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Daniel Villar

@daniel-a-villar.bsky.social

2.7K followers 4.8K following 390 posts

Conservation biologist and behavioural ecologist. Treasurer of Scientists for Labour. Postdoc at @durhamanthropology.bsky.social, DPhil from @biology.ox.ac.uk

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Daniel Villar @daniel-a-villar.bsky.social · Feb 22

zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/oidcS...

Paper born out of frustration trying to identify sex of Andean species by their plumage in fieldwork has finally been published, showing it isn’t the birds that aren’t dichromatic, but my eyesight that is poor

Sexual dichromatism increases with altitude in birds with ultraviolet sensitive vision

Previous work has shown a significant relationship between sexual dichromatism and altitude in birds, however, this work was focused on either a small subset of avian diversity or used human scoring ...

zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 17h

The elimination of USAID is a moral atrocity and all involved made a choice to enable, and then lie about, ending the lives of some of the most vulnerable people in the world.

MAE SOT, Thailand (AP) - Mohammed Taher clutched the lifeless body of his 2-year-old son and wept. Ever since his family's food rations stopped arriving at their internment camp in Myanmar in April, the father had watched helplessly as his once-vibrant baby boy weakened, suffering from diarrhea and begging for food.
On May 21, exactly two weeks after Taher's little boy died, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat before Congress and declared: "No one has died" because of his government's decision to gut its foreign aid program. Rubio also insisted: "No children are dying on my watch."
That, Taher says, "is a lie."

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 15h

an industry smaller than Onlyfans. Fishing communities deserve protection, but mainly foreign owned industrial trawlers in marine reserves doesn't seem like a growth/nature trade-off that we should be making.

Mongabay @mongabay.com · 15h

The U.K. government has rejected calls to fully ban bottom trawling in its offshore marine protected areas, despite evidence that the fishing practice tears up seabed habitats and releases large amounts of carbon.

UK rejects total ban on bottom trawling in offshore marine protected areas

The U.K. government has rejected calls to fully ban bottom trawling in its offshore marine protected areas, despite evidence that the fishing practice tears up seabed habitats and releases large…

news.mongabay.com

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Peter Mandler @petermandler.bsky.social · 18h

Plus everyone (including the Tory party leader) has forgotten that the Conservatives *designed* the current funding system to subsidize degrees with the RAB charge: it was a feature then, not a bug, and now it is a 'rip off'.

Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 19h

Something grimly predictable about the way that the conversation about 'ripoff degrees' in the UK is always about degrees that aren't rip-offs, but are instead fairly obvious 'this student has chosen something unlikely to pay off economically' rather than the short tail of crap business degrees:

Everyone needs educating in the fight over university degrees

Political confusion over the purpose of these institutions means the obvious fixes are being neglected

www.ft.com

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Daniel Villar @daniel-a-villar.bsky.social · 1d

Wither Hampden, Davenport, Denham, & St John?

George Pearkes @peark.es · 1d

Well that's not how appropriations work at all

*WHITE HOUSE TO TRANSFER TARIFF REVENUE TO FUND WIC: LEAVITT

Reposted by Daniel Villar

Kelsey Atherton @atherton.bsky.social · 1d

this is literally stuff King Charles did, like not only did the American colonists have a revolution to not have this happen, but they did so in the wake of the English revolution, which was about not having stuff like this happen

George Pearkes @peark.es · 1d

Well that's not how appropriations work at all

*WHITE HOUSE TO TRANSFER TARIFF REVENUE TO FUND WIC: LEAVITT

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Daniel Villar @daniel-a-villar.bsky.social · 1d

Not only is this policy dumb on its own terms, but it’s also incredibly corrosive socially. The de facto legalisation of bike theft and phone snatching is one (albeit not the primary) reason why people are moving towards more authoritarian politics

John C @badsocialism.bsky.social · 1d

So much of British policing boils down to the idea that there's no point dealing with Low Intensity Crime even though Low Intensity Crime is the crime 90% of people have to deal with

Will Yeates @wyeates.bsky.social · 2d

The British Transport Police (BTP) says it will not investigate bike thefts outside stations where the bicycle has been left for more than two hours.

Bike thefts at stations 'decriminalised'

Daniel Villar @daniel-a-villar.bsky.social · 1d

Not just the USA; the same dynamics are at play in the U.K., and across the western world. We’ve handed the means of communication over to fascists, and until they cease controlling any victory over them will be temporary at best

Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 1d

The far right goons in Trump’s administration are turning a dial labeled “fascism” and looking back at the audience for approval, except the audience is Elon’s neo-Nazi Twitter and it always approves and wants much more. This is literally why America is collapsing

Reposted by Daniel Villar

Fr Jonathan Bish @frjonathanbish.bsky.social · 2d

My experience is that there was a an absolutely huge gap between people’s beliefs about how their immigration systems work and how they actually work, and if you’ve had experience of the immigration system in the US or UK, you’ll spend a lot of time with one raised eyebrow when the topic comes up!

BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 3d

my in-laws were genuinely shocked that I, an English person, could not simply come and work in the United States at will.

lorem ipsum 🇧🇷🇺🇸 @whiskeynachos.bsky.social · 3d

Believe it or not, this is only the second most naive and clueless thing I've been told about the immigration system. Number one belongs to my own mother, who was so insulated by my dad that she actually asked me "can't I just bring a relative from Brazil to help me care for the house?"

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James Ball @jamesrball.com · 1d

Nanny state Conservatism: your child doesn’t decide whether they want to go to university or not, Kemi Badenoch’s civil servants decide based on her quota…

Times Higher Education (THE) @timeshighered.bsky.social · 1d

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch is expected to announce plans to cut the number of UK university places by about 100,000 annually by reintroducing student number controls, reports Patrick Jack #edusky
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/badenochs-number-caps-plan-would-cut-100000-university-places

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Daniel Villar @daniel-a-villar.bsky.social · 1d

Reminds me of someone I knew in university who lamented the loss of community that stemmed from secularisation, but never attended religious services of any kind.

Daniel Villar @daniel-a-villar.bsky.social · 1d

This complaint annoys me in general. People complaining that things are changing, and yet not reflecting on why that change occurred. It’s as if they think an evil wizard cast a spell and forced people to buy things on Amazon rather than the high street

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Andrés Cuervo @amcuervo.bsky.social · 1d

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
anyone else wondering about Hypopyrrhus?
#ornithology #evosky

Feeding Ecology, Evolutionary Allometry, and Convergence in the Lower Jaw of New World Blackbirds and Allied Passerine Birds (Emberizoidea)

We quantify the mandibular shape of icterids and other emberizoids using three-dimensional geometric morphometrics and its relationship with diet, gaping, and evolutionary allometry through phylogene....

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Daniel Villar @daniel-a-villar.bsky.social · 2d

This I think is what worries me most — across the western world, once enough of the populace decides it wants to go populist right, it seems that the fever never breaks. It just gets more extreme, as voters blame the last lot for not delivering

Dylan Difford @dylandifford.bsky.social · 2d

Italy's on what it's third wave of right-wing populists, after the previous two let their voters down? It doesn't go back in the bottle, just finds a new host.

Reposted by Daniel Villar

SpinningHugo @spinninghugo.bsky.social · 2d

The brilliance of Britain is that it is a concept. Its whole point is it is a *liberal* place.

We don't care what religion you are, what colour your skin is, what your backgorund is, what your beliefs are. We don't subject anyone to the choices of others.

We invented liberalism.

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Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 2d

This whole obsession with "too many people going to uni" is such a classic example of the parochialism of UK policymaking. No one bothers to ask why the % here is lower than in most other developed countries or whether that might be relevant.

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James Ball @jamesrball.com · 2d

It both the US and the UK, the political right teaches institutions not to mess with it – a small slip up with be ruthlessly and publicly exploited.

The left, meanwhile, teaches the same institutions it can be repeatedly and easily messed with, and there will barely be a squeak.

Chaminda Jayanetti @cjayanetti.bsky.social · 2d

if that HIGNFY Euan Blair fuckup had been about a right-winger it'd have had full front-page scandal coverage in the Mail followed by frontpage coverage across the board for the next week, days of "BBC in crisis" headline coverage by the BBC, and parliamentary questions about Tim Davie's future

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Daniel Villar @daniel-a-villar.bsky.social · 3d

Show us the last four albums you listened to

Daniel Villar @daniel-a-villar.bsky.social · 4d

Personally I think that higher ed is a social good that should be accesible to all. But there’s trade offs to each system — what doesn’t work is cutting subsidy, demanding they be social goods, and punishing them for their one remaining major revenue stream

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Daniel Villar @daniel-a-villar.bsky.social · 4d

If unis are social goods only for domestics, then they need state subsidy

If you don’t want subsidy but you want to make education cheap for domestics, you need to let unis get money via internationals

If you oppose subsidy, and don’t want foreign students, you need them to charge market rates

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Daniel Villar @daniel-a-villar.bsky.social · 4d

UKHE is a world class export sector, but has financial problems because the state both doesn’t want unis charging market rates to domestics and doesn’t want to subsidise them. To make up for this, unis have been forced to take on more foreign students, and the gov response is to punish them for it

Antoine Vernet @antoinevernet.bsky.social · 4d

The CAS debacle is testament to how anti-business the government is willing to be: let's turn away students who pay upward of £40k in tuition for a year of study in the UK

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 4d

A politician who embodies the current direction of the Tory party: a supporter of all the big policy shifts of 2016-24, who literally worked in Downing Street, who has decided oh, no, it is actually the fault of the immigrants. No, it’s your fault!

General Boles @generalboles.bsky.social · 4d

*googling 'can I trademark K Lamity?'* www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Next Tory leader? Rise of Katie Lam reflects rightward shift on migration

Shadow Home Office minister who tweets in language of hard-right populism is talked of as future of conservatism

www.theguardian.com

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The Baffler @thebaffler.com · 5d

As president of Uruguay, José Mujica expanded personal freedoms and aided a rapid increase in renewable energy—and left behind a country better than he found it. @sammyfeldblum.bsky.social follows his journey from militant to prisoner to head of state.

Free Radicals | Sammy Feldblum

Though José Mujica did not publish much writing, his views on life and politics live on through the corpus of interviews.

thebaffler.com

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Daniel Villar @daniel-a-villar.bsky.social · 4d

That’s the biological species concept used by Mayr, it’s not the only one used, and it’s certainly not the usual one used in paleo, where you rely on morphology. What is a species is actually a fascinating topic in biology, with plenty of decent literature reviews about it

Reposted by Daniel Villar

Brian J. Enquist @bjenquist.bsky.social · 7d

Classic macroecological laws-long held as signatures of biological systems-also emerge in economic and geological systems. The real signal lies not in the static universal patterns, but in how those patterns shift with scale 🌐🧪 #scaling #macroecology journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Separating Macroecological Pattern and Process: Comparing Ecological, Economic, and Geological Systems

Theories of biodiversity rest on several macroecological patterns describing the relationship between species abundance and diversity. A central problem is that all theories make similar predictions f...

journals.plos.org

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Helen Czerski @helenczerski.bsky.social · 7d

Still active, an inspiration, and doing conservation work right up to the end. Thank you for being a great and wonderful citizen of this planet, Jane Goodall.

www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Jane Goodall, world-renowned primatologist, dies aged 91

Jane Goodall Institute says ‘tireless advocate’ for natural world died in California during US speaking tour

www.theguardian.com

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