🚨New (very special) preprint! 🚨"What is the human germline mutation rate? methodological innovations, challenges, and evolutionary implications" doi.org/10.32942/X2T... The product of many coffees & pains au chocolat with @hhydrochaerus.bsky.social debating the knows and unknowns about mutations 🧬🧪

Ecological harshness has a weak influence on reproductive trade-offs in a great tit population Abstract. Lack’s seminal work on bird clutch sizes has spurred expansive research on reproductive trade-offs, especially focusing on offspring quantity–qua

Ecological harshness has a weak influence on reproductive trade-offs in a #greattit population:

@lbliard.bsky.social et al. 2026:

doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...

Thinking like a mountain in the age of AI Click on the article title to read more.

In a sea of opinions about the role of LLMs in academics I offer my own.

Apart from being harmful, exploitive plagiarism machines, LLMs rob us of the opportunity to experience the gift of friction in writing, which changes how we think.

We must not give away that gift.

doi.org/10.1002/fee....

Ecological harshness has a weak influence on reproductive trade-offs in a great tit population Abstract. Lack’s seminal work on bird clutch sizes has spurred expansive research on reproductive trade-offs, especially focusing on offspring quantity–qua

New paper out in @jevbio.bsky.social
Using 58 years of data, we look at the effect of environmental variation on reproductive trade-offs in great tits.

With @jsmartin.bsky.social, @dzchilds.bsky.social, Ella Cole, @sheldonbirds.bsky.social, @paniw.bsky.social & Arpat Ozgul

doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...

Very cool study, David!
The mass of individuals increases as they get older, or could it be due to the selective disappearance of lighter (frail) individuals within each cohort as the cohort ages?

Decline in body mass in adult (left) and nestling great tits. In the nestling plot, the purple line represents all nestling and the green line those that recruited to the population as breeders. Their different slope suggest an increase in the strength of selection on nestling mass something confirmed in the MS by analysing the temporal trends in selection differentials (see link for further information)

We have published a new pre-print showing a decline in great tit adult and nestling mass of around 1 gram in 47 y. [rate of approx. -0.040 Hadanes] With @ellafcole.bsky.social, @devisatarkar.bsky.social, Sam. Crofts, @mcmahok.bsky.social & @sheldonbirds.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Replication studies: a win-win for early-career training and behavioral ecology Replicating previous research builds confidence that results are real and meaningful. But close replications are rare due to limitations in resources and d

How do we know our research results are REAL? We replicate them! Most folks agree but lament on how hard it is to publish these replications.

My dearest gentle reader, lament no more! Delighted to unveil: Replication Studies, a new section of Behavioral Ecology 1/

academic.oup.com/beheco/artic...

I am looking for a PhD student to join my new Socio-Eco-Evo group, hosted in Katie Peichel's Evolutionary Ecology Division @ University of Bern. We're offering a fully funded 4-year position, studying social plasticity and behavioral adaptation among stickleback in Greenland. Please share around!

🚨 PhD offer (please share)
Fascinated by bird migration and movement ecology? 🦜🌍 Join us at @vogelwarte.bsky.social to study annual cycle energetics with multi-sensor loggers in multiple species

Deadline: 20 Feb 2026
Starting: June 2026
Supervision: Martins Briedis & me

Info: tinyurl.com/2dbv9nzh

We've got ISSUES. Literally.

We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do?

arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563

A 🧵 1/n

Happy to hare that the preprint I was advertising below has been published by the Journal of Evolutionary Biology:

academic.oup.com/jeb/advance-...

Thanks @jevbio.bsky.social for supporting responsible publishing!

Imputation of ancient canid genomes reveals inbreeding history over the past 10,000 years | PNAS The multi-millennia-long history between dogs and humans has placed them at the forefront of archaeological and genomic research. Despite ongoing e...

Our paper in the PNAS Special Feature on 🐕 is out!
We demonstrated the accuracy of imputing ancient canid genomes, looked at inbreeding levels over the past 10,000 years and found genomic regions resistant to ROH which were enriched for immunity and chemosensory genes.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I’m excited to announce the launch of my lab at EPFL in Jan 2026 🎉. We’ll combine evolution & synthetic biology to study and (re)engineer bacterial communication.
I’m recruiting PhD students to start in the first semester of 2026.
Apply via EPFL PhD programs by Nov 1
drive.google.com/file/d/1cm-t...

Examples of some recent papers from graduate students in my group - a full list of recent papers and preprints can be found here (https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=pTdxVdIAAAAJ) and profile of the group here: https://egioxford.web.ox.ac.uk/members

The annual Wytham Field Team Photo!

Celebrating a successful field season with great food & good company - May 2025

Front view of the Life & Mind Building, which opened in Oct 2025: The new home of Biology at Oxford

Interested in a PhD in ornithology? Funding available for projects at the interface of ecology, behaviour & evolution from Oct '26 working on long-term population studies of tits at Wytham, based in @biology.ox.ac.uk in the new Life & Mind Building in Oxford
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

📣 Hot off the press at #ProcB!

🔍 Our study checked data/code-sharing policies in 275 eco/evo journals and compliance in Proc B (n=2,340) & Ecology Letters (n=571). Policies exist, but clarity and strictness vary, affecting reproducibility.

🔗 doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

Symposia - SMBE 2026 - Copenhagen Denmark SMBE 2026 Symposia Check deadlines and important dates below.  Days Hours Minutes Seconds Conference Symposia We are now accepting proposals for symposium for the 2026 Annual meeting taking place in C...

🚨 The #SMBE2026 website is live! 🚨
The call for symposia is now open ➡️ smbe2026.org/symposia/
📅 Opens: Sept 1, 2025
📅 Closes: Oct 15, 2025
📢 Results: Nov 3, 2025
We can’t wait to welcome you to beautiful #Copenhagen 🌍✨
@official-smbe.bsky.social
#evolution #science

Covariance reaction norms: A flexible method for estimating complex environmental effects on trait (co)variances Estimating quantitative genetic and phenotypic (co)variances is crucial for investigating evolutionary ecological phenomena such as developmental integration, life history trade-offs and niche spe...

My first solo author paper is now available in early view at Methods in Ecology and Evolution! I develop a covariance reaction norm (CRN) model for estimating continuous, multivariate, and nonlinear environmental effects on G and P matrices.

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