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Rebecca Bliege Bird

@parnajarlpa.bsky.social

250 followers 63 following 13 posts

Anthropologist at Penn State studying and posting about indigenous land/resource ecology, behavioral ecology, cooperation, sharing, costly signaling, women’s hunting, fire ecology, plant dispersal. Also a feminist.

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Rebecca Bliege Bird @parnajarlpa.bsky.social · Nov 21

Check out this blog post summarizing our latest paper on anthropogenic seed dispersal!Indigenous landscape fire and seed dispersal promotes native plants and increases access to traditional foods in desert Australia. Link to paper at the top of the post. 🧪

Seed dispersal by Martu peoples promotes the distribution of native plants in arid Australia

Many Indigenous peoples recognise that the abundance and fertility of some local ‘wild’ plants are dependent on their intervention. The loss of these types of ecological services due to the spread of ...

communities.springernature.com

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Penn State Anthropology @psuanthro.bsky.social · Mar 1

We’re at the PREMIERE of “A Century after Nanook!” A documentary film by our own Dr. Kirk French!

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Bill Lukens @paleosol.bsky.social · Feb 20

What does US tax money (via #NSF research grants) pay for?

Example:
I employ 3-5 UG researcher in my lab w/NSF $$.
- They quit jobs in retail,
- Spend more time in scientific spaces,
- Gain confidence,
- GPAs rise,
- They graduate and join the workforce,

... and we get competent geoscientists.
🧪

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Jeremy Koster @jeremykoster.bsky.social · Feb 19

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)

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James Holland Jones @juemos.bsky.social · Feb 9

Hard to overstate how bad the Musk administration is going to be for American agriculture.

News Eye @newseye.bsky.social · Feb 7

US farmers sold $2 billion of food to USAID. Not any more.

- US farmers provided 41% of food delivered by USAID
- $340M of purchases/shipments are now paused. Over 680,000 tonnes.
- Food stranded in Houston
- Aid stopped in transit.

The world’s poor starving, food rotting & US farmers screwed.

Gutting USAID threatens billions of dollars for U.S. farms, businesses

U.S. businesses that sold goods and services to USAID are in limbo, including American farms dealing in rice, wheat and soybeans.

www.washingtonpost.com

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Jay D. Aronson @jaydaronson.bsky.social · Feb 9

Michael Roth is one of the few university president who actually gets the urgency of the moment. slate.com/life/2025/02...

Dear Fellow College Presidents: We Need to Do More Than Wait This One Out

Why civil society needs university leaders to speak up.

slate.com

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American Opposition @americanopposition.org · Feb 8

On February 17, we hope to see the largest peaceful protest event in American history. We want Donald Trump and his supporters in Congress to know that the American people will not surrender to fascism. Share this widely. Take your friends. Show up for your nation. #NotMyPresidentDay

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Miriam Goldstein @miriamgoldstein.bsky.social · Feb 6

Just in case you thought that removing DEI criteria would mean that everyone is competing equally: NIH is removing grad students from underrepresented backgrounds from the applicant pool altogether. Their applications will not be considered. Other students, not from these backgrounds, will be.

Update: They were removed from our reviewer assignments completely. I'm so sorry to all those graduate students.

Anonymous to protect the identity of the NIH employee I spoke to...I am on study section next month to discuss F awards. We were just instructed to put the F31-Diversity applications on the bottom of our priority list for review because there is a chance we may not be able to review them. My heart is breaking for the grad students and their mentors that put so much work into these just for them to be disqualified and thrown out.

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Chris Martine | Plants are Cool, Too! @martinebotany.bsky.social · Feb 7

I feel so fortunate to be part of this ongoing #NSF funded work in collaboration with the Martu community.

#Solanum #TEK #ozplants #iamabotanist

Doug Bird @dwbird.bsky.social · Dec 1

This is how homelands are built go.nature.com/4eXyApf

Seed dispersal by Martu peoples promotes the distribution of native plants in arid Australia

go.nature.com

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Darby Saxbe @darbysaxbe.bsky.social · Feb 4

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

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Rebecca Bliege Bird @parnajarlpa.bsky.social · Jan 29

Surprisingly (!!) we (Penn State) appear not to be capitulating. Yet.

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Steve Pyne @sjpyne.bsky.social · Jan 19

The Hollywood Reporter asked for 700 words for a special section on the fires they have just published. Something looking at the fire itself.So I repurposed some sentences on 'fire as biology' and gave the notion a long leash. Alas, the title is *not* mine. www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/local-n...

What Fire Wants: Understanding the Enemy

What long has been considered merely a chemical reaction perhaps is best compared to another all-too-familiar scourge — a virus.

www.hollywoodreporter.com

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Tobias Plieninger @plieningerlab.bsky.social · Jan 19

"The people shepherding livestock across the continent's great open grasslands have been widely seen as the enemies of its charismatic wild mammals — to be fenced out of protected areas and policed by armed rangers. But that image is outdated..." @yalee360.bsky.social. e360.yale.edu/features/afr...

How African Communities Are Taking Lead on Protecting Wildlife

A new analysis shows that African wildlife increasingly depend on lands managed by villagers and herders. In many areas, locally-run conservancies now more effectively protect wildlife than national p...

e360.yale.edu

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Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · Jan 19

Despite patriarchy's persistence, growing numbers of men believe they have it worse off than women. And, new research shows this "male victimhood" ideology is most common among men who aren't facing hardship. Which means what they're really feeling is status loss. 1/
www.psypost.org/male-victimh...

Male victimhood ideology driven by perceived status loss, not economic hardship, among Korean men

Research published in Sex Roles suggests that male victimhood ideology among South Korean men is driven more by perceived socioeconomic status decline rather than objective economic hardship.

www.psypost.org

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UVicAnthro @uvicanthro.bsky.social · Jan 17

New open publication in @annualreviews.bsky.social on
"Including People in Our Models of Nature and Modes of Science" by anth faculty member @iainmckechnie.bsky.social & co-author Anne Salomon #historicalecology
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Ecological functions (gold arrows) and feedbacks (teal arrows) of contemporary place-based coastal ocean societies. These reciprocal relationships, which develop over time through trial and error from ancestral practices, are mediated by governance principles, social norms, decision-making protocols, and intentional caretaking (i.e., management and conservation) actions. Illustration inspired by Bliege Bird & Nimmo (2018) and created by Arianna Augustine, Stz'uminus Nation.

Ancestral sea gardens across the Pacific Ocean, from the Pacific Sea Garden Collective (https://www.seagardens.net). Artwork by Lilly Crosby, design by Heather Earle, base map © Mapbox, © OpenStreetMap

Makah fishers congregating on Tatoosh Island, Neah Bay, Washington State, in the late 1800s. This island was also the site of Robert T. Paine's foundational research on keystone predation and trophic cascades for more than 40 years. In the late 1960s, Paine moved his research program from its original location in Makah Bay to this exposed outer coast island in part to reduce human influence on his experiments. Tatoosh is one of many ancestral settlements of the Makah Tribe and has a thousand-year-old shell midden that includes many of the macroinvertebrates (Friedman
1976) that were studied by Paine and his students and are still harvested by the Makah today. Photo reproduced with permission from the Bert Kellogg Collection of the North Olympic Library System, Port Angeles, Washington.

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Jake Holland-Lulewicz @archaeojake.bsky.social · Jan 14

🚨🏺🍑 Nature Ecology & Evolution (@natureecoevo.bsky.social) chose our work tracking the spread of peaches through Indigenous networks as one of ten ecology papers published in 2024 to be included in their Year in Review set! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Original: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Indigenous networks map peach spread - Nature Ecology & Evolution

Nature Ecology & Evolution - Indigenous networks map peach spread

www.nature.com

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Penn State Anthropology @psuanthro.bsky.social · Jan 15

🚨 New paper coauthored by Dr. Sagan Friant and colleagues in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B!! “Towards a ‘people and nature’ paradigm for biodiversity and infectious disease” royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Towards a ‘people and nature’ paradigm for biodiversity and infectious disease | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Zoonotic and vector-borne infectious diseases are among the most direct human health consequences of biodiversity change. The COVID-19 pandemic increased health policymakers’ attention on the links between ecological degradation and disease, and sparked ...

royalsocietypublishing.org

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Saimi Hanma ⚔️ @saimihanma.bsky.social · Jan 15

I'm realizing a lot of you probably aren't familiar with March Mammal Madness so here's what it's all about. You fill out your bracket of animal 'battles'. Then each battle will be narrated live by scientists here on Bsky in the most absurd and nerdy way possible.

libguides.asu.edu/MarchMammalM...

LibGuides: March Mammal Madness: How to Play

The official location for March Mammal Madness tournament information and resources! If you're learning, you're winning!

libguides.asu.edu

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Fábio Zuker @fabiozuker.bsky.social · Jan 16

In just one month our Science article on Indigenizing Conservation Strategies in the Amazon has reached nearly 10,000 downloads! 🌱📖 #IndigenousKnowledge #AmazonConservation #EnviroAnthro

Fábio Zuker @fabiozuker.bsky.social · Dec 12

Happy to share that we're publishing in at Science this article, fruit of two years of work between Indigenous and non-Indigenous scientists on how to indigenize conservation in the Amazon. A direct result of my time at Princeton, alongside the brillant co-authors.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Indigenizing conservation science for a sustainable Amazon

Dialogues between Western and Indigenous systems are critical

www.science.org

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · Jan 16

Gender roles have always been complex and flexible; time to retire for good the idea of “traditional” gender roles www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Iron age men left home to join wives’ families, DNA study suggests

Study highlights role of women in Celtic Britain and challenges assumptions most societies were patrilocal

www.theguardian.com

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Sagan Friant @saganfriant.bsky.social · Jan 16

Anthropological Research in Science Education (ARISE) at Penn State is a summer institute in integrated anthropological sciences for historically underrepresented and underserved undergraduate students from the United States. APPLY NOW!

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anthrofuentes.bsky.social @anthrofuentes.bsky.social · Jan 14

Terrific review by Eva Jablonka of @kevinlala.bsky.social and colleagues new book Evolution Evolving!!!

Chris Stringer @chrisbstringer.bsky.social · Jan 13

‘A new vision for how evolution works is long overdue’ www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A new vision for how evolution works is long overdue

The idea that evolution is driven by an organism’s development — not just the natural selection of its genes — challenges a dearly held orthodoxy among evolutionary biologists.

www.nature.com

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Jake Holland-Lulewicz @archaeojake.bsky.social · Jan 11

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. 💙📚
Day 15
#BookSky
#BookChallenge

Cover of Elinor Ostrom’s book: Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

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Jake Holland-Lulewicz @archaeojake.bsky.social · Dec 30

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. 💙📚
Day 3
#BookSky
#BookChallenge

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Rebecca Bliege Bird @parnajarlpa.bsky.social · Dec 28

#booksky

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anthrofuentes.bsky.social @anthrofuentes.bsky.social · Dec 12

read the article and check out the table in the supplementary materials for actionable goals and possibilities...

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