New paper out: Artificial selection for increased reproductive effort accelerates actuarial senescence and reduces lifespan in a precocial bird url: royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article... @uniexecec.bsky.social @erikpostma.bsky.social @joelpick.bsky.social y.social @oscarvedder.bsky.social
And if you want to read more about the survival cost of reproduction in our own species 👩🍼, @euantheyoung.bsky.social's @nlseb.bsky.social 2025 Prize-winning 🏆 paper is a must-read. doi.org/10.1126/scia...
New preprint looking at the associations between maternal mortality and having sons in preindustrial Finland from work with León van Dorp during his master’s project. Also with Mirkka Lahdenpera, @lummaalab.bsky.social, and @hannahdugdale.bsky.social
Mothers face immediate, but family-size dependent, costs of sons in preindustrial Finland www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...
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!
Thanks to some great comments and suggestions, we've updated TADA!
Read it here: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...
Transferable, Available, Documented, Annotated.
“Uruguay did what most nations still call impossible: it built a power grid that runs almost entirely on renewables—at half the cost of fossil fuels. The physicist who led that transformation says the same playbook could work anywhere—if governments have the courage to change the rules.”
📢 I'm hiring! 3-year postdoc in theoretical evolutionary ecology at University of Helsinki 🇫🇮 Apply: jobs.helsinki.fi/job/Helsinki-Postdoctoral-Researcher-in-Theoretical-Evolutionary-Biology/1348955157/
#AcademicJobs #Postdoc #EvolutionaryEcology #TheoreticalEcology #ScienceJobs #AcademicChatter
Life-history traits as predictors of expected genetic contributions 15 years later in a cooperatively breeding bird www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12...
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...
So there you have it, twin study estimates were greatly inflated, and molecular data sets the record straight. I walk through possible counter-arguments, but ultimately the uncomfortable truth is that genes contribute to traits much less than we always thought.
A lot has happened since our first announcement of #ExE2026, an evolutionary ecology conference hosted by @uniexecec.bsky.social in #Cornwall from June 29 to July 3 2026.
Have a look at our new website to see our confirmed plenary speakers, the mid-conference excursions, and more.
👉 evoxeco.uk 👈
POV: you are a young woman celebrating a recent academic success
1/6 In a new preprint we ask a question:
Why do males and females so often age and die at different rates?
We argue that sex-specific mutation accumulation may be the most parsimonious evolutionary explanation for sex-biased ageing:
ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...
This is terrifying.
"[AI agents] can... infer a researcher's latent hypotheses and produce data that artificially confirms them."
...
"We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people" -@seanjwestwood.bsky.social
Join us for this interesting project on fitness consequences of early life experiences in humans 👨👩👧👦 or elephants 🐘🐘🐘!!
**PhD opportunity at @uniexecec.bsky.social** How does host microbiome dynamics affect wildlife disease?
Combine molecular techniques, statistical modelling, and field sampling to understand how microbiome dynamics in 🦡 affects their susceptibility to bTB. 🔬🦠🧪 Please repost! shorturl.at/q3OxV
Congratulations to Dr @euantheyoung.bsky.social who defended his PhD yesterday on 'Family matters: The role of trade-offs in shaping human life-histories and health' research.rug.nl/en/publicati... @rug.nl supervised with @erikpostma.bsky.social @lummaalab.bsky.social 🎉
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.
A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:
a 🧵 1/n
Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Thanks! And yes, I would agree. Short-term (maternal) mortality costs are - for sure - larger. But given that we only look at part of these reproductive costs (i.e., on lifespan) and still find an effect, this to me underlines their importance, at least in this system.
We have an open PhD position (application deadline 9 January 2026) in "Theory of fitness landscapes" at @unibe.ch 🤓⛰️📊👩💻🎓: banklab.github.io/positions/
Please share widely!
#QueerInSTEM #DisabledInSTEM #BlackInSTEM #WomenInSTEM #CarersInSTEM #AcademicSky #HigherED
Thanks Phyllis!
The age-specific trajectories of 13 phenotypic traits in individuals the Seychelles warbler population of Cousin Island (dates differ per dataset, minimum date 1981, maximum date 2022) identified through Generalized Additive Models. The x-axis is age in years, and the y-axis is the trait value; all traits, except for annual reproductive success, survival and malaria, are z-transformed. The solid black line depicts the model-predicted curve and the grey shaded areas depict the standard error. Blue points are raw data points. RTL = relative telomere length. ARS = Annual Reproductive Success. For buffy coat (Fig 1h & i), F indicates female, M indicates male.
"Asynchrony of ageing among traits in a wild bird population"
doi.org/10.32942/X27...
That means a lot Marianthi 🥰
13/ And since I have you here, it's time for some shameless plugging!
I defend my PhD ( :O ) next week, and if you are interested in more of what I got up to over the past few years, you can check out an @nrc.nl here: www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/...
11/ Many thanks to the Strategic Research Council, @erc.europa.eu, and @rug.nl's Rosalind Franklin Fellowship for funding and everyone who has helped with the project. In particular, my *super*vising team.
10/ Overall, this "natural experiment" yields new insights into the consequences of human reproductive behavior. This gives a biological explanation for previously inconsistent results and evidence in favour of reproductive costs playing an important role in shaping human lifespans.
9/ These differences then disappeared again after the famine, probably because of the improvements in healthcare and reductions in family size in 20th-century Finland.
8/ Mothers exposed during other life stages did not show these costs. This suggests that environmental conditions can influence whether mothers suffer reduced lifespans when having more children, but it is the conditions experienced while actively raising children that are most important.
