Natterjack toads mating
Natterjack toads are one of the UK’s rarest amphibians, known for their loud mating calls and for breeding in warm, shallow pools that can disappear quickly. They’re famous for their loud, rasping call that can carry surprisingly far at night.
Spring nights on the dunes come alive with sound 🎶🐸
This is the call of the natterjack toad, one of the UK’s rarest amphibians.
Natterjacks depend on warm, shallow pools on coastal dunes and sandy heaths. A rare sound, from a fragile habitat, & one well worth protecting.
⭐Nominate remarkable ecologists for our annual BES prizes⭐
Our awards recognise key influencers in our community whose work has benefited society and significantly advanced our understanding of the natural world🌿
Deadline for nominations is 19 April 🧪
www.britishecologicalsociety.org/bes-prizes/
Any ECRs interested in joining a journal editorial board? I’m leaving an associate editor position due to upcoming maternity leave and other commitments and am happy to offer suggestions to the journal for a relacement. Broad zoology remit, reasonable workload.
Pablo Villar et al discover male octopus mating arms are sensory organs used to find females, navigate internally to the oviduct & deliver sperm. From behavior to structure, these findings offer a framework for how sensory systems shape reproduction & species barriers
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Our new paper in @journal-evo.bsky.social is out! 🎉
We showcase how to use phylogenetic meta-analysis of variance to test evolutionary hypotheses across species, applied here to test patterns of stabilising selection and canalisation for wing length in 172 birds
📄 doi.org/10.1093/evol...
Installation with thousands of paper numbers creating a large passge in rainbow colours
Artist Emmanuelle Moureaux used over 100,000 paper number cut-outs to create this multihued installation designed to visualise the passing of time #WomensArt
How does evolution turn a harmless bacterial feeder into an active predator?
Our new study led by @marianneroca.bsky.social and published in @pnas.org explores how sensory systems were rewired to enable prey detection and predatory behaviour in nematodes.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
🧵below!
Did you know? Insects eat plants as medicine. #OpenAccess
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
A phylogenetic tree of insects is shown annotating the presence or absence of a an antimicrobial peptide gene across winged insects
Various phylogenetic secondary loss events are mapped to a tree of insects to explain the parsimony calculations necessary to explain the diversity of insect Drosomycin antimicrobial peptide genes
Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are key defence molecules of the innate immune system of plants and animals. Understanding the evolutionary origins of AMPs can help to explain how immune systems acquire novelty and vary in their defensive capabilities. However, AMPs evolve rapidly, and so the origins of similar AMPs across organisms is often unclear. Furthermore, false negatives due to low search sensitivity are common and can hinder confident annotations about true absences. Due to these difficulties, understanding whether similar AMP genes found in diverse organisms represent ancestral molecules or evolutionary novelties has been challenging. In this report, we present evidence of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) of the antifungal peptide gene Drosomycin across insects. We show that in Diptera, the presence of Drosomycin is restricted to the Melanogaster group and additionally the distant relative Drosophila busckii. We go on to recover Drosomycin genes in cockroaches (Blattodea), mantises (Mantodea), one katydid (Orthoptera), various beetles (Coleoptera), and a recently acquired pseudogenized Drosomycin locus in Liposcelis booklice (Psocodea), but no other insects. Explaining this diversity through shared ancestry requires at least 50 independent loss events, or just seven HGT events. Previous studies have suggested that similar AMPs found across divergent species reflect conservation from a common ancestor, or due to their small size, that they arose via convergent evolution resulting from pathogen-imposed selection. Our findings suggest horizontal gene transfer can be responsible for the presence of some AMP genes found scattered across the tree of life. By presenting a mechanism through which immune systems can acquire novelty, our study also suggests a possible explanation for certain lineage-specific competencies for defence against infectious disease. While loss of AMP genes is common in certain lineages, here we suggest gain of AMPs can occur just as suddenly.
Pleased to finally share this fun collab that began at #Ento23
@cedricaumont.bsky.social presented & I had seen NCBI annotated some cockroach genomes as "contaminated." Turns out NCBI & I were wrong (much more fun).
Horizontal transfer of an #AntimicrobialPeptide across insects
bit.ly/DrsHGT
1/🧵
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
Open postdoc position in my lab at Cornell, conducting comparative and experimental studies on transcriptomic responses to diet and toxins, utilizing the milkweed-insect community. Background in molecular bio & herbivory desired. academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31867
UCL's Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment invites Early Career Researchers for fellowship applications. Deadline: April 30, 2026. Details: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/life-sciences/gee #postdoc
A black-and-white cartoon shows a person straining to push a huge boulder uphill, evoking Sisyphus. The person is sweating but glances outward with a hopeful expression. Beneath the image, the caption reads, “After this, things are going to calm down for a little while, right?”
Week 13
Promotional image for a scientific meeting organised by the Royal Society. The meeting is titled 'Love, actually and in theory', 5-6 March 2026. On the right of the image is a photograph of two older people dancing happily together.
Register for our upcoming scientific meeting in Edinburgh on 5-6 May as psychologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and zoologists meet to discuss the evolution of love in human relationships: royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectu...
Dream Job Alert! @unituebingen.bsky.social is hiring a FULL PROFESSOR (W3) for EXPERIMENTAL BIODIVERSITY RESEARCH! You work on soil fauna/fungi/food webs and their relations with environment, plants, ecosystem processes? Come and join the @terra-cluster.org and our institute!
Please re-post!
Fig. 1 from the article: Associations of malondialdehyde (MDA) and uric acid (UA) with migration distance in birds. Phylogenetic distribution of MDA, UA and migration distance is shown across bird species
Pap et al. present a comparative study across 113 European species that examines links between oxidative lipid damage, uric acid levels and characteristics of species and their migratory journeys.
➡️ nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jav.03325
My second DPhil paper is out! A nice example of how continuous long-term monitoring of natural populations can be so valuable for understanding impacts of climate change on wild animals 🪶
📍Wytham Woods, Oxfordshire 🌳🪺
Oh this is fun! 🌈 👀
www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/
This was fun!
What's My JND? 0.0074
Can you beat it? www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd...
Many brightly colored pinned moth specimens in an Entomology collection.
Undergrad and graduate students! Could your work benefit from visiting one of the NHMLAC’s collections? Apply for our Collections Study Award, due Apr. 1. I’d love to have students make use of our Entomology collection!
Details here:
tinyurl.com/bdduefsy
🔊 JOB VACANCY
Would you like to work at the heart of a global ornithological membership society?
BOU are seeking a Journal and Engagement Manager to play a central role in delivering our mission
⏰ Apply by 14 April
bou.org.uk/vacancy-j...
#ornithology 🪶
Intense hot pink morph of an adult female Arota festae. Photographed at 23:32 on 27 March 2025 on Barro Colorado Island, Panama, using a Sony A7CR camera with a LAOWA 90 mm f/2.8 lens and a Godox Speedlite TT350 flash. The final image was produced by focus stacking 4 photographs in Adobe Photoshop, with brightness increased for clarity while leaving saturation and hue unaltered. Photo credit: Zeke W. Rowe.
👏🏻 title of the year?! 👏🏻
Pink cricket club: Dramatic color change in a Neotropical leaf-masquerading katydid
From @benitoexplains.bsky.social & @zekerowe.bsky.social
esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Species-specific spectral tuning of motion vision in butterflies: Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol...
Never too late! From a hot summer in 2009 spent in the lab molecularly sexing pied flycatchers to a 2026 paper 🐦
Using 2,759 sexed nestlings (1997–2018) tracked through 2023, we show male attractiveness & annual rearing conditions increase the proportion of sons in broods
🔗 doi.org/10.1016/j.an...
This infographic titled "Crocuses, Saffron & Poisonous Imposters" explores the chemistry and botany of crocuses. It explains that saffron comes from Crocus sativus, which contains the deep red pigment crocin. While yellow petals contain carotenoids, purple petals contain anthocyanins like delphinidin. It warns that Colchicum autumnale, also called "autumn crocus," is a toxic lookalike containing colchicine, a dangerous alkaloid that can cause organ failure but is also used to treat gout.
It’s spring in the northern hemisphere and the crocuses are blooming. Find out more about their colours and poisonous lookalikes in this graphic: www.compoundchem.com/2022/03/15/c...
#ChemSky 🧪
Common frog
Look who I met last night
MENI is back! Join us in Dublin this August 2026 for our 3rd Meeting for Microbial Evolution in Ireland. We are delighted to have @rachelmwheatley.bsky.social @drrebeccajhall.bsky.social @jpjhall.bsky.social and @tweethinking.bsky.social join us as keynote speakers this year. miniurl.com/MENI
How does treatment induced antibiotic resistance happen in real-world infections? We analysed 25k Pseudomonas isolates from 180 patients in a clinical trial to find out! TLDR: The ecological and evolutionary paths are surprisingly diverse & complex even in patients receiving identical treatment…
Ladybird
Sun shining ☀️
Birds singing 🎶
And a little seven-spot ladybird soaking it all in 🐞
