there is an objectively best bird trivia fact and I won't tell you what it is

as a spectator (usually fun, like a zoo) and hugely reluctant participant (occasionally would like to think of ending up with a job) of the Ecology and Evolution Job Board, I have to say the mood is more toxic than usual. And boy howdy is that saying something.

the fact that Trivers was clearly just vibing out drawing whatever lines is one thing; the idea that tens of thousands have cited this paper, including myself right now, is altogether something else

Do you know of an inland or coastal Common Gull colony? Any abundance or productivity data on this under-monitored gull would be incredibly valuable for the @smp-seabirds.bsky.social #seabirds #ornithology #ScottishBirds

The result? Current selection is not strong enough to produce meaningful levels of rare variant heritability (9-25% of total heritability), and to close the gap for IQ specifically would require selection to be orders of magnitude stronger than it seems to be based on current data.

HEY HEY I may not be on social media much anymore but I wrote a thing for @biographic.bsky.social about gulls nesting in unexpected places that maybe aren't so unexpected after all. www.biographic.com/spains-cliff...

Of the few things that give hope for a political future, the crowd at a @themountaingoats.bsky.social show is one of them

Really liked this, sort of a jazzy "The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die" racingmountpleasant.bandcamp.com/track/do-you...

this is a real question I have - how is it possible that HPAI H5N1 2.3.4.4b hasn't spread to Oceania? like literally what has made that possible?

competitive birding (derogatory)

I've long been associated with The Biological Bulletin. My first paper was published there, with the cover! I've been an AE for ~ a decade, and appreciate my colleagues on the board. It is a classic journal focused mainly on marine integrative biology, and I'm always proud to publish there. 1/n

Colony managers know it The literature ignores it! Many seabirds are young - juvenile, immature, subadult, prebreeder - and we know v little about them! Here's our paper on why you should care about young seabirds for conservation! W/ @ejgnam2.bsky.social doi.org/10.1002/fee....

Arc Institute’s “MULTI-evolve” learns a classical additive model, not epistasis. Preprint (w/ Gian Marco Visani and Aayush Verma): www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Blog: dewitt-lab.github.io/posts/2026-0...

Nothing to see here, just 22,400 Sabine's Gulls in one flock... 🤯🇨🇦😍 ebird.org/checklist/S3...

important work continues from this group monitoring HPAI and its downsteam impacts in gannets!

🥳 New paper in Ornithological Applications! @amornith.bsky.social Research and conservation priorities for domesticated birds’ wild counterparts academic.oup.com/condor/advan... A wonderful collaboration with @willjsmith.bsky.social, Philip Lavrestsky and Eben Gering. #ornithology

What if we just let Canvas die?

oh god oh god they're going to leak my my feedback on Canvas student assignments where I give them one strength, one weakness, and one general tip to improve their writing going forward no no no

Insane views of Corncrakes today on Tiree. Including this showy male (until he got scared of a Lapwing).

The #CDC really has been effectively muzzled. I have checked the website the last few days and there is no information page on the ongoing Hanta Virus outbreak on the MV Honduis. Mean while Conspiracy theories and fear-mongering are spiraling online. Makes me really sad.

Hantavirus being hyped up as a pandemic risk by clout chasing science communicators AND the first exposure was at a birding trip to a landfill?? As a gull biologist - sign me up!!

Pretty stoked how well the final project worked out for our Molecular Ecology students this semester! They generated fecal meta-barcoding data from Vermivora warbler poop. Analyzed it with QIIME2. Identified the arthropods, found them in the ento museum, and verified with observations on GBIF! 🦉🪰🐛🪲

1/Our lab has two new papers out! Both highlight how nuanced the responses of many species are to climate change. The first was led by super undergrad Eden Smith: link.springer.com/article/10.1... The second by awesome PhD student @feipenghuang.bsky.social: academic.oup.com/beheco/artic...

Linear Regression: A Visual Introduction to (Almost) Everything You Should Know 👉 mlu-explain.github.io/linear-regre... By @jdwlbrv — a must-read for anyone into #rstats, #dataviz, #datascience, #machinelearning, #LinearRegression, and #stats.

Hey Siri Richard Dawkins AI Bride

you ever supposed to be doing something and you update #RStats

A cool demonstration of an important fact -- shearwaters are really, really, really freaking good at flying

instead of writing what I'm supposed to be writing I'm learning something really interesting, what a massive freaking waste of time

📣 The difference between replicable and not replicable is not itself scientifically replicable. 📣 New work with Erkan Buzbas, showing that verdicts such as "X% of results replicated" are based on an inferential machinery that doesn't work. arxiv.org/abs/2604.26268

you know who knows what's cool? The NYT magazine lmao

We’re hiring 4 field positions to help reintroduce and monitor the endangered Mottled Duskywing butterfly in southern Ontario. Great opportunity for early-career ecologists. norrislab.ca/opportunities/

this is the real kinda stuff

when we mourn le guin, we mourn one of our greatest writers & thinkers. but we also mourn one of our all-time greatest haters

seabird biologists when you ask them about prebreeding birds

this is great stuff!

The solution is to assume in advance the phylogeny won't be resolved. Instead, ask questions that don't depend on knowing it but allow you to integrate over it's uncertainty. Anything else leads to sadness and heartbreak

something about this chart casts doubt

how many times in my life am I going to read this same paragraph about euthanizing neonate Guinea Pigs #IACUC

DID YOU KNOW I can guess what your parents do for work (professors) based on your publication record alone (pubs from undergrad)

I wish there was a way to cite someone like, yeah they thought of it but to be clear they didn't do a good job

Congratulations to the four recipients of our research grants! ✨🎁🔬 👉 Theo Kyprianou Rivers is looking at the effects of LED lighting conversion on Manx Shearwater 👉Yinka Adeniji is using acoustic recordings to estimate individual Manx Shearwaters (1/2)

oh my god base #rstats 4.6.0 has the %notin% operator now what will I do with all my new free time?

Trump removes a thorn in his side by firing all 24 members of the National Science Board, NSF's oversight body. www.science.org/content/arti...

subbed for an animal behavior seminar and had them read that whale birth paper. they usually have a quiz in class so I thought it'd be funny to make them write a poem from the perspective of a specific weird whale in the paper. but then the poems made me think about the paper differently 😭

the only allometry you'll ever need

📃New paper in Ecology letters 🐦 I’m delighted to share the publication of the first paper from my #postdoc with @samanthacpatrick.bsky.social looking at life-history trade-offs and #senescence in black-browed #albatrosses from Kerguelen and Bird Island doi.org/10.1111/ele.70384

One of my favorite moments as an academic was a discussion about urban bird conservation with an older scientist, and them very cautiously being courageous to say, "I...I don't want to sound weird here....but I think...it occurs to me that....some of what these people say reminds me of, uh, racism"

Really excited to see this paper, which is basically the long-form explanation of everything we put into the animated mural in the Chicago Archaeopteryx display.

undergraduate biology education and that 1970s Pianka paper everyone thought they killed in the 1980s, name a more iconic duo