A family of Ravens is putting the goth back in gothic at NYC's largest cathedral--St John the Divine. There are five mouths to feed, so the parents are staying busy! ⛪️⛪️⛪️ #Ravens #Cathedral #birding
Pangenomes, but scalable.
Panmap: phylogeny-guided framework for read alignment, genotyping, sample placement on pangenomes. 600x smaller indexes, faster builds, and placement from 20K to 8M genomes. @amkram.bsky.social @alanbyzhang.bsky.social @russcd.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
eDNA is possibly the coolest application! Below: read-level placement across a pan-vertebrate mitochondrial pangenome (left) where a clear cluster of read assignments supports the presence of many mammoth reads (right). Processing ~9 billion reads took just 8 minutes!
Wildlife trade drives animal-to-human pathogen transmission over 40 years
New in @science.org ‼️ In the most comprehensive study to date, we show that wildlife trade is driving animal-to-human zoonotic spillover at a planetary scale, with +1 spillover per host every 10 years. Live animal markets and illegal trade pose even greater risks. 🔓 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
1/8 🐺📢 Our study in Behavioral Ecology is out now! We explore the drivers of daily movements of wolves in human-dominated landscapes and found out that they shorten considerably their movements 🔗 Paper: sl1nk.com/xkue00q 🧵👇 (📸 Francisco J. Lema Fuentes).
Reminded me of these two (my cats have organized themselves into totes)
🎶 when I go on bluesky I want to see those cat classics 🎶
This is Achrioptera manga, a giant phasmid or stick insect native to Madagascar.
The specific epithet, "manga" means blue in Malagasy & it's not hard to see why. Only males are blue.
The tiny back wings ("alae") are an example of brachyptery: they're useless for flight, but have other functions.
Puppets are severely underutilized in most departmental seminars. Doug Mock is working to address this puppet-deficit.
Can you believe that until now there were more genomes sequenced for the woolly mammoth than for living African elephants?
Today, we bring you the first genomic, continent-scale analyses of 232 high-quality genomes of both species, the savanna and forest elephant.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Wonderful freshwater crabs, Potamon fluviatile, drawn by Leonardo da Vinci in the late 15th century
Leonardo did know how to draw animals, as shown today (in hos birthday) by @peterpaulrubens.bsky.social
A scientist drills a skull in search of ancient human DNA
Until now, scientists have identified only a few dozen variants that went through natural selection in humans in the past 10,000 years. A new study claims to find hundreds--maybe thousands. Here's my story on the provocative research, and the mixed reception it's getting. Gift link: nyti.ms/4tSJH9G
Personally, #7 is writing, but with this kinda vibe
I love it when a plan comes together.
Hear Dr. Gero talk about the study and seeing the birth on our podcast: www.sciencefriday.com/segments/wha...
Aluma, Y., Baron, Z., Barrett, R. et al. Description of a collaborative sperm whale birth and shifts in coda vocal styles during key events. Sci Rep 16, 9206 (2026). doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Our podcast guest, whale biologist Dr. Shane Gero, witnessed a rare event: a sperm whale birth.
The whale mother had her entire family unit there, taking turns holding the newborn above the water and fending off nearby pilot whales and dolphins.
Video credit: Project CETI
Further evidence that the primary difference between cat species is scale
For millions of years the traits of predators and prey have dictated their interactions. In the Anthropocene, humans are altering these traits. In @cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social, we explore how human-induced traits shifts reshape predator-prey interactions.
tinyurl.com/TREEshifts
I’m convinced at least half of these are actual bean bags.
This is figure 1 from “Genomic history of early dogs in Europe.” It shows genomic screening identifies early dogs in Europe.
Domesticated dogs were already widely distributed in western Eurasia at least 14,200 years ago, according to two studies published in Nature. The papers report the oldest known dog genomes to date.
go.nature.com/4lWrxBe
go.nature.com/3NPY9zE
🧬 🏺 🧪
Microscope images of Ryugu samples collected from the first and second touchdown sites of the Hayabusa2 mission, respectively. Credit: JAXA / JAMSTEC
The complete set of nucleobases found in terrestrial DNA and RNA — adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine and uracil — have been detected in samples returned from the asteroid Ryugu, according to research in Nature Astronomy. go.nature.com/3P9A9YN 🔭 🧪
For good measure, here are some Louisiana black bear cubs (and the hands of some of our collaborators at the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries)
Special Issue on Genetic Rescue is out 🎉🎉🎉
The 21 papers on the SI highlight how evolutionary biology can enhance resilience & long-term survival of biodiversity. Introducing genetically diverse individuals can boost fitness in small, isolated populations 🧬🌿
doi.org/10.1111/eva.70225
(7/7) Overall, we found no genetic evidence for subspecies designations & weak/flawed additional support, BUT these formerly listed bears do not seem to have genetically recovered despite demographic recovery— diversity is low and individual FROH/inbreeding is among the highest in bears globally.
(6/7) Additionally, there’s something of a natural experiment in genetic rescue… kind of. Minnesota bears were brought into Louisiana in the ‘60s, but they’ve had minimal impact on the gene pool (for better or for worse) while also apparently doing just fine in the heat and humidity
(5/7) Signatures of selection and adaptation to the environment are minimal— most of the signal follows the path of phylogenetic expansion, and the primary drivers of population differences appear to be the genomic effects of small NE and isolation (drift, inbreeding, etc.)
(4/7) Two bottlenecks seem to explain a lot— the 1st occurring ~1kya during a period of cultural transition (end of the Late Woodland period and beginning of the Coles Creek cultures) with widespread landscape impacts, and the later ~300yrs ago during the French occupation of Louisiana & fur trade
