Evolutionary diversification of Lepidopteran larval appendages. Left: Representative morphological diversity among Lepidopteran caterpillars. Phylogenetic relationships are indicated by the cladogram and family names for each representative species are indicated. Bombyx belongs to the Bombicidae (highlighted in red). Right: Representative caudal horn diversity among species in the Bombycinae sub-family. Shown are the posterior larval segments for each species; the cladogram depicts their phylogenetic relationships.

Closely related species often exhibit distinct morphologies. Kenta Tomihara @pinharanda.bsky.social Takashi Kiuchi @pandolfatto.bsky.social &co uncover the #genetic basis of caudal horn size differences between the #SilkMoth and its wild relative @plosbiology.org 🧪 #evolution plos.io/4b3kwdR

Genome of the Abominable Snowfly uncovers the mysteries of cold tolerance in a winter active insect! New cool (literally) paper in @currentbiology.bsky.social from Marco Gallio, @matthewcapek.bsky.social, @tuthill.bsky.social, myself, and fine colleagues! ⛄ 🦟
authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

Many congratulations!

High-resolution mapping of a rapidly evolving complex trait reveals genotype-phenotype stability and an unpredictable genetic architecture of adaptation The extent to which adaptation can be predicted, particularly for traits with complex genetic bases, is unknown. Here, we leveraged a model complex trait, model species, and high-powered longitudinal ...

Thrilled to finally share the magnum opus of my PhD that focuses on the genetic basis of evolutionary change! Specifically, we know we can map the genetic basis of a trait, but can we tell which genes will underlie the trait shift when it evolves? doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Cr. to Shen Tian

My main PhD work @monteirolab.bsky.social is now in @natecoevo.nature.com! We found a Hox gene promoter that helps butterflies🦋adjust their wing eyespots in response to seasonal temperatures🍃🍂, shedding light on the evolutionary origin of phenotypic plasticity. 1/9 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Glass beads of all sorts balancing on wavy threads.

How is functional variation at large-effect loci maintained in natural populations, even as environments change? In a paper led by @mkarag.bsky.social, we tracked known pesticide resistant alleles in outdoor 𝘋. 𝘮𝘦𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘨𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳 cages & inferred selection and dominance from temporal sequencing data.

For the love of frontier research, or why Elon’s rockets keep blowing up | EMBO reports EMBO Press is an editorially independent publishing platform for the development of EMBO scientific publications.

"The most transformative technologies, ..., emerged not from goal-directed efforts but from foundational inquiries with no predetermined outcomes." #curiosity-driven_science

Don’t ask “when is it coevolution?” — ask “how?” Abstract. Coevolution has come to be widely understood as specific, simultaneous, reciprocal adaptation by pairs of interacting species. This strict-sense

So this came online over the weekend: My dive into the "definition" of coevolution is online ahead of publication in @journal-evo.bsky.social!

Don’t ask "when is it coevolution?" — ask "how?"

doi.org/10.1093/evol...

Preschool teachers provide fewer participation opportunities to working-class students than those from more privileged backgrounds | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Homepage - Population, Evolutionary, and Quantitative Genetics Conference Visit our website to learn more.

Save the date! #PEQG26 June 9-12 2026 in Asilomar, CA. Happens only every 2yrs, but is my favorite conference. Full website coming soon, and registration and abstract submission opens November 14, but I'm allowed to tease that keynotes will be @jnovembre.bsky.social @jennytung.bsky.social and me!

Thank you, Niels! 🦋

Thank you, Marcus!

Ευχαριστούμε! 💛

Very excited to see this work in press! I think there is a reason to believe that this is a common means of stabilizing large-effect polymorphisms in general and might be an important reason for why diploidy is so common. news.stanford.edu/stories/2025...

Beneficial reversal of dominance maintains a large-effect resistance polymorphism under fluctuating insecticide selection - Nature Ecology & Evolution Measuring selection and dominance in fitness of the insecticide-resistant Ace alleles in Drosophila melanogaster, the authors show evidence for beneficial reversal of dominance, a mechanism that can s...

How do populations maintain an evolutionary memory? I am happy to share that our work with Dmitri Petrov @petrovadmitri.bsky.social, Paul Schmidt, and colleagues on dominance reversal and stabilization of insecticide resistance in changing environments over time is now published at Nature EE.

August’s Nature Plants cover story shows how we integrated large-scale multiDAP and snRNA data to reveal drivers of cell type identity and evolution in flowering plants. www.nature.com/nplants/volu... We packed a lot into this paper! Here’s a single-cell spin on what we found:

Congratulations! Beautiful cover 🌄!

Earlier in summer, there was a gigantic 4-year longitudinal study in France showing that the school environment triggers a gender gap in mathematics. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Monarch butterflies’ mass die-off in 2024 caused by pesticide exposure – study New peer-reviewed research found an average of seven pesticides in each of 10 butterflies tested

I was down at Pacific Grove last weekend and a volunteer shared the monarch population is declining.. #pesticides #land_use_change

Toxin resistance (natural or synthetic toxins) Vs traits dependent on normal enzyme activity. See also our recent manuscript on maintenance of genetic variation due to tradeoffs www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Evolution and Guinea Pig Toes How one animal's oddity inspired Sewall Wright to take on one of Darwin's big ideas

check out my new article published in @nautil.us on Sewall Wright's famous shifting-balance theory of evolution, told through the lens of his work with guinea pigs!

nautil.us/evolution-an...

Milkweed Munchers. A comic strip that uses 5 tall panels. Each panel depicts a different invertebrate that relies on milkweed as a host plant. First Monarch caterpillars, one of them exclaims “Delicious!” Next, Swamp Milkweed Leaf Beetles, one beetle shouts “Exquisite!” The third panel shows a cluster of Oleander Aphids on the stem of the milkweed, several small speech bubbles that say “Yum.” are coming from the group of aphids. Then we have Large Milkweed Bugs. The adult bug says “Delectable!”. There’s a group of nymph bugs in the background. Lastly, the final featured invertebrate is the Small Milkweed Bug. The cute orange and black bug has words of praise “Tremendous Chef.” It says. Below the panels are the name of each invertebrate. Above is the title that is adorned with milkweed to the left and right. On the left the milkweeds is young and blooming and on the right the plant is older, has grown seed pods and the leaves have been consumed.

#Invertefest?! Okay!
This one is a personal favorite out of all my bug art.

Just noticed this in last Sunday’s Observer, a week in the life of an Orange-tip as told to Simon Barnes. Brilliant.

Photos: Scientists trace a butterfly migration route that is millions of years old Scientists have recently mapped the painted lady butterfly's annual flight from equatorial Africa to northern Europe and back, the world's longest butterfly migration. In Constant Bloom, photographer ...

Scientists have recently mapped the painted lady butterfly's annual flight from equatorial Africa to northern Europe and back, the world's longest butterfly migration. In Constant Bloom, photographer Lucas Foglia documents the journey.

Inferring Balancing Selection From Genome-Scale Data Abstract. The identification of genomic regions and genes that have evolved under natural selection is a fundamental objective in the field of evolutionary

Inferring Balancing Selection From Genome-Scale Data

Rachel Carson

For Women's History Month, may we all remember and summon the courage of Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring to inform the world what DDT was doing to the songbirds, raptors,and by extension, us. While battling cancer, she stood her ground against savage attacks by the chemical industry...

PopGen Seminar Series Summer Term 2025 04.03.25 – Lutz Becks (Univ. of Konstanz, DE)
The evolutionary dynamics of novel endosymbiosis. 11.03.25 – Ilkka Kronholm (Univ. of Jyväskylä, FI)
How chromatin structure influences genetic and epigenetic variation. 18.03.25 – Katja Hoedjes (Vrije Univ. Amsterdam, NL)
Understanding functional impact of genetic variation on complex traits at a single nucleotide resolution. 25.03.25 – Sophie Armitage (Freie Univ. of Berlin, DE)
Evolutionary ecology of host-pathogen interactions. 01.04.25 – Matthew Rockman (New York Univ., US)
Developmental evolution is a population-genetics problem. 08.04.25 – Wen-Juan Ma (Vrije Univ. Brussels, BE)
The evolution of sex chromosomes and sex determination in frogs. 15.04.25 – Almorò Scarpa (Vetmeduni, AT)
Two centuries of transposable element invasions in Drosophila melanogaster 22.04.25 – Julia Kreiner (Univ. of Chicago, US)
The mode and tempo of genomic adaptation to contemporary agriculture. 29.04.25 – Martin Kaltenpoth (Max Planck Inst. for Chemical Ecology, DE)
Microbial symbionts as sources of evolutionary innovations in beetles. 06.05.25 – Luisa Pallares (Friedrich Miescher Laboratory, DE)
Phenotypic robustness across the genotype-phenotype map, from genes to environment and back. 13.05.25 – Diana Rennison (Univ. of Calif., San Diego, US)
Understanding the predictability of evolutionary trajectories using threespine stickleback.

20.05.25 – Filipa Sousa (Univ. of Vienna, AT)
Bioenergetics Evolution: The link between Earth’s and Life’s history. 27.05.25 – Yun Song (Univ. of California, Berkeley, US)
Learning and applying complex probability distributions over biological sequences. 03.06.25 – April Wei (Cornell Univ., US)
Enabling efficient analysis of biobank-scale data with genotype representation graphs. ALT TEXT OUT OF SPACE, GO TO https://www.popgen-vienna.at/news/seminars/

The PopGen Vienna Seminar series schedule is ready for the next term (Mar-Jun). It's jam-packed with fantastic speakers in #evolution, #genetics, #genomics, #popgen, and more! Details and streaming link signup can be found on our website www.popgen-vienna.at/news/seminars/

A century of theories of balancing selection Traits that affect organismal fitness are often very genetically variable. This genetic variation is vital for populations to adapt to their environments, but it is also surprising given that nature (...

A century of theories of balancing selection www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...