A common type of ant in Europe breaks a fundamental rule in biology: its queens can produce male offspring that are a whole different species

go.nature.com/4mOb5T9

And as heavy as three rhinos. No banana for scale? 😉

Absolute honor to hop onto @newspeciespodcast.bsky.social to talk science, bugs and field anecdotes. Thank you Zoe! 🦂

🚨 Postdoc Opportunity in Quantitative & Population Genetics!

We’re hiring a 2-year postdoc at CBGP (INRAE, Montpellier, France) to work on quantitative and population genetics applied to Drosophila biarmipes.

📍 More details: umr-cbgp.fr/rejoindre-le...

#Postdoc #Genetics #Drosophila

I am somehow for the first time ever reviewing for PNAS and their reviewer instructions include this BANGER of a line:

"The purpose of peer review is not to demonstrate proficiency in identifying flaws"

Print it in eleventy point font and hang it from the hillside. Scream it from the rooftops.

OPEN biodiversity DATA ALERT: iNaturalist has released range data for 100k+ taxa: www.inaturalist.org/posts/106918 🌍🧪

Evolutionary stasis in horseshoe crabs!

New writing! For @sciam.bsky.social, I talk about misleading memes.

If you understand evolution enough to know this already, great! But memes/youtubes/etc reach folks with no biology background. Science has been twisted to justify bad things, such as eugenics, before. NOT IN CRABS' NAME.

🦀🧪🦑⚒️

Upon learning that yesterday would be my last day as a program officer at the National Science Foundation, I shared this parting message with my colleagues. The next few months will be frenetic and stressful for them. Here are some things that you can do to help them with the mission ahead. (1)

Where do species come from? where and when did they meet and exchange genes? find it out with our new R tool for historical biogeography, RRphylogeography is published:

doi.org/10.1111/2041...

The majority of people who responded to a poll in Nature say they’re now using Bluesky. They’re using it to connect with other scientists, keep up to date with other research or researchers, and promote their own research. 🧪

Our paper with #postdoc Michael Roswell is out!
TLDR: We test regionally on plants and insects a machine learning protocol originally developed to predict global conservation needs.
The tool performs even better at this scale & can readily assist conservation decision-making. doi.org/10.1111/ddi....

500 million years before humanity ever existed, the world was spectacular.

There are too many horrors to look at right now. Help sustain your soul by remembering what was/is/will be beautiful.

Thank you @cenospire.bsky.social for creating this. SOUND ON.

Arachnologist Lauren Esposito develops community platforms to share LGBTQ+ voices and wants to shed light on the overlooked intersectional barriers affecting queer people of colour.

https://go.nature.com/4jiW1vi

The insanity of being a fire ecologist in the epicenter of a major fire event, bags packed and ready to evacuate, watching active fire from my window, while taking media requests and explaining to the public, for the 100,000th time how climate change is largely responsible for this

Our genome assembly of Hylesia metabus published in Journal of Heredity. A collaboration between CBGP, PHIM, LEEISA, CNRGV, BIPAA IGEPP, SEAG, FUNDSALUD and MGX @cbgpmontpellier.bsky.social @phimresearch.bsky.social

#microCT is awesome.

Species concepts in conservation biology — some thoughts derived from our 2023 paper advocating a retrospective reproductive community concept.

waynemaddison.wordpress.com/2024/12/28/s...

#conservationbiology #evolbio #philbio #philsci #hpbio #SpeciesSaturday @jeannettewhitton.bsky.social

Ok people. I’m drawing silhouettes this afternoon. If you have a paper coming up and you are in need of a #silhouette please let me know and I will have it ready today. As always I upload all my silhouettes to phylopic.org

I also have tutorials on how to put a silhouette in a plot in R.

My Saturday got just a little bit worse. But I'm here for it

Damn.

🚨 Don't eat uncooked snake! Your eyes & lungs can be parasitized by pentastomids, which are a CRUSTACEAN. Adults lack so many features that they weren't believed to be arthropods at all until their DNA was sequenced (and sperm morphology, but that was not widely accepted). Yet, they are!
#Crustmas 🧪

📢 Soutenance de thèse de #Louise_Camus, Jeudi 19 Déc. à 14h00

"Prédiction génomique du potentiel adaptatif de populations dans un nouvel environnement : application aux espèces envahissantes"

Thèse co-encadrée par @mgda76.bsky.social & #Simon_Boitard

Zoom: tinyurl.com/yszp3wmw
Mdp: n1.Czm.dxT