BIG day for warbler genomes, with work led by @kevinfpbennett.bsky.social! Whole genomes nearly *every species* of warbler.
Warblers the most "Pokémon" of the bird world? Well, they're also trading their coloration genes like valuable collectors cards ...
www.psu.edu/news/eberly-...
🦉🧪
A five panel figure, with four showing photographs of a putative hybrid warbler between a mourning warbler and a common yellowthroat. The final panel shows an illustration of the bird by David Sibley
A three panel figure showing the genetic composition of the hybrid and the putative parental species. Two panels show points on a principal components analysis, with the hybrid falling intermediate. The final panel shows bars illustrating genome-wide admixture, with the hybrid having intermediate ancestry between the two.
I mean, the title says it all: Genetic confirmation of an “uncommon mourningthroat” (Geothlypis philadelphia × G. trichas): A rare but persistent hybrid warbler. Fun stuff with @kevinfpbennett.bsky.social and Kurt Gielow, OA in @wilsonornithsoc.bsky.social!
🦉 🧪
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
sorry folks i am indeed a splitter
???? Help??? What???
LOL
Interested in how new sex chromosomes evolve in birds? Our NSF-funded collaborative work with the (Daven) Presgraves lab at @urochester.bsky.social is out this week in @pnas.org. Check it out!
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Comparative genomics reveal positive selection underlying mating signal diversification across bowerbirds Lan-Nhi Phung, Gerald Borgia, J. Albert C. Uy University of Rochester, Rochester, NY University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Super last minute as I’m on my flight to #AOS25 — I will be talking about my work on bowerbirds on Wednesday morning in Genomics 2. Looking forward to seeing everyone and sharing this incredible dataset 🐦⬛
#AOS2025 don't miss @kevinfpbennett.bsky.social's talk at 11:15am on Wednesday in the Genomics 2 session (Ballroom C). We're cooking up some cool stuff with @mbtoomey.bsky.social on warbler carotenoid processing enzymes! 🦉🧪
I love my wittle piping plovers sm
An image of a blue wildebeest grazing with a graph of effective population size over time below
Some good news for a Friday morning: it's been a long road, but this work from my M.S. is now published! Using RAD-seq data, we assessed genetic diversity and the demographic history of the world's second largest migratory wildebeest population in Zambia's Greater Liuwa Ecosystem
:( I’m so sorry
A lot of blood sweat and tears put into this one: we revisit Robert MacArthur's classic warbler study—with @eliotmiller.bsky.social and colleagues—using, among other techniques, fecal metabarcoding.
🧪🦉
📸 Ronnie d'Entremont
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
@psubiodept.bsky.social
As a comic relief I present to you the worst name ever for an R package
A PhD position has opened up in my old lab group in Uppsala with Anna Qvarnström! I can't recommend Uppsala and the group highly enough. This is a really great opportunity! If anyone wants to learn more about life in Uppsala or in the department, I'm very happy to talk.
I know it's small in the whole scheme of things, but the bloodbath at NPS in Hawaii is almost certainly going to lead directly to the extinctions of no fewer than 4 native Hawaiian songbirds in the next 4-5 years.
To update people on the NSF PRFB situation: despite the court challenge and rescinding the original memo, the NSF has continued to comply with the executive order. They have not communicated with us at all and our paychecks are still canceled indefinitely. I know people who cannot pay their rent.
To expand on this, right now ~200 postdoc fellows directly funded by NSF are locked out of their salary &research funds right before the first of the month. No doubt other NSF funded grads &postdocs are affected as well. All requests for funds put in before the freeze are slowly being cancelled
Thank you so much—and I’m looking forward to see your work as well!
Washington Post news items: National Science Foundation halts reviews of research proposals NIH stops new research as part of health communications pause Researchers funded by Education Department told they need agency permission to publish results.
This one hour of day seven of the presidency.
I don’t have a definitive source on this yet but it looks like NSF review panels have been canceled.
Sixty-some years ago, Eisenhower transformed higher education because he viewed a science education gap as the single greatest threat to national security.
This is absolutely an act of sabotage.
If you’re in the US and you’d like to know what projects and vital services federal grants currently fund in your state, you can search here: www.usaspending.gov
And you can find the contact information for your elected representatives here: www.usa.gov/elected-offi...
They need to hear from you.
Seeing and hearing that NSF panels & reviews shut down. Again, for the love of science, this is not the time for scientists to be quiet..speak up if you can and push Uni administrators to do so as well.
Thank you!!
An image of my title slide. The title of the talk is “Tempo and mode of trait evolution in the adaptive radiation of Malagady vangas”. The authors are Anya Auerbach, Euan Lim, and Sushma Reddy, who are affiliated with the University of Minnesota and Bell Museum of Natural History. The text is surrounded by five photographs of different species of vangas, which look impressively different from one another.
Hey #SICB2025 - interested in adaptive radiation? Morphological evolution? Cool birds? Just trying to figure out where to start tomorrow morning?
I’ll be presenting the results of my first dissertation chapter, looking at diversification in Malagasy vangas, in A601 at 8:45am!
conclusions and tidbits:
- there might be a Vancouver-only Townsend’s warbler dialect
- vireos are still complicated
- the Rockies boundary holds very well
- clustering methods are still cool
- the Macaulay Library rules
At long last, my first paper (ever, first-author, and with @davetoews.bsky.social) is out in @plosone.org 🐦🎶
We quantified and compared song divergence within and between 8 pairs of common North American songbirds—please check it out!
journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
something coming from me, watch this space tomorrow 👀🐦🎶
I am looking for a postdoc! Pls share
#postdoc #genomics #insects #inversions
genomicsofoutbreaks.com/?page_id=141
Male Kirtland's warbler perched in a Jack Pine
New warbler paper /w Anna María Calderón & Zachary Szpiech. Kirtland's warblers were ESA delisted in part because of 👍 management. What wasn't known at the time—and we show here—is that they have a striking footprint of inbreeding in their DNA🦉
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
📸 Nathan Cooper