What larks! Howling mice, self-decapitating slugs and butt-poison-firing beetles. All in @joannabagniewska.com's modern bestiary and another cracking @pubsci.bsky.social.

Thanks for coming!

15th April – The Modern Bestiary with Joanna Bagniewska Meet some of the weirdest, wildest, most wondrous living creatures that share this amazing planet with us!

IanVisits rates it one of the "Top things to do in London" tomorrow — so grab your ticket for @joannabagniewska.com's talk on beasts, bestiaries, and "crazy-but-true" creatures which wouldn't be out of place alongside the hippogriffs of a medieval manuscript!

pubsci-april2026.eventbrite.co.uk

Now, was the grebe hungry, or was it just sick of the chiffchaff yelling its own name over and over and over again?

#birdsaredicks
🧪🪶🌍🐦

✔️ Beers
✔️ Bars
❌ Bears
❌ Bores
There might be some burs and Boers, but I'm not 100% sure.

Try and stop me.

The bear has, unfortunately, retired.

15th April – The Modern Bestiary with Joanna Bagniewska Meet some of the weirdest, wildest, most wondrous living creatures that share this amazing planet with us!

Book your spaces - pay what you can.

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/15th-april...

Joanna reading The Modern Bestiary to a dead bear.

The Modern Bestiary: like the medieval bestiary, but with less moralising and more wildlife. Also more butts, sex and grossness.

I will be talking about bestiaries in general and The Modern Bestiary in particular at @pubsci.bsky.social in London on 15 Apr. Booking link below.

#SciComm 🧪🪶🦊 #BookSky

These snakes steal poison from their prey—here's how they know they have enough Snakes that gain poisons from eating toads seem to know when they’re toxic by keeping track of what they last ate

These snakes are both more organized and more toxic than me: 🧪 www.scientificamerican.com/article/thes...

A screenshot of the Paper Trail blog series webpage, showing four blog thumbnails with striking photographs of different animals. The first is a brightly coloured spider for the blog "The Politics of Taxonomy - Tangled in a Web of Inequalities". The second is of two mouse lemurs looking sweetly up to the left, over the blog "Out on a Limb: How Primates Jump in the Trees". The third is of an elephant emerging from behind a tree in tall grass in soft lighting, above the blog "Elephant Poo is a World Class Fertilizer... Sometimes". The final one is a blue-lit beetle, proud and mysterious, almost mirroring the posture and form of the elephant to its right, above the blog "Ghosts of the Past: How DNA Reveals an Extinct Island Lineage".

📣 Call for writers!

Are you an early career researcher? University student? Science communicator? Know someone who is? We're always looking for new Guest Bloggers to contribute to our journal blog The Paper Trail! Have a read below, or check out our vacancies page to apply.

buff.ly/7IohkLQ

Is the bird nest of the future 3D-printed and made of mushrooms? As ancient, hollowed trees disappear in England, one researcher and his team are engineering prosthetic nests to provide an alternative home for endangered birds.

3D-printed bird boxes are being trialled at Blenheim Palace in an attempt to provide more appealing habitats for marsh tits, whose numbers have halved since the 1970s. The boxes are made out of mycelium (mushroom substance) and shaped to dissuade predators. www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/arti...

@oxfordclarion.bsky.social - nice and local!

"Everything is old in Europe" - snails from 140 MYA at London Paddington paving slabs.
🧪 🐌 🚇

Statistically significant chuckles: who is using humour at scientific conferences? Abstract. We’ve all been there: 11.47, swamped by a long stretch of dense scientific talks at a conference. Six slides into a hyper-technical presentation,

Do scientific conferences need to be boring? Who uses humour in their talks and how do the jokes land?

A joyous little paper by @stefanomammola.bsky.social et al., with a great abstract too (starting with "We’ve all been there" is a clear winner!):
doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

#AcademicSky #SciComm 🧪

Male (left) and female (right) emperor cichlid B. microlepis breeders with free-swimming fry. Image from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/view-large/figure/19969769/rsos.251919.f001.tif

"Oi, get your eyes off my eggs!"

Fish know when you're staring at them - and they don't like it. Tourists, avert your gaze, please.

🧪🐠👀

Study of emperor cichlids: royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article...

"Get them in with the rage baiting, then give them biology” - how to channel online hate into great science communication.
@juliet-turner.bsky.social from @biology.ox.ac.uk shares how she handled misogyny on social media and used it to open career opportunities 💙
🧪
#academicsky #scicomm #womeninSTEM

Ahh, I finally get to feel like a true supervisor: I stand around as my students climb trees and install nest boxes!
Read about our mycelium (🍄) bird boxes in the National Geographic article below.

#Academicsky 🧪🪶

‪
🌳 Do you want to contribute to research on how humans perceive forests? Take this quick, anonymous 10-min survey 🌲

👉 www.biodiful.org#/forest

This will help us explore how people experience forest biodiversity!

Please share on 🦋 & tag @biodiful.bsky.social to reach more participants 🙏💚

🌐🌍🦤🦑🪴🍁🧪

You're right, but without data it is even harder to convince policymakers to change how the world runs. Plus, why not do both?

Also, it's never too late to study - some of our students have just entered retirement and going strong! Others may be in their 20s. It's great to have a varied cohort.

PGCert in Ecological Survey Techniques | University of Oxford About the courseThe Postgraduate Certificate (PGCert) in Ecological Survey Techniques is a part-time taught course combining online and field-based learning to develop skills in biodiversity

Sounds like you'd be the perfect person for our PGCert in Ecological Survey Techniques! We cover different monitoring setups, but usually venture beyond backyards (though urban wildlife is interesting, too). www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/g...

We grow the mushrooms, not kill them. Using customisable box designs means that you can put tree hollows in places that have been impacted by say, forest fires, and mould them to the tree shape. Also, nestboxes are a standard in bird research - might as well use biodegradable ones.

Aren't you a fungi.

Is the bird nest of the future 3D-printed and made of mushrooms? As ancient, hollowed trees disappear in England, one researcher and his team are engineering prosthetic nests to provide an alternative home for endangered birds.

Our work on building bird boxes out of mushrooms is featured in National Geographic!
Mycelium (🍄) boxes are lightweight, biodegradable and carbon-neutral; we are trialling them against conventional bird boxes.
🪶 🧪
Read more here:
www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/arti... by @interspecies.agency

🧪🐳🦭🐬

🎶Everybody farts... sometimes. 💨
Researchers want to know exactly how often, and they're using specially designed undies to do so.
Smart underwear - or fart underwear.
Now you know.
🧪

Hopefully with @drhedgehog.bsky.social's findings, Hedgehog Hugh will no longer get into trouble on the A32.
🦔🚗🧪🌍

Indian pangolin, photo by Sandip Kumar, Wikimedia Commons

Long-tailed, or black-bellied, pangolin - photo by US Fish and Wildlife Service, Wikimedia Commons

A Philippine Pangolin pup nudges its mother, rolled up into a protective ball., photo by Shukran888 Wikimedia Commons.

Pangolins in numbers (thanks to @danchallender.bsky.social's brilliant talk):
- Largest: a 48kg pangzilla (Indian pangolin)
- Scaliest: Philippine pangolin, ~1000 per animal
- Most vertebrae in tail: 47, long-tailed pangolin (duh)

Pangolins are surprisingly strong - some enough to kill a leopard!
🧪

Science explains the perspective in Manet's painting - and adds a depth of meaning!
🧪

"Ask Me About Science!" Got some time and want to engage your community? Grab a whiteboard, find a seat with foot traffic, and see what unfolds! "Hello! Im a friendly neighborhood scientist, and I work on Linsert area of expertise and practice]. Ask me about science!" written on a whiteboard

What if every scientist spent one afternoon a month just talking about science with strangers?

Last week, I had the pleasure of hearing @beccmel2.bsky.social speak about in-person engagement for @standupforscience.bsky.social.

How can you do that in your community? Try a whiteboard!

(1/10) 🧪

Butts, butts, butts! #WorldWildlifeDay butts - and the best one of them belongs to a dragonfly. What's so special about it? I explain in this here video.

For more animal butt facts, buy my book (or just ask me).
🧪🍑

Big shoutout to the @morethanadodo.bsky.social, where the greatest filming happens.