolerance in Caenorhabditis elegans https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.14.676146v1

Congrats to Yash Singhal, a new grad student @utoronto.ca in EEB.

Congrats to Dr. Meng Yuan, who defended her PhD on the genome-wide potential for ploidy & sexual conflict in plants! Many thanks to @judithmank.bsky.social for serving as her external examiner. A fun collaboration w/ @stepheniwright.bsky.social and also @stuartmcdaniel.bsky.social for a paper!

MSc position in my lab. Come study the evolutionary & behavioural ecology of insects! @stfx-university.bsky.social

I am recruiting a PhD student this application cycle to explore questions on the evolution of morphological variation and phylogenetics. I'm especially seeking folks interested in fossil marine inverts. Please reach out to me if interested! Portal opens Nov. 1 eeb.utoronto.ca/education/gr...

Hmm... Since the test has only existed since 1992, "worst scores since 1992" as teased at the top of the article really means "worst scores in the history of the test." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/09/u...

Toronto in a nutshell.

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JOB ALERT 🚨 We are hiring TWO principal investigators in cell, molecular, systems, or chemical biology in Toronto, Canada at @sinaihealth.bsky.social. We provide a generous startup, fully funded salary and academic appointment at U of Toronto. www.nature.com/naturecareer... Please repost!

Starbucks’ CEO made 6,666x more than the company's median employee in 2024. This was the widest CEO-to-Worker pay gap in the entire S&P 500. Remember this before you order your next pumpkin spice latte.

Please share broadly: I am looking for a postdoctoral fellow to work on a collaborative project on the temporal population genomics of invasive Capeweed (using contemporary and herbarium genomics), with ‪‪@shaky-dingo.bsky.social‬ and colleagues

I'm hiring a postdoc to work in theoretical / computational phylogenomics! More info at tinyurl.com/63hb5ew8. Please share!

and, @stuartmcdaniel.bsky.social ! My favorite part of this paper: the collaboration started after I sent Meng a biorxiv preprint from Stuart's lab.. She contacted him with questions about that work, and the collaboration grew from there.

Sadly, I'll be missing #ESEB2025 because of the labor disruption affecting @aircanada.bsky.social ... Flight attendants went on strike as of last night, and my outbound flight was cancelled this arvo despite the Feds ordering binding arbitration to send parties back to work.

New work from Josephs lab grad student Asia Hightower @puffballove.bsky.social w/ Dan Chitwood & many many others on general, flexible methods for analyzing leaf shape variation www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Come check out my presentation on what community properties can predict microbiome resistance to drought today! #ESA2025 COS 015 BCC 336 3:30-5:00

Post promotion, I quit tracking conference presentations, titles of seminars, run of the mill service, etc. OOPS! You'll eventually run into someone who cares what year you were on Grad Admissions or gave an SSE talk. Asking people to track their years on the seminar committee is really stupid.

Hey #Botany2025 folks -- Asia Hightower @puffballove.bsky.social will be talking about leaf shape G x E x Development in Capsella bursa-pastoris. Tuesday Jul 29 at 9:15 in Mesquite B!!

Please read this great piece by @graphicmatt.com about privatizing city services. It's super relevant to Toronto residents, but applies to any city that has outsourced public services since the 1990s. Privatization always ends up costing more. (Paging #healthcare) www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...

New preprint! We investigated the evolution of supergenes and mechanisms underlying distyly in Linum species that diverged ca 33 Mya. 1/8 bsky.app/profile/bior...

🚨 TT JOB ALERT 🚨 Evolutionary Ecology Williams College

In an especially cruel twist of fate, my email has glitched into this state where I can only receive but not send messages. On the one hand: built in excuse for not replying. On the other hand: I would soooo much prefer the opposite.

Utah penstemon (Plantaginaceae: Penstemon utahensis) inhabits dry areas of the southwestern US. The bright tubular flowers provide nectar for hummingbirds, who are the primary pollinators. Capitol Reef National Park, Utah, 11 Apr 2014.

Model organism communities are fantastic. Good work, "Drosophilists"! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

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I wrote a little bit about a cool recent paper looking at heritability estimates from very large registry data, and how we still really don't understand why outcomes track in families. A short 🧵:

A great day for field work.

Prettiest view on campus! @utoronto.ca

I’ll be at #CSEE2025 talking about patterns of collaboration in the Canadian eco/evo research community 🇨🇦 If you’re a eco/evo prof in Canada, odds are you were one of my data points… so come check it out! Wednesday - 4:30 - Science in action @csee-sceemtgs.bsky.social

Hey #CSEE2025 interested in flowers, natural selection, urbanization or any combination of the three? I’m presenting results of my thesis at 11am today in the urban ecology session (Rivière Coaticook)

The Meselson and Stahl experiment demonstrated in 1958 that DNA replicated semi-conservatively. Meaning, each of the two strands of DNA serves as a template for a new copy to made of the complementary strand. Foundational finding, elegant experimental design.

Repeated signatures of balancing selection in small and large populations of guppies (Poecilia reticulata) https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.12.659363v1

🚨 My first first-authored paper is out on bioRxiv! 🌆🏵️ Urbanization changed the pollinator community and flower morphology of Impatiens capensis. 🐝 The size of bumblebees—the main pollinators—correlated with sepal size, driving selection for larger sepals in urban populations. 🧵 More below ⬇️

The FLC gene helps determine #FloweringTime variation in #Arabidopsis. Analysis of FLC mutants across 62 natural #genetic backgrounds by @plantevolution.bsky.social shows how #PanGenetics analysis of hub genes can reveal the extent of their broader genetic network @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/3ZkZNvV