Faculty presenting on grad student's work

accepting submissions for people who make some kind of donation again, now and for the next ~51 minutes!

Fascinating ABA podcast this week, reviewing the life of Roxie Laybourne, an amazing female scientist who “may be the most influential ornithologist you've never heard of”. #Ornithology

"What James Watson got wrong about DNA" By the great Sohini Ramachandran (@sramach.bsky.social) and your boy for The Boston Globe (@bostonglobe.com). www.bostonglobe.com/2025/11/14/o...

some consider this a hot take, but I think seabird conservation biologists should kill rats rather than seabirds! Yay Isle of Muck! 💙 www.bbc.com/news/article...

"Nature, red in tooth and claw" are you dumb, nature is green ?

1/2 #NearLab @chasedbrownstein.bsky.social described Birmingham Darter Etheostoma birminghamesnse in April 2025 It is under threat from a mega data center. A petition was filed yesterday by the @biologicaldiversity.org to review the species for protection under the ESA www.wbrc.com/2025/11/14/n...

surely the best path forward to reckoning with the raw beauty of the universe, the complete complexity of the natural world that constantly does and undoes our science, is to publish in special edition Springer journals and gamify the new NSF grant ranking compression

COLLEGE STATION, Texas (AP) — Texas A&M adopts policy requiring professors to get OK from school president to discuss certain race and gender issues.

🔥

At a time when real fascism thrives, when people are daily kidnapped, and trafficked, and killed in the streets, when anyone with a heart or brain has a million real, impossible questions about the practices of political violence, the brave biologist stands up and sequences Hitler's genome

Reminder that my lab is seeking graduate students for fall 2026. As part of @oupaleobiology.bsky.social, my lab uses a combination of fossils, statistical phylogenetics, fieldwork, & computational approaches to investigate macroevolutionary dynamics in the marine biosphere. Link w/ more info below:

can't even

SHOUT OUT to this paper and to my gulls for not causing *all* the problems :)

No real excuses tbh

My book 'The Tree of Life' is published in the USA and Canada today. Available as book, on kindle and as audio. I would be really grateful for reposts. www.amazon.com/Tree-Life-So... www.amazon.ca/Tree-Life-So...

me, trying as always to listen to the Silver Jews Spotify: Here's Pavement. Have you tried Pavement? Want to listen to some Pavement? Next up we've got an alt mood, like an Allen wrench dipped in bakers chocolate. Let's kick it off with some Paveme

I've had my PhD nearly 10 months, hardly even won one Nobel prize, spend all day arguing with people about shooting gulls and moping about evolutionary theory, what the hells wrong with me

Difficult to beat Pete Coviello for great words on the subject of lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

Griffon Vultures crossing The #Straits yesterday- pure migratory magic! ….or youth dispersal magic 😉 1,687 Griffon Vultures crossed over our heads!

My long awaited review of the new, highly enjoyable @themountaingoats.bsky.social album

In case anyone is wondering if Watson was really THAT bad, @lpachter.bsky.social compiled a list of quotes that are absolutely not for the faint of heart. liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/j...

I can’t believe Zohran is transing the trains already www.mta.info/article/f-m-...

Out now in Behavioral Ecology. We built weigh bridges that allow us automatically to track the energetics of a sensitive, nocturnal seabird. We show how these devices can help answer fundamental questions about parental care. doi.org/10.1093/behe...

Phylogeny of tinamous based on whole-genomes and fossils: academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan... 🪶🧪 (📷Musher et al.)

Awesome paper. Poor woodpeckers, bashing their heads against trees *and* hyperventilating....

Do you teach #rstats? Do your students complain about how lame and old-fashioned dplyr is? Don't worry: I have the solution for you: github.com/hadley/genzp.... genzplyr is dplyr, but bussin fr fr no cap.

The New York Times running brave headlines like DID THE IMMUNE SYSTEM RUIN CELL REPLICATION? Authored by literally Plasmodium

Zohran says you’re trans now

as an ornithologist and published life history theorist (lol), I often get asked how long different kinds of birds live, and I always just say, "ehhh, like 12 years."

If you're looking for a #postdoc but aren't quite a fit for my lab, check out this exciting opportunity via IU's Common Themes in Reproductive Diversity group! 2-year NIH traineeship to work on one of the group's core themes. Details here! ctrd.indiana.edu/how-to-apply/

Mamdani: "My message to I.C.E. Agents and to everyone across this city is that everyone will be held to the same standard of the law. If you violate the law, you must be held accountable."

@zohrankmamdani.bsky.social Freaking love this guy

the first students have now registered for my institution's first ever Phylogenetics course. Let's gooooo. Evolutionary history is historical baby 😈.

oooh

NEW JOB in #ornithology and #conservation heading a team that develops habitat measures to benefit priority #bird species in #Switzerland (deadline 8 Dec 2025): buff.ly/Y1bIHr7

sending all my shitposts to the Spring Nature Manuscript Adviser AI

We're doomed, in the sense of always having been doomed

I remember reading somewhere the thunderbolt-and-lightning fact that some large proportion of cuckoo eggs do not match their host nest at all and I remember a great wave of relief washing over me and I cannot remember where I read it

The sentence I'd start my paper with if it weren't against the rules - Birds develop their plumages strangely, more like the blossoming of an inflorescence than, say, the growth of a shell.

Manakin dances are beautiful and I love them. Here are two papers that interpret the same kinds of evidence about them in completely opposite directions (I'm clearly biased as to which one is more correct) doi.org/10.1098/rsos... www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

A poem for if you've ever been driving out of Boston and realized you could, not that you would, but you could, couldn't you, drive full speed into Kowloon my first ever in print (eek!). In the awesome Q Review! #Boston #Poetry

I'm going as multilevel selection for Halloween everyone at the party gets a flask of flour beetles

1/5: Interested in basketball? Disease ecology? Epidemics? 5 years ago, the NBA embarked on a great experiment in infection control: "The NBA Bubble." In a new preprint led by Dr. Yun Tao + Dr. Nita Bharti, we examine it's underlying disease ecology principles. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

a phone line academics can call and someone talks them down from their moods

oh my god the origins of both quinine and artemisinin as indigenous medicines; they literally do not teach you this in school

Oh my GOD the apicoplast WHAT WHAT IS THIS

learning about the biology of malaria is just one of those wild things man

This morning's task - take the most beautiful and important parts of my preprint out back like old yeller

missing these fuzzy little ones :) (Leach's Storm-Petrel)