Introducing the campest katydid of all time. 🦄💅🏽👸💞 Why would this animal (Arota festae) have evolved this way, other than to look utterly fabulous? We have unleashed some (slightly whacky) thoughts, now out in @esajournals.bsky.social. Photo credit: @zekerowe.bsky.social doi.org/10.1002/ecy.... 1/n
3-year Independent Post-doc in Animal Behavior based at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama!
Three positions, each including salary & a research budget.
Applications due April, 15th.
DM if you are interesting in developing a project with us!
stri.si.edu/academic-pro...
🌡️How might an increase in extreme thermal events with climate change impact the reproductive success of ectotherms?
🪲 @jakobwiil.bsky.social and @nataliepilakouta.bsky.social show that beetle larvae exposed to a heatwave suffered a reduction in survival to adulthood.
📖 doi.org/10.1016/j.jt...
Quelle surprise, as these say in the Old Bailey!
UK ban on Palestine Action unlawful, high court rules. Protest group’s co-founder wins legal challenge against decision to proscribe it under anti-terrorism laws
Sir Keir Stormfront’s censorship of protest is struck down. Protest is a human right.
[6/6]
This project was a lot of fun to think about. Huge thanks to Dom, Mike, and Konrad. Any thoughts & comments are welcome. Thanks for reading. 🙂
We also found little difference in rates of long-term gene flow, divergence times or ancestral population sizes between allopatric and sympatric pairs. In short: present-day geographic ranges tell us surprisingly little about Drosophila speciation histories. [5/6]
Coyne & Orr’s work also supported reinforcement: strengthening of reproductive barriers following secondary contact. When we fit a secondary-contact model, only 8 (all sympatric) pairs were best explained by this model, suggesting reinforcement may be less important than assumed. [4/6]
We analysed whole-genome data from 93 Drosophila species pairs, a subset of those studied in Coyne & Orr (1989, 1997), using a range of demographic models. Only 12 fit strict allopatry. The remaining 81, including many currently allopatric pairs, showed considerable support for gene flow. [3/6]
Allopatric speciation has long been thought to be common, because reproductive isolation can evolve unimpeded by gene flow. But genomic studies increasingly show that gene flow is widespread. So, which is actually more common: strict allopatry, or speciation with gene flow? [2/6]
New paper out: “allopatric” Drosophila species aren’t so allopatric after all. We show that most currently allopatric species pairs probably overlapped in the past and exchanged genes at levels similar to sympatric pairs. @evolletters.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1093/evle... [1/6]
Different transcriptional responses to developmental versus short-term acclimation temperatures in Pieris rapae www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11....
Hi everyone! Please re-post: I want to highlight the amazing work of @queendroso.bsky.social and a newly formed NGO called the "Blossom STEM Education Initiative (BloSTEMEI)", which aims to support #STEM #Education, #Mentorship, innovation, and research-driven #ScienceOutreach across Africa ..
Very happy to see our opinion article out in @cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social today. 🥳 We ask whether sexual signals can influence the evolutionary trajectory of naturally selected adaptations, such as protective colouration, for better or for worse 🧐 1/n
doi.org/10.1016/j.tr...
Happy to share that our paper ‘a formal theory of group-level adaptation for obligate eusociality’ (with @andygardner.bsky.social) is now out in @jevbio.bsky.social advances.
doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...
#OpenAccess #Eusociality #GroupAdaptation #FormalDarwinism
Leaf? 🍃 Or katydid? 🦗
Our new
@plosbiology.org paper sheds light on how these incredible mimics evolved their disguises, and what this reveals about how complex adaptations arise. We find that coordinated evolution between traits might be the answer… plos.io/4oUE741 1/n
We have a preprint out for our study testing conditions/signatures of repeated adaptation in multiple wild cricket populations. Feedback welcome!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Genomic signatures of local adaptation across parasitised cricket populations www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08....
BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen has confirmed that the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City has been killed.
Fantastic paper from an amazing team:
Genomics of Neotropical biodiversity indicators: Two butterfly radiations with rampant chromosomal rearrangements and hybridization
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Really happy to share this article I'm grateful to have been a part of: 'Impediments to countering racist pseudoscience' coauthored with @kevinlala.bsky.social, @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social and Marcus Feldman. Check out a preprint here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
#ScientificRacism #Antiracism
So very excited for the magnum opus of my #PhD to finally be out in @pnas.org. 🎉🎉 We demosntrate that mutualistic co-mimicking tropical butterflies not only converge in light microhabitat but, as a consequence, have also converged in visual system morphology! 1/n😀
www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...
Now all typeset and pretty! A little summary:
Excited to see our most recent MS finally out in the world. We used F1 female hybrids (of two behaviourally-isolated cricket species) to show that broad gene expression divergence in the brain underpins context-dependent divergence of female response to male sexual signals.
Just out in @journal-evo.bsky.social: "Testing for age- and sex- specific mitonuclear epistasis in Drosophila"
academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...
Very excited to share that our paper, ‘The clonality window: relatedness and the group covariance effect in the evolution of division of labour’, is out now in @journal-evo.bsky.social advances. With @andygardner.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1093/evol...
#OpenAccess #Evolution #Multicellularity
This was such a fun start to my @royalcom1851.bsky.social fellowship and involved plenty of stimulating discussions with Nathan Bailey and Graeme Ruxton. Also huge thanks to summer intern Lotte Rolfe for her militarian target checking efforts. Looking forward to the reviewer comments. 9/n
Together, these results show how synergy between trait components (ie colour and shape) can facilitate the evolution of complex adaptations such as masquerade, adding to existing mechanisms of composite trait evolution in other systems. 8/n
But most interestingly of all, we not only found an evolutionary association between colour and shape, but phylogenetic pathway analyses also indicate that these traits were acquired simultaneously during the evolution of leaf masquerade. 7/n
