Check out my new paper with Howard W. Rundle and undergrad Rebecca Janacek now online at @ASNAmNat! We manipulated parental age at reproduction of antler flies in the lab to see how that affected their offspring’s fitness in the field. 1/ journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/71…

Happy 2022. May you swab your nose anatomically correctly this year.

today's worm is the gossamer worm! it is a planktonic polychaete and it is bioluminescent! she is absolutely gorgeous 🪱

"Maybe EO Wilson sympathized with Rushton because people called him racist too" That's bad! No amount of criticism would make me see Rushton as a kindred spirit. Do you know what kind of person thinks race science is unfairly maligned?

This flood, descending a kilometre to the sea floor, had a thousand times the discharge of the modern Amazon... And it refilled 90% of the West Med in a YEAR. This was 5 (or 6) million years ago. Did any of our distant ancestors see it? Can you imagine their terror? 10/

Exciting result! This tweet is misleading though. The authors suggest (as the image here does) that "arachnid" orders colonized land multiple times, and evolved convergent adaptations, NOT that horseshoe crabs secondarily returned to the sea.

franz (not here) @jopabinia

Watch these students in Dr Jaime Coon 🌾🐛🐦🐮🚜's biology class create a beautiful pollinator garden using milk jugs. The jugs will be stored at Miller Farm and serve as a greenhouse to germinate the seedlings. The future garden will be planted at Runyan Center. 🌱

TONIGHT, 7 pm ET at the virtual Wildnerness & Canoe Symposium: Patrick Moldowan will share stories of adventure & discovery in his talk titled, "Wilderness in a living laboratory: Over 75 years of wildlife research at the AWRS." Register (free): bit.ly/34DalgU

Greg Abbot has officially directed Family and Protective Services to begin investigating all trans children in Texas and prosecuting their parents as child abusers. He has also instructed all teachers, doctors, and caregivers to begin reporting any trans students they see.

Great thread on how a new species of weevil was described !

Who will you choose?

An example of mandible allometry in the stag beetle Cyclommatus alagari. All these jaws are from the same beetle species.

Just some recent ‘enchanted’ landscapes I’ve done.

BioQuipBugs is for sale! Please click the link for details of the sale. bioquip.com/aboutus/bioqui… ONLY SERIOUS INTERESTED PARTIES TO BID

Super excited to share my ✨first✨ first-author paper out in Animal Behaviour - Australasia! We investigate how snapping #turtle hatchling vocalisations may be associated with social behaviour within the nest 🐢🔊 #ScalySociality authors.elsevier.com/a/1euWcmjL%7Ed…  🧵 1/

The best supervisor, Russell is both a lovely human and great intellectual mentor. Plus, the neriids are a great system. Get in there PhD candidates, a great opportunity.

If so, this raises the question of what selection acts on: the number of germline mutations at reproduction, with somatic rates as a byproduct? The burden of somatic mutations over the lifespan, with germline mutations as a byproduct? Or maybe some combination of the two?

I've been thinking of leaving twitter for a while. Goodbye! Be good to each other, but not to bigots :)

Please RT: fully-funded, 4-year PhD position in my group at the University of Zurich 👇