Fungus or a festive ornament? 🍄This small, spheroid fungus (Abortiporus biennis) was found on decaying wood, its main nutrient source, in an urban park in Nanning, China. The vivid red liquid settled on the white surface is guttation – when fungi excrete their internal liquid.   📸 Junjie Liu

Great news! RHUL has received Doctoral Focal Award from BBSRC to train the next generation of engineering biologists in partnership with @rothamsted.bsky.social & @uniofreading.bsky.social. The funding will see a cohort of PhD students trained across six years www.royalholloway.ac.uk/about-us/new...

The @iussi-nwes.bsky.social that we organised this week in Leuven (18-19 December, www.iussi-nweurope.org/meetings) was a success! @rmash.bsky.social and @patrick-kennedy.bsky.social delivered fantastic keynote talks and there was a great set of contributed talks and posters.

Congrats also to Dylan Thatcher and Alexis Gkantiragas for winning the prize for best student talks and to Cassandra Uthoff and Annie Joseph for the being awarded with the best poster prizes.

Patron: did you carve me that owl? Sculptor: real squinty with human feet, just how you wanted. Patron: what…?

This week's departmental seminar is by Prof Nazif Alic from @ihaucl.bsky.social who will discuss the relevance of polymeraze III activity to human ageing. Everyone welcome!

Delighted to share this note on only the second British record of the #hoverfly Paragus quadrifasciatus, which @amaeda16.bsky.social, @ellileadbeater.bsky.social, and I found during a #pollinator survey of the @ucl-pnl.bsky.social garden lab. Read and share! 🧪 www.researchgate.net/publication/...

The fruits of many sleepless nights of fieldwork. Great to see it published! Worth a read for anyone interested in pollinators! :)

Nice short new paper documenting invasive bumblebees in the Faroe islands. I have the urge to make a species distribution model for it #ecology #bees www.reabic.net/journals/Bir...

Bubble? No bubble here.

I can't help wondering how much of this decrease is due to functional (though probably uninentional?) outsourcing of emissions to other countries.

For those of you that missed the Darwin Birthday Debate by the Centre for evolution and ecology this year they've just uploaded it ! #ecology #academicsky www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbdT...

Really cool concept I hadn't encountered yet - using bees to deliver fungicide treatments to plants via their flowers. It performed almost as well as spraying in this study #science #ecology #pollinator academicjournals.org/journal/AJAR...

2025 @conservoptimism.bsky.social Film Festival takes place tonight @morethanadodo.bsky.social. Sofia Castelló y Tickell (@sofiaatsea.bsky.social) from @rhulbiology.bsky.social, a co-founder of the festival, welcomes everyone. The festival is livestreamed here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=urvW...

R Script I wrote to unstack rasters. Hope someone finds it useful I made it for the bioclim future climate rasters (www.worldclim.org/data/cmip6/c...) but it should work for anything github.com/AlexisGGk/ma... #ecology #environmental #ClimateChange #science

I got frustrated that Worldclim didn't have annual averages and stuff for solar radiation, wind and water vapor pressure so I did it and put it on Figshare. Hope it saves one of you the hassle! #ecology #environmental #ClimateChange #science #academicsky figshare.com/articles/dat...

Some R code you might find useful - it takes occurrence data from any species you specify, extracts bioclimatic data and plots the occurrence points in a PCA github.com/AlexisGGk/us... #programming #R #ecology #science

This is from a paper with 400 citations... #academicsky

First of the two @rhulbiology.bsky.social presentations at today's @ceevol.bsky.social Autumn Symposium is by @hannahmcgx.bsky.social who presents her PhD work on effects of oil pollution on guppy colouration

Don't be this editor. I can't believe we still have to put up with this exclusionary sh*t in academic publishing.

What the actual fuck

The "who has been married twice" really gets me lol

Kier Starmer what is up with your handwriting www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

One of the things I find most frustrating about AI in education is that it means the only fair way to assess people are probably timed, in person exams. Yet, a few years ago, I would have advocated moving away from these kinds of assessments

Hymenoptera represent!

@blog.ecosia.org.web.brid.gy Please stop. I do not want a tab to be able to access a chatbot. You don't need a chatbot you're a search engine #ai #ecosia

Really great free course content on species distribution modelling from @uclcber.bsky.social. Really good for the underlying theory and easy to follow www.youtube.com/watch?v=8inE... #ecology #science

Do not. The water/electricity use is always going to be higher than for a normal search. Also the summaries are bad. The reason I switched back to Ecosia despite the fact that the search results are worse is specifically because it didn't use that stupid AI summary function

When so much of the media rolls out the comfy red carpet for Farage, Private Eye trips him up and milkshakes him. Be more Private Eye.

Really nice talk from @britishecologicalsociety.org on biodiversity change by Maria Dornelas! www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ee6...

I’m petrified about today’s science news. Genetically modifying crabs to have cheetah genes? This could go sideways fast.

I AM ELDEN LORD

My God it's beautiful Shame it's not global !

The singularity is awesome

Excellent title, no notes

MPs gathered this #InsectWeek to #StandTallForTheSmall and pledge their support for insect life at the launch of a new All Party Parliamentary Group (#APPG) 🐝 🪲🪶 Sign the #Pledge & help insects thrive 🔽 www.royensoc.co.uk/news/mp-pled... ‪@barrygardiner.bsky.social‬‬ @libdemdaisy.bsky.social

THE WORKERS FIGHT BACK! www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news...

Oh the irony of playing fortunate son "I ain't no millionaires son"

Gonna stop arguing with brainlets on bsky. I'm so grateful for Elon Musk & Donald Trump for snapping me out of it and reminding me of what truly matters: being a sicko peering through the window and laughing

Worth noting that a lot of fipronil based treatments advise prophylactic administration every few months

Does anyone know if this article about mass extinctions is about a new paper and if so, could someone link to it? I know there's been some work in this area but is this new research or just a pop Sci article..? It's behind a paywall #science #ecology www.newscientist.com/article/2481...

As someone who is working on landscape epidemiology in pollinators was great to see @billsutherland.bsky.social new video on landscape scale conservation :) #ecology #conservation www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr6u...

Congratulations to all the new fellows! I wonder can the RS confirm they were all sent information about the code of conduct, adherence to which is a condition of fellowship? Or is the Society not bothering with that any more, given their inaction over Musk's evident breaches?

It’s Mary Anning’s birthday, so time to share @katebeaton.bsky.social’s brilliant cartoon again.

One of the best emails I have ever received…

Brown hares can currently be shot all-year round , despite an estimated decline of 80% in the last 100 years . Please sign the petition now calling on the Govt to introduce a close season from Feb – Sept . Thank you !

Also the idea that just building more houses will solve the problem is flawed Any approach that actually drives down house prices would be electoral suicide since it is most home owners only serious asset

Here is the pre print (weird reading a paper without an author that's not standard practice) nabla-public.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/2025_nabla_d... Keep in mind only 10% ISH of drugs get through clinical trials

Let's go somewhere more private, my friend. Please step into the pentacle of writhing tentacles I have recently had built into my home.