Ziv E. Lieberman
@formicula.bsky.social
ants. emmets. mires 🞚 systematics🞚evolutionary morphology & anatomy🞚 paleoentomology🞚biogeography🞚3D imaging
PhD candidate at UC Davis || views & statements my own
{they|them} ☄
PhD candidate at UC Davis || views & statements my own
{they|them} ☄
Reposted by Ziv E. Lieberman
Hey bsky! I’d like to share some cool work I recently coauthored that integrates entomology, paleontology, and German cultural history. 🔶🐜⚡️ We discovered a fossil ant in the amber collection of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe! Read on for a delightful story of #museomics and #collectomics. >> 1/
February 5, 2026 at 1:11 PM
Hey bsky! I’d like to share some cool work I recently coauthored that integrates entomology, paleontology, and German cultural history. 🔶🐜⚡️ We discovered a fossil ant in the amber collection of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe! Read on for a delightful story of #museomics and #collectomics. >> 1/
Reposted by Ziv E. Lieberman
reading about organisms that aren’t your specialty is like
margins of the quorbus eplungulate, ploobular processes bent posteriorly towards the foobulum
define term “eplungulate”
- lacking plungae. synonym: thubulous
margins of the quorbus eplungulate, ploobular processes bent posteriorly towards the foobulum
define term “eplungulate”
- lacking plungae. synonym: thubulous
February 2, 2026 at 10:14 PM
reading about organisms that aren’t your specialty is like
margins of the quorbus eplungulate, ploobular processes bent posteriorly towards the foobulum
define term “eplungulate”
- lacking plungae. synonym: thubulous
margins of the quorbus eplungulate, ploobular processes bent posteriorly towards the foobulum
define term “eplungulate”
- lacking plungae. synonym: thubulous
Reposted by Ziv E. Lieberman
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
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
January 13, 2026 at 8:27 AM
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
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
I fell down a big 'standards of identity' rabbit hole recently😅
January 27, 2026 at 2:36 AM
I fell down a big 'standards of identity' rabbit hole recently😅
As a note, American cheese doesn't necessarily require that name. If it's just cheese with emulsifiers, acidifiers, etc. it is just American cheese; if it's 51% cheese but also contains dairy like milk, whey, or cream, it's a "cheese food". The use of milk protein concentrate makes it a "product".
January 26, 2026 at 6:24 AM
As a note, American cheese doesn't necessarily require that name. If it's just cheese with emulsifiers, acidifiers, etc. it is just American cheese; if it's 51% cheese but also contains dairy like milk, whey, or cream, it's a "cheese food". The use of milk protein concentrate makes it a "product".
My favorite binomial is Dendrocygna autumnalis, for the meaning and mostly for the way it feels to say.
January 23, 2026 at 1:23 AM
My favorite binomial is Dendrocygna autumnalis, for the meaning and mostly for the way it feels to say.
It's (in my opinion) very robustly ctenos. There's been a few sponge-sister papers recently, but there were some pretty severe flaws. The gene linkage paper by Schultz et al. (2023) on the issue was very strong evidence for ctenos.
January 21, 2026 at 5:31 AM
It's (in my opinion) very robustly ctenos. There's been a few sponge-sister papers recently, but there were some pretty severe flaws. The gene linkage paper by Schultz et al. (2023) on the issue was very strong evidence for ctenos.
Another responses to the recent sponge/ctenophore paper in Science. . .also worth a read!
Our eLetter github.com/caseywdunn/s... responding to a recent Science paper was just posted. The paper found more genes with consistent support for sponge-sister than ctenophore-sister. We found several technical issues that, when corrected, reverse the conclusions and recover ctenophore-sister.
January 9, 2026 at 11:12 PM
Another responses to the recent sponge/ctenophore paper in Science. . .also worth a read!
Reposted by Ziv E. Lieberman
New work from @miyapan.bsky.social and our team, bringing ant, bee, and wasp labs together. @chuanxinyu.bsky.social shows that the ANTSR locus we discovered in ants has determined sex for 150+ My across bees and stinging wasps 🐜🐝, despite virtually no sequence conservation 😮 doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
January 6, 2026 at 3:01 AM
New work from @miyapan.bsky.social and our team, bringing ant, bee, and wasp labs together. @chuanxinyu.bsky.social shows that the ANTSR locus we discovered in ants has determined sex for 150+ My across bees and stinging wasps 🐜🐝, despite virtually no sequence conservation 😮 doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
Reposted by Ziv E. Lieberman
New Ant Lab video today about pincer wasps and a new research project. This one has some really cool, newly-filmed insect behavior in it! youtu.be/9osTBzQ0zbk
Spring-Loaded Claws on a Wasp – Parasitoid Pincer Wasps
YouTube video by Ant Lab
youtu.be
December 22, 2025 at 3:19 PM
New Ant Lab video today about pincer wasps and a new research project. This one has some really cool, newly-filmed insect behavior in it! youtu.be/9osTBzQ0zbk
Reposted by Ziv E. Lieberman
I posted an eLetter to the recent Science paper claiming strong evidence for sponges as the sister group to all other animals.
The eLetter can be found under the original article.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
The eLetter can be found under the original article.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Integrative phylogenomics positions sponges at the root of the animal tree
Determining whether sponges or ctenophores root the animal tree has important implications for understanding early animal evolution. Here, we examined support for these competing hypotheses by constru...
www.science.org
December 17, 2025 at 11:58 PM
I posted an eLetter to the recent Science paper claiming strong evidence for sponges as the sister group to all other animals.
The eLetter can be found under the original article.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
The eLetter can be found under the original article.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Looking for leads on methods for inferring ancestral areas (historical biogeography) that incorporate fossils - specifically total-clade fossils. I've seen ways to use fossils in Bayesian biogeo, but those required the fossils to be resolved tips.
December 2, 2025 at 5:59 AM
Looking for leads on methods for inferring ancestral areas (historical biogeography) that incorporate fossils - specifically total-clade fossils. I've seen ways to use fossils in Bayesian biogeo, but those required the fossils to be resolved tips.
Reposted by Ziv E. Lieberman
Harmony in the hive? Think again! 🐝⚔️
Insect societies are famous for cooperation, but beneath the surface lies a brutal conflict over who gets to wear the crown!
Our new review in Biological Reviews explores the evolutionary battleground caused by such caste fate conflict. 🧵
Insect societies are famous for cooperation, but beneath the surface lies a brutal conflict over who gets to wear the crown!
Our new review in Biological Reviews explores the evolutionary battleground caused by such caste fate conflict. 🧵
November 24, 2025 at 1:08 PM
Harmony in the hive? Think again! 🐝⚔️
Insect societies are famous for cooperation, but beneath the surface lies a brutal conflict over who gets to wear the crown!
Our new review in Biological Reviews explores the evolutionary battleground caused by such caste fate conflict. 🧵
Insect societies are famous for cooperation, but beneath the surface lies a brutal conflict over who gets to wear the crown!
Our new review in Biological Reviews explores the evolutionary battleground caused by such caste fate conflict. 🧵
Reposted by Ziv E. Lieberman
Assessing the impact of character evolution models on phylogenetic and macroevolutionary inferences from fossil data onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... @daveyfwright.bsky.social @datadryad.bsky.social
October 27, 2025 at 8:45 PM
Assessing the impact of character evolution models on phylogenetic and macroevolutionary inferences from fossil data onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... @daveyfwright.bsky.social @datadryad.bsky.social
. . .The position here taken seems so obviously unwarranted as to hardly merit discussion." Similarly, "Under No. 41: No one accepts the idea that the type of the genus is the sum of the species."
October 24, 2025 at 10:08 PM
. . .The position here taken seems so obviously unwarranted as to hardly merit discussion." Similarly, "Under No. 41: No one accepts the idea that the type of the genus is the sum of the species."
"We must dissent, however, from Rule 38 in so far as it relates to 'co-types,' this part being to the effect that when a species is 'described from more than one specimen, no single one being selected as the type, the 'type' in this case is the 'sum of the co-types'. . .
October 24, 2025 at 10:08 PM
"We must dissent, however, from Rule 38 in so far as it relates to 'co-types,' this part being to the effect that when a species is 'described from more than one specimen, no single one being selected as the type, the 'type' in this case is the 'sum of the co-types'. . .
I'm interested in this too. All I can say is that it predates 1878, as Strickland's Rules for Zoological Nomenclature refers to types. The Merton Rules in 1896 had some whacky concepts about them, excoriated by Coues and Allen in 1897. . .
October 24, 2025 at 10:08 PM
I'm interested in this too. All I can say is that it predates 1878, as Strickland's Rules for Zoological Nomenclature refers to types. The Merton Rules in 1896 had some whacky concepts about them, excoriated by Coues and Allen in 1897. . .
Dean Koontz is Fred Willard in a 2009 Bieber wig. I knew it all along.
October 19, 2025 at 3:15 AM
Dean Koontz is Fred Willard in a 2009 Bieber wig. I knew it all along.
...we raise some points that are more broadly relevant. These regard study design, model implementation & testing, and interpretation, in particular relating to taxon and site downsampling, model fit, & sensitivity tests. We also clarify the common conflation of compositional and site heterogeneity.
October 17, 2025 at 3:35 AM
...we raise some points that are more broadly relevant. These regard study design, model implementation & testing, and interpretation, in particular relating to taxon and site downsampling, model fit, & sensitivity tests. We also clarify the common conflation of compositional and site heterogeneity.
Dear colleagues,
I'd like to share a short new contribution on the application of highly complex site-heterogeneous models, in particular CAT-GTR, to phylogenomic inference. While this paper arises from a recent publication on the early-branching topology of ants...
I'd like to share a short new contribution on the application of highly complex site-heterogeneous models, in particular CAT-GTR, to phylogenomic inference. While this paper arises from a recent publication on the early-branching topology of ants...
Ant phylogeny is not resolved by the application of site heterogeneous models - Communications Biology
Communications Biology - Ant phylogeny is not resolved by the application of site heterogeneous models
tinyurl.com
October 17, 2025 at 3:35 AM
Dear colleagues,
I'd like to share a short new contribution on the application of highly complex site-heterogeneous models, in particular CAT-GTR, to phylogenomic inference. While this paper arises from a recent publication on the early-branching topology of ants...
I'd like to share a short new contribution on the application of highly complex site-heterogeneous models, in particular CAT-GTR, to phylogenomic inference. While this paper arises from a recent publication on the early-branching topology of ants...
Reposted by Ziv E. Lieberman
Out now in Biology Letters, my latest paper tackles an apparently simple question: how many characters are needed to reconstruct a phylogeny? TL;DR: in most cases between 100 and 500, more than a substantial portion of morphological datasets, but the story is more complex... doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...
October 15, 2025 at 9:29 AM
Out now in Biology Letters, my latest paper tackles an apparently simple question: how many characters are needed to reconstruct a phylogeny? TL;DR: in most cases between 100 and 500, more than a substantial portion of morphological datasets, but the story is more complex... doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...
Reposted by Ziv E. Lieberman
Absolutely beautiful figures in this one
I am extremely happy to see that our review on fossil tip-dating is out in early view in Systematic Biology! A huge thanks to all the authors of this massive project (@heckeberg.bsky.social, @basantakhakurel.bsky.social, Gustavo Darlim, and @hoehna.bsky.social)! academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...
September 26, 2025 at 12:01 AM
Absolutely beautiful figures in this one
In the Zoological code, the relevant articles are 27, which forbids marks like hyphens except when Art. 32.5.2.4.3 applies: "If the first element is a Latin letter used to denote descriptively a character of the taxon, it must be retained and connected to the remainder of the name by a hyphen."
September 22, 2025 at 9:01 PM
In the Zoological code, the relevant articles are 27, which forbids marks like hyphens except when Art. 32.5.2.4.3 applies: "If the first element is a Latin letter used to denote descriptively a character of the taxon, it must be retained and connected to the remainder of the name by a hyphen."
Reposted by Ziv E. Lieberman
Here is a confocal stack of a clonal raider ant antenna from first author and FISHerman extraordinaire Giacomo Glotzer. You can see the densely packed cell bodies of olfactory sensory neurons, along with fluorescent signal from two different odorant receptors and an intergenic region.
September 19, 2025 at 3:44 PM
Here is a confocal stack of a clonal raider ant antenna from first author and FISHerman extraordinaire Giacomo Glotzer. You can see the densely packed cell bodies of olfactory sensory neurons, along with fluorescent signal from two different odorant receptors and an intergenic region.