👀 geukensia genome?

A circular enamel pin featuring a red crab on a white background, surrounded by a red border with gold text that reads, "DON'T TALK TO ME UNTIL I'VE HAD MY DETRITUS."

Today's Low Quality Ad is for this Detritus Pin. Please repost if you're a proud member of the Crab Club. I'm trying to find my people on here.
collabs.shop/el4iiy

that sounds so cool! 😭

Appropriate since snakes do not have arms.

Close up shot of Solaster endeca surface pink and bubbly. By Alexander Semenov: https://www.flickr.com/photos/a_semenov/4371752155/

Red and orange projections as a close up shot of Crossaster papposus surface. Photo by Alexander Semenov: https://www.flickr.com/photos/a_semenov/4372503348/

Closeup of sea star skin, unknown species. Alexander Semenov: https://www.flickr.com/photos/a_semenov/8447618289/

Close up of Crossaster papposus sea star skin. By Alexander Semenov: https://www.flickr.com/photos/a_semenov/8448703898/in/photostream/

My god. Have you ever seen close-ups of sea star skin? 🧪🌊🌿

🌊🧪 As chemical oceanographers, we wander through the plant measuring inputs, outputs, and internal compositions - trying to reconstruct the missing design. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences: An Evidence-Based Approach Scientific writing is hard (but my book can help) – but teaching scientific writing is even harder. Nearly all of us teach writing – sometimes in a formal classroom setting, sometimes as advisors t…

But if you want to start smaller: my new book (with Bethann Garramon Merkle), 'Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences', is loaded with evidence-based tips to lighten the load! scientistseessquirre... 🧪
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THIS IS INSANE

new paper from my phd is now out as a pre-print @biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social!! we leverage a novel gt-seq panel to investigate a marine ecology “black box” — population connectivity!

read here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🌊🧪 Thus any study of the chemistry of sea water is heavily dependent on knowledge derived from physical oceanographic and marine biologic studies. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

Anyone know what this might be? Spotted inMonterey Bay yesterday. It’s a little less than an inch long. 🤿
#marinelife

My quote of the day

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.

Daniel J. Boorstin

I don't think people fully appreciate how apocalyptic things are for US science. I haven't had any new funding since 2024, but I'm still ok since typical grants are for three years. This means next year I will be completely out of funding and will have to fire everyone in the lab. It's not great.

Pervasive Fitness Trade‐Offs Revealed by Rapid Adaptation to Shifting Population Densities in Large Experimental Populations of Drosophila melanogaster Trade-offs are an inherent feature of organismal biology and fundamental to the evolution of natural populations. Using experimental evolution in large, genetically diverse populations of Drosophila ...

Really excited to see this work out now in Ecology Letters!
May be particularly interesting to those thinking about life-history trade-offs and eco-evolutionary feedbacks, and how those may interact to maintain variation within natural populations.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

the northern parulas are back too

it’s yellow rumped warbler season in savannah!!

Our paper is out in @Science! The Atlantic silverside spans Earth's steepest latitudinal gradient in coastal sea-surface temperature. Despite high gene flow, populations show clinal genetic variation in multiple locally adapted traits. doi.org/10.1126/scie...

snail

Euglandina rosea, the Rosy Wolfsnail, aka cannibal snail, has chemical receptors that allow it to stalk other snails by following their slime trails. And i didn’t notice until looking at this picture that this guy was in HOT PURSUIT

A crow says "I just want to"

"Focus" Crow is now very detailed and crouching down

Larval axolotl almost ready to hatch in a clear egg

Eg

late february is the late november of the spring semester and i will not be elaborating

Great review on marine apicomplexans! Well done @ambonacolta.bsky.social et al. 🙌🏻👏🏼

i will be blowing up your inbox this week, apologies in advance 👩‍💻😂

me writing words: pained, struggling, tortured, unmotivated
me writing code/analyzing data: locked in, forgets to eat, move, blink or check phone, hours fly by like minutes, living my best life

This delicate sponge has a remarkably clever survival strategy.🪝✨️⁠
⁠
Most sponges filter small plankton and bacteria from the water and pump them through their bodies. But the harp sponge (Chondrocladia lyra) uses small hooks along its vertical branches to trap and eat larger prey.

Forskalia from @schmidtocean.bsky.social dive 651. So perfectly designed to catch prey. I love them. #sepacificseamounts #MarineLife

MetaZooGene Intercalibration Experiment (MZG‐ICE): Metabarcoding Marine Zooplankton Diversity of the Global Ocean DNA metabarcoding of zooplankton biodiversity is used increasingly for monitoring global ocean ecosystems, requiring comparable data from different research laboratories and ocean regions. The MetaZo...

Closing 2025 with a bang! Great experience working on this collaborative project.
MetaZooGene Intercalibration Experiment (MZG‐ICE): Metabarcoding Marine Zooplankton Diversity of the Global Ocean - Blanco‐Bercial - 2026 -
@blancobercial.bsky.social

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Finally, we’ve solved a long-standing mystery: what tintinnid shells are actually made of:
A new class of biomaterial formed by remarkable structural proteins unique to tintinnids.
A major milestone after 3 years of work! Read about it in our preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202...
#ProtistsOnSky