This was one of the first projects I started during the early pandemic days of my PhD and it is incredibly special to have out in the world. I am so grateful to my coauthors for sharing their deep knowledge and enthusiasm for eastern massasaugas with me, and trusting me with this amazing dataset!

While the populations in this study seem to be demographically stable (more on that forthcoming from the Hileman lab at WVU!), this has pressing implications for the conservation of this species, which has seen widespread habitat loss and local extinction across their range.

Inbreeding depression is expected to be ubiquitous but is difficult to document in wild populations. Using targeted genomic data from just over 1000 individuals and capture-recapture models, we find evidence of inbreeding depression on the two major components of fitness—survival and reproduction.

This paper represents a huge collaborative effort by Eric Hileman, Jen Moore, Lisa Faust, Randy Junge, Brendan Reid, Danielle Bradke, @gbradburd.bsky.social, @swfitz.bsky.social, and many others over the years!

Thrilled to have a new paper out where we use 12+ years of monitoring data to document the impacts of inbreeding on fitness in eastern massasauga rattlesnakes! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

So great to get out on the water, see some beautiful kelp beds, and learn more about kelp microbiome sampling!

I'm beyond words at this point.

If I wanted to literally straight-up destroy any efforts at basic biology research in the US, this is exactly how I'd do it.

On this week’s ep, Kevin Bird (@stairwaytokevin.bsky.social) explains the events of the last 3 months, how science is funded in the United States, why it is being attacked so aggressively, and the ideologies behind these attacks. Found everywhere you get podcasts.
open.spotify.com/episode/0E9l...

Congratulations Chris!

I got an email yesterday afternoon that my NSF SPRF Postdoctoral Fellowship was terminated. My grant focused on testing interventions to address online misinformation and I was 8 months into a two year appointment.

If you have experienced direct harm to your work/lab/job due to recent changes at US NSF, & are willing to share this on behalf of the Am. Society of Naturalists and NSF, please DM/ email me ASAP (this is time-sensitive) or submit story here sites.google.com/view/scienti...
Please share widely

Hi Nevé! If you send me your email, I can add you!

To expand on this, right now ~200 postdoc fellows directly funded by NSF are locked out of their salary &research funds right before the first of the month. No doubt other NSF funded grads &postdocs are affected as well. All requests for funds put in before the freeze are slowly being cancelled

I’m so sorry you’re in this position. None of us can receive money from our awards right now, but I’m not sure if there would be additional ramifications for starting the fellowship. If you send me your email, I can add you to the PRFB slack.

As of this AM, it is uncertain how NSF postdoc fellows will be impacted.

If you are on an NSF PRFB and not a member of the slack group, send me a message.