Many wild populations are fragmenting and declining, leading to inbreeding.
We are studying how animals avoid inbreeding and the consequences of inbreeding an in a >20 year study of >20,000 wild mice with whole genomes.
We are recruiting a postdoc at Columbia and two PhD students in U Zurich.

The McBride Lab at Princeton U. seeks a lab tech for mosquito research starting summer 2026. Requires a biology degree, lab experience, and interest in evolution/neuroscience. Apply at: research-princeton.icims.com/jobs/21661/research-spec... #job

We also showcase the creativity of scientists working in new model organisms:

human blood donations, insects flying in starlight virtual reality, custom-made ant protective suits, GPS-logging free flying bats, cuttlefish sperm donations & more…

🦇🪸🦟🦑🐜🦗

Exciting new review/perspective on the importance of using diverse systems in neuroscience by @tessamontague.bsky.social and @kocherlab.bsky.social!

Love to see mosquitoes and naked mole-rats getting recognition :)

Excited to share a new review by @kocherlab.bsky.social and me:

Nature-inspired neuroscience

We discuss diverse sensory systems and behaviors across the animal kingdom and argue for their integration into neuroscience. New tools in diverse systems are making this possible ✨

tinyurl.com/y5y9du27

For an update on our preprint about the mysterious signature SBS5, see: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... New analyses throughout, but see Figure 5 in particular.

The neural mechanisms supporting the rise and fall of maternal aggression - Nature In mice, female aggression is governed by an amygdala–to–medial hypothalamus circuit that is strengthened during pregnancy and is dynamically amplified by oxytocin during lactation.

What has changed in mama bear brain (well, actually mice) to make her risk her life to attack a potential threat and protect her young? Oxytocin is the key! Happy to share our new study led by two awesome postdocs: Takashi Yamaguchi and Rongzhen Yan.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

EEB Scholars - run by our wonderful Princeton EEB graduate students, now open for applications: eeb.princeton.edu/graduate/eeb...

Pablo Villar et al discover male octopus mating arms are sensory organs used to find females, navigate internally to the oviduct & deliver sperm. From behavior to structure, these findings offer a framework for how sensory systems shape reproduction & species barriers
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

We often think of survival as an individual act. But when facing hardship together, social groups may function more like a unified system than a collection of separate individuals.

We are excited to share our latest work @natneuro.nature.com studying collective social dynamics.

See: rdcu.be/e8LrV

Our new experimental evolution study across 30+ locations using the plant Arabidopsis thaliana —— we direct "see" adaptation and extinction to different climates at the genetic as it happens!

Read it in Science
dx.doi.org/10.1126/scie...

@ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social
@hhmi-science.bsky.social

Tolerance toward foreigners in ants requires chronic exposure for establishment but only sporadic exposure for maintenance Bailly et al. show that ants learn to tolerate genetically distinct non-nestmates through prolonged exposure. Once established, this tolerance persists with occasional re-encounters with ants of the s...

Ants are experts at telling nestmates from foreigners via subtle differences in odor profiles. In this new paper, we explore the conditions under which ants develop and maintain tolerance to foreigners. Turns out the ant recognition system is surprisingly plastic.
www.cell.com/current-biol...

Spontaneous behavior is a succession of self-directed tasks Weinreb et al. reveal a hierarchy of timescales in mouse behavior, including low-level syllables and high-level behavioral states. States and syllables are encoded in different brain areas. Prefrontal...

Have you ever wondered why mice do what they do when they are free to do whatever they want? Check out our latest (and this slightly delayed thread about our recent paper, led by Caleb Weinreb and friends...) www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Applications are open until Mar 31! Are you an undergrad looking to get research experience in evolutionary biology? Our lab has summer funding for an undergraduate researcher to participate in our research on how urbanization affects house mice. apply here: careers.drexel.edu/cw/en-us/job...

cOMPaRatiVe cOGNitiONHumans share acousticpreferences with other animalsLogan S. James1,2,3,4* Sarah C. Woolley 1,2, Jon T. Sakata1,2,Courtney B. Hilton5,6, Michael J. Ryan3,4, Samuel A. Mehr5,7,8Many animals produce courtship sounds, and receivers prefersome sounds over others. Shared ancestry and convergentevolution may generate similarities in preference across speciesand underlie Darwin’s conjecture that some animals “havenearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have.” In this study,we show that humans share acoustic preferences with a rangeof animals, that the strength of human preferences correlateswith that in other animals, and that humans respond fasterwhen in agreement with animals. Furthermore, we foundgreatest agreement in preference for adorned, ancestral, andlower-frequency sounds. humans’ music listening experiencewas associated with preferences. These results are consistentwith theories arguing that biases in processing sculpt acousticpreferences, and they confirm Darwin’s century-old hunchabout the conservation of aesthetics in nature

out now in Science: @loganjames.bsky.social collected pairs of sounds in 16 species where we *know* which sound is more attractive (to that species)

he played them to ppl on themusiclab.org, asking, in each pair, which was nicer. humans agreed w other animals

doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202

Society for the Study of Evolution Site description

Applications now open for the Graduate Research Excellence Grants! These provide evolutionary biology research funds for early and advanced Master’s and PhD students. Proposals due May 18.
www.evolutionsociety.org/content/soci...

Introgression and parental conflict shape repeated occurrences of postzygotic isolation in Mimulus Postzygotic reproductive isolation is often thought to accumulate as a byproduct of neutral divergence. Yet it frequently evolves rapidly, in line wit…

I am SO THRILLED to share our first fully-lab lab paper!!!!!! Led by @hybridzones.bsky.social & @hagarsoliman.bsky.social, w/ a major assist from @pfschwarz.bsky.social!!!!!!!!!!!!! Read more below, if you're curious (you should be- it's AWESOME!!!!!!!)

link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Excited to share this preprint that describes my latest work on using GPUs to accelerate processing of RNA-seq data.

The title says it all: "RNA-seq analysis in seconds using GPUs" now on biorxiv www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... and github github.com/pachterlab/k...

Figure 1 shows they key result

Neurobiology of Social Touch Social touch is a critical component of our daily lives, shaping our interactions with friends and loved ones. Reduced social touch, especially during early life, can have detrimental effects on healt...

Excited to share this review article I wrote.

Neurobiology of Social Touch - www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

The molecular basis of force selectivity by PIEZO2 - Nature PIEZO2 is intrinsically more rigid than PIEZO1, and disparate mechanical stimuli paradoxically evoke opposite conformational and gating responses in each channel.

Very excited to share our new manuscript – published today!

Why are PIEZO1 and PIEZO2 are tuned to transduce different types of mechanical force? I was lucky to work with some extraordinary colleagues to begin to figure out why.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

An overview of the results below ⬇️ ⬇️

Yuki giving an amazing talk at UW Biology

Super excited to have @yukihaba.bsky.social visit Seattle and @uwbiology.bsky.social and give a talk on his mosquito work!

Excited to share our latest work in @nature.com showing shared neural substrates for parenting and prosocial helping behavior. Full text available here: rdcu.be/e6PnY

Thank you so much for having me, @riffelllab.bsky.social! I had a great time presenting our recent work and chatting with you all at the UW Bio. Really appreciated the thoughtful questions and lively discussion.

@annaryba.bsky.social's paper on the neural underpinnings of intraspecific behavioral variation is now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social

Highly recommend! -> Paper identifies neural substrate for variation in promiscuity among Drosophila melanogaster strains🧪

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

So well deserved! Congratulations @ishmailsaboor.bsky.social!

Agouti integrates environmental cues to regulate paternal behaviour - Nature Expression of agouti signalling protein in neurons in the medial preoptic area is increased by group housing and negatively associated with care, and overexpression of Agouti reduces care and enhances...

Why are some males caring toward infants while others are neglectful or abusive? I'm so pleased to share work that my colleagues and I @princeton.edu have just published @nature.com (an explanatory thread to follow!) (1/8)

So excited to share this manuscript led by the inimitable Cara Brand, who discovered that Topoisomerase II evolution causes hybrid female lethality in Drosophila.

Congrats to Cara, @nickbr0wn.bsky.social, Anirban, and
@buszczaklab.bsky.social!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New paper! From Sam Snodgrass and @genomeofforrest.bsky.social, w/ @druncie.bsky.social, @gcbias.bsky.social, and a collaboration with Andres Moreno and @santiagogmm.bsky.social. Can we quantify the impact of humans on maize dispersal?

Plant yourself in a comfy chair and lend me your ear:

1/10

Balanced polymorphism in a floral transcription factor underlies an ancient rhythm of daily sex alternation in avocado In avocado and certain wild relatives in Lauraceae, pollination occurs via a synchronized rhythm of floral sex timing between two hermaphroditic flowering types. A-type plants present female-phase flo...

Did you know there are 2 types of avocado varieties? A-types switch from female to male, B-types male to female, within a single day. This reciprocal sex alternation promotes cross-pollination and has a simple genetic basis. Read more in this recent preprint from the final chapter of my PhD thesis 🥑

All right it’s time for the annual “please tell us about one (or a few if you are ambitious) paper from 2025 that really impressed you and why we should all read it“! Go! If you tell us how it changed your view of the world and what makes it so powerful and consequential It would be excellent.