Can species reintroductions harm biodiversity rather than help it? Are we using reintroductions as a distraction from the real drivers of our nature crisis? Listen to my conversation with the one and only @alexanderlees.bsky.social 🌍🦤🧪🪶 ➡️ pod.fo/e/32fae6

An Intergeneric Hybrid Between Historically Isolated Temperate and Tropical Jays Following Recent Range Expansion | doi.org/10.1002/ece3... | Ecology and Evolution | #ornithology 🪶

How to find Mogulones crucifer: The weevil is native to Europe/West Asia, but has been introduced to North America to control its host (Cynoglossum officinale; Hound's Tongue) which is invasive there.

Crazy discovery in ants 🤯🐜 One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants | Nature www.nature.com/articles/s41... "Males from the same mother exhibit distinct genomes and morphologies, as they belong to species that diverged over 5 million years ago."

If you want to identify, well, anything, I recommend this post from @weevil-see.bsky.social. His choice of weevils to illustrate it is of course excellent, but it applies to everything from mushrooms to marsupials. This is how you can be a good identifier of things. [Link contains spider]

Top film. The smartest look at this subject I've ever seen. Also funny and sweary. youtu.be/zl-wAqplQAo?...

Thought I'd post something about separating Nysius senecionis and graminicola, as both are now widespread. The features to focus on are the extent of the matt field of the evaporatory area (the brown bit) and the length of the 1st hind tarsal segment relative to the 2nd and 3rd.

At #EOU2025 @eounion.bsky.social conference next week, we'll show new evidence implicating forestry in declines of British Marsh Tits during the era of woodland conversion in 1950/60s-1980s. This was period of steepest decline in Marsh Tits. Why? What was going on back then? #ornithology 1/5

We just published a new issue of #BritishandIrishBotany, our Open Access online journal. 7 papers for you to enjoy inc Lady's-slipper orchid reintroductions; variation in Restharrows; a new Comfrey hybrid for UK; montane plants; sea-grapes new to Europe! bsbipublicity.blogspot.com/2025/08/brit...

NEW! The latest UKCEH Land Cover Map, describing the UK land surface in 2024, is now available 🏞️ 🌳 See what broad habitats—ranging from broadleaved woodland and arable land to freshwater and urban areas— there are and where in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. #LandCover #LCM 🧵🧪 1/

Also, white stork is doing very well on the continent (partly due to reintroductions), see fe breeding trend in the Netherlands ((c) @sovonvogels.bsky.social ). No doubt this population outbreak will spread to the UK. Better to use limited funding for conservation to species that really need it.

Most weevils have a snout, elbowed antennae & a heart-shaped foot—making them easy to recognise (with a few exceptions). 🪲 Learn more for free with @markgurn.bsky.social: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1491232379... #Weevils 🧪 @amentsoc.bsky.social @britentsoc.bsky.social @royentsoc.bsky.social

How do broomrapes find their hosts? How can they specialise on different hosts? Enter the astonishing world of strigolactones . youtu.be/mUp9n_RW2eg?...

Absolutely incredible turnout for Budapest Pride! So proud of all the organizers, including some old friends, who estimate hundreds of thousands— major embarrassment to Orban

The BMS's Field Mycology journal is now available to all on a new, open access online platform. Find out more, and visit the journal website to read the latest articles and access back issues here: www.britmycolsoc.org.uk/fm-journal.h...

A monumental taxonomy unification effort has just been published - thanks to all those who've collaborated for years to make this happen! birdsoftheworld.org/bow/news/avi...

Has the Nechisar Nightjar Mystery Been Solved? A fascinating summary on the identity of the mysterious single wing found in Ethiopia in 1990. www.aba.org/has-the-nech... #birds #birding #ornithology @aba.org

We trained 10 large language models with 6 retrieval strategies then compared all of these with our experts with access to literature. Well-trained LLMs won! General LLMs without extra training are likely to perform poorly and misinform decision-makers journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Since we are still talking about interactions, I worked with some ecologists a couple of years ago on measurement scale, interactions and interpretation issues. I think some problems arise from failure to distinguish prediction from inference, a chronic problem in ecology imo doi.org/10.1111/brv....

1/6) New paper out in Molecular Ecology! We uncover the intriguing biogeographic history behind the Holarctic disjunct distributions in Vanessa butterflies. @phylomigrationlab.bsky.social #biogeography #insectmigration #butterflymigration #butterflies #evolution shorturl.at/UFrrU

Every year, fewer #WhiteStorks cross the Straits of Gibraltar on their annual migratory journey. In this paper, we unveil the mechanisms driving the recent and rapid loss of their migratory behaviour. 👉https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1365-2656.70035

We have 3 fab #WildFlowerID webinars lined up for you this spring. Led by national experts. All absolutely free! 22 Apr: Mulleins with Mike Crewe 7 May: Mints with Ambroise Baker 10 June: Broomrapes with @christhorogood.bsky.social Details & booking links: bsbipublicity.blogspot.com/2025/03/shar...

Although I don't want to question the general value that beavers can have to nature conservation, in Flanders they often pose conservationists for a lot of challenges. Here is our local experience with beavers. (1/n)

Turnstones are well known omnivores (everything from dog 💩 to human flesh). How can we work out whether a change in diet is borne of necessity? Blog from 17 Feb 2016 9️⃣🎂 wadertales.wordpress.com/2016/02/17/w... #ornithology

Feisty little dudes. I'm almost used to calling them Curruca instead of Sylvia now. Scratchy songs, angry fire eyes, good colour schemes, but lose a point for being a bit too skulking = 8/10 #birdart #birds

Isabelline Wheatear is continuing its range expansion in Eastern Europe, with the species having recently colonised Moldova:

We have just returned from La Janda, S Spain, where we sampled some of the wintering Siberian buntings (1 Rustic, 5 Little Buntings) to uncover their birth/breeding origins. Huge thanks to the Cigüeña Negra ringing group for the warm welcome! @pdvsky.bsky.social #ornithology

Durrell is looking for someone to be the Galápagos Programme Coordinator. What a job! 🇪🇨 www.durrell.org/get-involved...

Delighted to see this in a Hypera drawer at the Natural History Museum today. In what seems to be a fit of exasperation, Richard Thompson asks a fundamental question of the universe. Almost forty years later we still don't have a satisfactory answer. #WeevilPhilosophy

Paper alert. 🧵 As biologists and biogeographers, we are all aware that invasive plants are bad. However, when it comes to assessments of what actually threatens biodiversity most, they rarely rank as high as strong, competitive native species that outcompete rare ones through natural succession.

21. Sketchbook moths - Hypercompe theophila, a tropical tiger moth, from different angles. It's good to practice different views of the same species. Also note the tape over the sketchbook binding to protect the glass on my scanner. Always look after your scanners, they work hard! 💖

For my first post here, I’m happy to share our new paper just published in @ibisjournal.bsky.social Thanks to a great team effort, we made a small step forward in the study of Siberian vagrants in Europe and clarified the status of two (pseudo) vagrants: the YBW & the Sib Chiffchaff. Some results 🧵

The seed dispersal crisis describes the loss of dispersers such as primates, hornbills, parrots and fruit bats. So how do avocados fit into this story? youtu.be/65bFILDE7oM?si…

JOB VACANCIES! We're seeking 3 Conservation Scientists to join our friendly team of #seabirders at the RSPB. We're an inclusive team where everyone is welcome. DEADLINE: Friday 3rd January. #conservationjobs #ornithology #seabirds #science Details: app.vacancy-filler.co.uk/salescrm/Car...

A very distinctive signal for #ClimateChange in the species composition in the latest SEO/BirdLife Spanish rarities report - with increases in tropical and subtropical seabirds, Afrotropical waterbirds and raptors, and range expansions in Maghreb passerines #Ornithology 🐦 seo.org/wp-content/u...

Should we use natural regeneration to create new woods? Tim Sparks describes his study of a barley field left 60 years ago at Monks Wood. www.youtube.com/watch?v=km32...

Want to turn #BlackFriday into #GreenFriday? Why not look for #wildflowers blooming in your local area & share pix during #WildFlowerHour on Sunday 8pm! Still fancy a discount? Code GreenFriday50 gets you 50% off any of our eBooks or bundles until Monday night! Check out our titles: bsbi.org/ebooks

Our paper in the new issue of Freshwater Biology shows greylag geese are great seed dispersal vectors for 24 plant species in #Doñana, and the decline in their population and duration of winter visits is impacting connectivity between plant populations onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Welp, I reckon it's time to start bothering you with my sketchbooks on the regular, like I used to on birdchan. This week's warm up sketch. Can you believe I've never drawn an elephant hawkmoth? FFS. Time to fix that.

My new paper is out in Bioacoustics: "Field tests of small autonomous recording units: an evaluation of in-person versus automated point counts and a comparison of recording quality." doi.org/10.1080/0952... Thanks to NSERC and Bowdoin Scientific Station. #bioacoustics #ARUs #ornithology

My entire team wrote an opinion paper about Common misconceptions of speciation research. Each section is written by 1-2 team members. The bulk of the writing happened during two writing retreats. It was a lot of fun and I am very happy with the result. academic.oup.com/evolinnean/a...

Lots to dig into in this preprint on gene flow between Balearic & Yelkouan Shearwaters suggesting adaptive introgression into Balearic may play crucial role in maintaining population #Seabirds www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This is a great demonstration of something “everyone knows”…especially in wildlife departments like mine. I mean this as a compliment: this is a cool study, with important implications. The academy tends to value one type of Important Research. conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Short blog post (in Swedish) about illustrating all Thomisidae of Sweden. A few [habitus] illustrations and link to the rest of them on the website of Artdatabanken. utgangspunktnykarleby.blogspot.com/2023/12/krab... #Invertebrate 🐙 #SciArt 🐡 #NaturalScience 🧪 #Spiders 🕷️ #Araneae #Thomisidae

As Ingolf Askevold reminds us, YOU TOO could be “some guy” who goes into iNat to clean up the observations for your favorite beetle group, thereby improving iNat and populating GBIF with critical data

Increasing rate of moth species establishment in Great Britain over 120 years shows no deceleration. Implications for biosecurity and conservation @royentsoc.bsky.social resjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

African birds colonising Europe. A review of over a century of remarkable new arrivals in Iberi, by Ernest Garcia. #birds www.ardeola.org/uploads/arti...