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/...

A star scientist showed that better genetics lessons could reduce racism. It was the death knell for his career Brian Donovan had persuaded high school teachers and education researchers that prejudice might be ended by changing how genetics is taught.

“We’ve lost out on the ability to continue to improve this work to make it more effective, and to explore how to apply it to other areas…There are a lot of different ways that genetics has been used to justify prejudice and…that human-made social categories interface with biological categories“🧪

Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request to Congress

I am shocked to see this language from the NSF.

“The U.S. National Science Foundation's Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request reflects a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment while eliminating woke and weaponized grant programs that previously funded radical DEI projects.”

Inbreeding depression persists even without genetic variation in identical snail genomes. This new paper suggests epigenetic mechanisms beyond classic mutation-based explanations. Image credit: Robert Aguilar, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center @wikimedia doi.org/10.1093/evle...

How can you not be romantic about evolution?

Since 10/1/25 and as of 3/25/26:

219 standard, non-collab, new awards (inc. EAGER, RAPID, MRI, and other standard grants)

1 RET and 7 REU awards

70 CAREER

19 travel

76 conference

153 new collaborative awards (for ~100 projects)

120 continuing awards

3 cooperative agreements

= 668 awards

I've spent 2 weeks unsuccessfully trying to download Kraken2 libraries from NCBI.... Any advice? I remember before I had to change something about the NCBI path in the source code but I don't remember.

I love this for us

Pretty, pretty good

At 10am, I was working through epigenetics example problems with students. At 11am, I was holding a Common Snapping Turtle up in front of a class. How did I get a job like this?

First @molecology.bsky.social 's special issue in December (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/1365294x...), and now this! Inspiring to see so many talented scientists working at the intersection of evobio, genomics, and applied conservation. Great for your reading lists!

Updating the lab website today (dentonlab.org/people/) and remembering how lucky I am to have the ability to support all these wonderful people. Looking back on this list is a nice reminder when things are tough.

A genetic trick helps this all-female fish species escape evolutionary doom

The Amazon molly, which reproduces asexually, has survived—and thrived—at least 10 times longer than predicted by evolutionary theory. https://scim.ag/4cJbm7I

I see this so much that I actually question myself now. *Am I?*

Did you know that Evolution Letters now publishes reviews?! Our inaugural one is fantastic! Deep learning is opening new doors for evolutionary genomics, especially for nonmodel organisms with sparse or uncertain genomic data. doi.org/10.1093/evle...

Gene conversion empowers natural selection in a clonal fish species - Nature Analysis of the asexually reproducing Amazon molly Poecilia formosa and its sexually reproducing progenitors Poecilia mexicana and Poecilia latipinna reveals that it maintains a divergent mutational l...

Cool paper, turning evolutionary theory on its head - gene conversion overcomes the cost of asexual reproduction…

Gene conversion empowers natural selection in a clonal fish species www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Lateral view of a preserved croaking gecko (Aristelliger) embryo

I’m so excited to announce our new paper in @journal-evo.bsky.social showing how embryology can help us determine ancestral character states in temporal niche

academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...

Collab w/ A Bauer, A Wegerski, @tonygamble.bsky.social, & A Rasys

#GeckoEvoDevo #Aristelliger
1/x

Woah that pale weirdo is WILD

Salamanders of various species, from plain gray to covered in yellow spots, huddle together in plastic containers.

Spotted Salamanders (Ambystoma maculatum), Smallmouthed Salamanders (A. texanum), Tiger Salamanders (A. tigrinum), and unisexual Ambystoma packed into our local vernal wetlands overnight. Always amazing to see this explosion of life.

I interrupt to tell you:

The salamanders are here, and they are glorious.

Sex chromosome stability and turnover across vertebrates: a developmental gene regulatory network perspective Sex chromosomes have evolved repeatedly across the Tree of Life, yet their evolutionary fates differ strikingly among lineages. In mammals and birds, highly degenerated Y/W chromosomes have remained s...

🚀 New lab preprint on #SexChromosomeTurnover is out on @arxiv.bsky.social

Huge congrats to lab thesis student for submitting his PhD @fwovlaanderen.bsky.social fellowship: big milestone and fingers crossed 🤞 and to all students for the submissions🤞🤞

More to come soon… 🐸🧬

arxiv.org/abs/2602.23624

So I pleased to announce the conceptual spawn of FigTree: PearTree (acronym still to be finalised). If you want to dive right in it is hosted as a web app here: artic-network.github.io/peartree (click the “Example...” button for immediate candy and then click every button you can find).

for summarising values over groups in plots, I think that generally ridgeplots are superior to box plots and violin plots...
#rstats #statistics #dataviz

White House stalls release of approved US science budgets The US Congress rejected sweeping cuts to science agencies. But the NIH, the NSF and NASA have had their spending slowed.

White House stalls release of approved US science budgets: The administration has not yet released funding Congress allocated to multiple research agencies, so they cannot provide it to funded entities/people - including NIH and NASA. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Humbled by Evolution Understanding the history and diversity of life inspires awe and wonder.

1. I’m quite happy with this popular piece that Lee Dugatkin and I wrote recently. For the next two weeks it’s free to read on the American Scientist website.

The National Science Foundation’s entire budget is $10 billion.

My department at CSU Northridge is hiring a vertebrate functional morphologist! We've got a great EEB group, and we're looking for someone to carry forward a tradition of enriching organismal courses and community-engaged research. App review starts March 15

csucareers.calstate.edu/mob/cw/en-us...

Trump said to select Thiel protégé as NSF director

President Donald Trump is planning to nominate a libertarian protégé of billionaire Peter Thiel with no research experience to be the next National Science Foundation director, according to reports today in the New York Times and elsewhere. 1/7

Selection-driven color variation in the aposematic strawberry poison frog, Oophaga pumilio Aguilar-Gómez et al. use exome sequencing of 347 strawberry poison frogs to uncover the genetic basis of color variation. They identify that kit, ttc39b, and bco1 underlie blue-red, yellow-red, and gr...

The last chapter of my PhD is finally out !!!! In the same species, on neighboring islands, we see radically different warning colors emerge. Evolution in action:
Selection-driven color variation in the aposematic strawberry poison frog, Oophaga pumilio: Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol...

Wishing past Rob had the foresight and audacity to clear my schedule so I could watch all Olympic hockey.