U of G Collecting Insects to Track Biodiversity BugQuest invites participants to learn more about insect biodiversity in their local community while contributing to national data.

🐜BugQuest, a nationwide community science project run by the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics, invites participants to learn more about insect biodiversity in their local community while contributing to national data. news.uoguelph.ca/2026/04/got-...

Very excited to announce that the #BayesianWorkflow book by @statmodeling.bsky.social, @avehtari.bsky.social, @rmcelreath.bsky.social et al publishes in June! routledge.com/9780367490140 #RStats #DataScience #Bayesian

Facing rising temperatures in urban environments: the role of phenological plasticity in an urban-dwelling passerine, Parus major Abstract. The capacity for birds to adjust their breeding time to variation in spring temperature via plasticity is crucial for insectivorous passerines in

I’m excited to share the final chapter of my PhD published in #ProceedingsB @royalsocietypublishing.org !

🌳🏙️🪺 We compared Great tit laying date responses to spring temperature between urban and forest habitats across five study systems :
royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

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“🧪

New preprint from the fantastic @sarah-dobson.bsky.social !!

Worried about assuming causality when estimating selection? Confused about knowing whether selection is hard or soft? We have the solution for you!

Hello BlueSky 🌞 my group has a large project growing arms and legs, and we've decided to graduate from post-its to a project management software (kanban or similar).

Any recommendations from academics? Ideally with clear project roles, a task tracker, and as lo-fi as possible!

thermal tolerance acclimation with rearing temperature, and divergence between lowly-domesticated and highly-domesticated fish

Are you interested in domestication selection and conservation physiology?

Newest paper @evolappjournal.bsky.social: Highly and Lowly Domesticated Endangered Fish From a Conservation Hatchery Diverge in Their Thermal Physiology, Transcriptome, and Methylome

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

Short‐Term Cold Storage of Gray Ratsnake (Pantherophis spiloides) Sperm We collected sperm samples monthly from 17 gray ratsnake in the ex situ population from May to October, 2023. We assessed concentration, motility, rapid progressive motility, and membrane integrity (...

@gingerelliott.bsky.social 's new paper published in Zoo Biology. Congratulations!🎉

Elliott measured the degradation of gray ratsnake sperm at 4°C in different extenders. An important step for understanding how we can best preserve samples during transport from the field.

doi.org/10.1002/zoo....

Enjoyed reading this Perspective from Tautz and colleagues which calls for a re-engagement on the part of classical genetics with the realities of complex phenotypes as revealed by quantitative genetics
academic.oup.com/genetics/adv...

Led by my talented PhD student @justine-armg.bsky.social we’re running a #meta-analysis of #cross-sex-genetic-correlations in fitness components.

If you have unpublished data or know of studies that might not appear in a systematic search, please reach out, we’d love to include them!

Please share!

SLiM 5: Eco-evolutionary Simulations Across Multiple Chromosomes and Full Genomes Abstract. Evolutionary simulations of multiple chromosomes, even up to the scale of full-genome simulations, are becoming increasingly important in populat

Slim 5 can now simulate genomes with multiple chromosomes like autosomes, sex chromosomes, mitochondria and chloroplast dna academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

📣🐦This is a reminder that early bird registration for the CSEE 2026 Conference ends tomorrow, January 30!

Register here: event.fourwaves.com/csee2026/reg...

IMAGE SHOWS GRAPHIC OF CORNELL LAB OF ORNITHOLOGY PHYLOGENY EXPLORER TOOL.

MAJOR NEWS! We just launched an awesome new tool! The illustrated Birds of the World Phylogeny Explorer lets users trace any bird’s lineage, compare species relationships, and explore major evolutionary milestones with a click of a button. SHARE and EXPLORE! birdsoftheworld.org/bow/news/phy...

Organizing an intensive writing day for a group of experienced & junior scientists!Goals are to outline manuscript, agree on questions/hypotheses, draft sections, start analysis.

Team will be split into outlining/writing + stats/analysis group.

Tips for max progress & momentum after?

trans scientist collective Trans Scientist Collective Landing Page and Interest From

This seems like a really great initiative! If you know any Trans scientists who might be interested in joining a broader community, please pass along!

transscientistcollective.carrd.co

This is a beautiful, hypnotising bit of footage of a lobate ctenophore from @schmidtocean.bsky.social 🧪 🦑
#MarineLife.

And no, it's not a jellyfish, it's a comb jelly

MBE | SLiM 5: Eco-evolutionary Simulations Across Multiple Chromosomes and Full Genomes

Haller, Ralph & Messer present SLiM 5, a major extension of the SLiM simulation framework for simulating multiple chromosomes, enabling a heightened level of realism for full-genome simulations.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf313

#evobio #molbio #compbio

How can natural history museums help nature recover? It is widely accepted that we face a biodiversity crisis due to human activities, and we need active conservation interventions to address it. Natural history museums have recently made public commitm...

www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

Three stages of manuscript development – and why they matter to you as a mentor When folks find out that Bethann Garramon Merkle and I have written a book called Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences: An Evidence-based Approach, they often ask: “What’s your #1 tip?”* …

How to work on a draft manuscript with a developing writer - through three stages of manuscript development. You can do less work and be more effective! 🧪

Nucleotide diversity is a poor predictor of short-term adaptive potential A capacity to adapt is essential for a population to avoid extinction in a changing world and is recognised as a global conservation priority. Adaptation requires additive (heritable) genetic variatio...

I'm excited to share that our preprint is now available on bioRxiv! Our study challenges the widespread use of molecular genetic diversity as a predictor adaptive potential, with important implications for how genetic data is used to inform conservation decisions.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Time to publish responsibly: DAFNEE, a database of academia-friendly journals in ecology and evolutionary biology Abstract. The current economics of scientific publishing reveal a profound imbalance: academia pays prices far exceeding the actual costs of publication. R

Academia friendly peer-reviewed journals in EEB: academic.oup.com/jeb/advance-...

Adaptive tracking with antagonistic pleiotropy results in seemingly neutral molecular evolution - Nature Ecology & Evolution Population genetics simulations and analysis of experimental datasets in yeast, Drosophila and E. coli show that beneficial mutations are abundant but transient, as they become deleterious after environmental turnover (antagonistic pleiotropy). Consequently, populations continuously adapt to changing environments (adaptive tracking), yet most mutations that reach fixation are neutral.

Adaptive tracking with antagonistic pleiotropy results in seemingly neutral molecular evolution | Nature Ecology & Evolution

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-025-02887-1

Opposing Effects of Succession on Bacterial Diversity and Function within Pitcher Plant (Sarracenia purpurea) Leaves | The American Naturalist Abstract How biodiversity and ecosystem functions change with succession has proven to be difficult to predict. Generally, it is thought that species accumulation over time should increase function, y...

Within a pitcher plant, bacteria break down prey to feed the plant. As the leaf ages, bacteria become less diverse, but more efficient at degrading insects. It appears that species that are strong degraders are weak competitors.

Read now ahead of print!
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Biologists who teach: in what order do you teach the four forces of evolution? Genetic drift first or selection first? And I'm still struggling to smoothly fit in HWE so that its utility is emphasized (students focus so much on how likely it is that assumptions are violated).
#iteachbio 🧪 #Evolution

🔈 CALL FOR PAPERS

IBIS Special Issue

Collections-Based Ornithological Research in a Changing World

Submission deadline: 30 June 2026

onlinelibrary.wiley....

#ornithology 🪶

Title, authors' names and abstract of the paper.

Congratulations to Hélène Dion-Phénix and Gabrielle Gingras for publishing this new paper studying why female blue tits add aromatic plants to their nest. @oikosjournal.bsky.social @nordicoikos.bsky.social

I have a new preprint demonstrating a genome-architecture-aware approach to inferring species trees and introgression landscapes from a small number of genomes. If you are interested in phylogenomics, birds, or hybridization, this is for you! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Took me a year (😱), but I finally published a blog post about our article on the #quantgen variance partition of phenitypic plasticity with @lmchev.bsky.social, published in @peercomjournal.bsky.social.

🇬🇧 devillemereuil.legtux.org/quantitative...
🇫🇷 devillemereuil.legtux.org/fr/genetique...

Anthropogenic change and the loss of behavioural diversity Abstract. Behavioural diversity is an important but understudied facet of biodiversity that enables wildlife populations to cope with rapidly changing envi

What are the causes & consequences of behavioural diversity loss in a changing world? And how do we harness this knowledge for conservation? New open access paper led by @odedberger-tal.bsky.social with David Saltz and @mrmic1.bsky.social

#BobWongLab

royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

This is the moment we realised what we were looking at.

During @nemo-tools.bsky.social ROV surveys to map gorgonian & coralligenous habitats, the seafloor suddenly turned into a landscape of circular nests, each guarded by a male.

We weren’t searching for spawning grounds – we dropped onto one.