I would have bet actual money that the dark rover ant, Brachymyrmex patagonicus, was supercolonial. This is a relatively recent arrival to Texas, and it's one of our most common ants now, getting into everything, in huge numbers.
And I would have been very wrong.
The paper: Statistical and Structural Bias in Birth-Death Models by @phylieu.bsky.social & @omearabrian.bsky.social link.springer.com/article/10.1...
That's a great thought, thank you! I think this could be a great option!
...as new names are established and would be a companion to any publication. I would love to have some physical copies too, though.
It's a passion project, so not really needed for my citation record, but ofc it wouldn't hurt :P
Any thoughts about avenues for developing this work are appreciated!
One obvious thing is to add this information to AntCat, which I do plan to do, but I want to maintain the additional discussion and other short chapters.
Right now, I'm considering just maintaining a website while possibly self-publishing a small run of books. A site can be updated...
I'm struggling to find a suitable outlet for publishing this work. It's not right for linguistics publishers or entomology journals. I've considered things like History of Science...It's also hampered by being very long and highly-formatted, though I could hypothetically compromise on the latter...
Looking for perspectives! Background:
For some time I've been cooking up a document which provides etymologies for all genus-group names of ants, plus historical and sociocultural commentary. The direct inspiration is Wheeler&Wheeler's 'Myrmecological Orthoepy & Onomatology".
[continued]
I've always called soldier beetles shoulder beetles and I'm not stopping
Gotcha, thank you again!
Awesome, thank you for the suggestions! I've been looking for reads-based approaches particularly, so these are great. Do you have any GetOrganelle tips or is the documentation solid in your opinion?
What's your favorite tool for extracting mitogenomes from whole-genome sequences?
Since the last time I tried this, the options have proliferated. Any recommendations would be great!
every now and then I get a little bit crow-nly
Job alert! Post-doc position available in the Tsutsui lab at UC Berkeley. I'm specifically looking for someone optimize and scale RNA interference for invasive ant control and eradication. Happy to take questions at ntsutsui@berkeley.edu. Spread the word! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05325
Figure of historical timeline for ideas in the manuscript. Caption reads: "An evolving view of phylogenetic biogeography. Each period (arrow) corresponds to one of the four periods discussed in the main text. The ordering of themes within each period does not precisely correspond to when key ideas were introduced or popularized."
New preprint on the recent history of phylogenetic biogeography, with co-authors Isabel Sanmartín and Joel Cracraft, now up on EcoEvoRxiv: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...
the kind of info fields and links between things. But I don't really know exactly how much AntWeb pages come directly from TW.
time, shapefiles, etc, then associate specimens to that event with their own data like ID, medium, location, notes. Doesn't seem anything that can't be done in other ways but potentially a useful concatenation of those features. I think an AntWeb specimen page is a semi-representative overview of...
I have also found their page to be infuriatingly opaque. If you go to the Guide, there's somewhat more useful info. A lot of what seems most valuable is basically a UI for linking data and metadata across multiple records, e.g., you can make a "collecting event" associated with coordinates...
I don't know about many of its features, but AntWeb uses TaxonWorks for a lot of infrastructure, and it works pretty well for a large, partially collaborative and partially centrally curated database with different data types. I hear your reservations tho
A person dressed in a mascot suit of "Gunrock" the horse, mascot for UC Davis. It is a bipedal blue horse wearing blue sneakers, silver basketball shorts and a black t-shirt with the text "Aggie Pack". The mascot's mouth extends too far back for a horse, giving it an uncanny look and recalling the memes about horses with dogs' mouths.
For some horrible reason this is how the UC Davis mascot is designed.
@mossworm.bsky.social new hypothesis, fairy scrumps are just free-living woodlouse nervous systems.
Hi all. I am very excited that after 6 years I finally got my phylogenetic comparative methods book and online exercises online. Feel free to use and share. The book is here: nhcooper123.github.io/pcm-primer/. Note that it is not finished, we had to abandon it before the sunk costs fallacy broke us
I like the thinking and suggestions here. . .
"Biology needs philosophy, but what philosophy?"
DiFirsco & Orzack 2026
doi.org/10.1093/bios...
Ants are experts at telling nestmates from foreigners via subtle differences in odor profiles. In this new paper, we explore the conditions under which ants develop and maintain tolerance to foreigners. Turns out the ant recognition system is surprisingly plastic.
www.cell.com/current-biol...
shrmp (too small for vowels)
Couldn't sum it up better than this: "I've realized now that writing *is* how I think best: often, my thoughts only crystallize once I try to put words on the page and then revise those words repeatedly."
If you outsource your writing, you outsource your thinking. And then what is even the point?
a sponge wrote this
Just in case anybody out there wants a postdoc with some of the coolest people in the field, here it is!
jobs.anu.edu.au/jobs/researc...
📢 Including fossil tips in your phylogeny can double your continuous trait model fitting accuracy!
Updated preprint out now on @ecoevorxiv.bsky.social.
🔗 doi.org/10.32942/X27...
with @pedrolgodoy.bsky.social @macroecoevoale.bsky.social and @bethanyjallen.bsky.social
IME, almost no publications actually cite species authors/descriptions in the bibliography, even when the author and year are given in text; even in taxonomic works.
