www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/... A truly delightful read by Judith Bronstein reflecting on the state of mutualism studies. It's a thoughtful look at where the field has been and where it's going—and such beautiful writing as well!
Professor of ecology and evolution @ UConn. Studies adaptation, evolutionary immunology, speciation, genomics, foraging, parasite ecology and more. Hikes, rock climbs, tango, history buff, photographer & parent
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www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/... A truly delightful read by Judith Bronstein reflecting on the state of mutualism studies. It's a thoughtful look at where the field has been and where it's going—and such beautiful writing as well!
Looking for a new team member to join us on our journey of discovery. #mathonco #evolution #antibioticresistance @cbo.bsky.social @sandyanderson.bsky.social @mathonco.bsky.social @natphys.nature.com @aaas.org
Stop the presses!!! Heavens to murgatroid! Are you saying Benny Johnson lied about something!?!? Say it ain’t so.
The House discretionary budget bill is now out for FY26, including a proposed *slight boost* in NIH funding & many other components that will take time to unpack. Bill text: appropriations.house.gov/sites/evo-su... A few key points including IDC analysis in a provisional 🧵
News flash: a man who does not bother to read, begins to wonder why he does not know things.
Chicken of the woods. I like this time of year.
Seen on a walk this morning. A sign on a tree in the middle of the woods saying “you are enough”
Today’s crop of peaches from the tree I planted four years ago.
9 CDC Directors going back to 1977 speak out. What RFK Jr has done to our nation’s public health system "should alarm every American." It "is unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...
Sunset over Hartford Connecticut through a veil of rain from Case Mtn.
As Measles Exploded, Officials In Texas Looked To CDC Scientists. Under Trump, No One Answered. #ctnewsjunkie #ctpolitics
"Some CDC employees are bracing for what they & many medical experts say could be a death knell for the credibility of public health in America: A declaration from Kennedy that vaccines can cause autism" This is like the NASA chief declaring the moon is really made of Swiss cheese wapo.st/4myP0HW
“A respected network of hospitals and cancer centers is halting enrollment in clinical trials for children with brain cancer after the federal government said it would no longer provide funding to the group.” www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/w...
Maybe the only we survive this is with a twinge of sarcasm and very dark humor😞.
This is a terribly drafted (on purposes) survey designed to lead you to view Free File negatively. The survey is set up just to create a pretext to cancel the program. Participate, but be sure that all you answers prefer "the government" doing stuff over someone else doing that same stuff.
Trump take LEGO www.404media.co/lego-stops-s...
Trump admin planning to change student visas from lasting for duration of academic program to fixed 4-yr term, and then much harder to renew Could destroy US ability to attract global talent, particularly those seeking advanced degrees in STEM. The median time to complete a PhD is 5.7 yrs per NSF.
The maddening thing is that we know EXACTLY how to prevent this. Yes, kids should get vaccinated, test, stay home when sick, mask as much as possible. But even without any of that: Better ventilation and filtration in schools can MASSIVELY reduce viral spread, for all sorts of respiratory diseases.
A second lesson is the benefit of following focal populations for many years and being a hoarder when it comes to specimens and DNA.
One lesson: avoid transplant experiments. These have been quite popular in stickleback over the years and so we were following in an established tradition, but I would now recommend against them.
While the introduction was entirely unintentional, I comfort myself that this is just 1 of 1000's of lakes with stickleback. And, the accident now shows us the potential magnitude of immigrant fitness advantage, and the speed and genome-wide extent of conspecific introgression in its early years.
This is where things get embarrassing: a former grad student in my lab had used those populations in a reciprocal transplant experiment years ago (with provincial permission, of course). A few cages were vandalized in Gosling Lake, releasing a few dozen fish into a huge resident population.
Thanks to samples from many other populations we are able to pin down the ancestry of the immigrants that drive this introgression, to a pair of populations in a neighboring watershed.
We then added genomic data, and that's where we were really surprised by the speed of genome-wide changes. This graph shows the between-decade Fst (2009 vs 2022) within the focal lake.... huge regions of the genome have dramatically changed ancestry
This led an undergraduate, Ren Simonse, to study Spi1b evolution in this population, giving us our first inkling that there had been a lot of evolutionary change in the past decade.
This paper has been a long time coming, using two decades of genetic samples I've hoarded over the years of studying stickleback. We first started our CRISPR work in 2018, and were puzzled by non-deleted alleles at Spi1b in a population we knew had been fixed for the deletion.
The evolution of increased fibrosis response during this introgression may be due to the invasion of an ancestral allele at Spi1b (the native genotype to the lake has a deletion in Spi1b). We confirm w CRISPR and pharmacological knockdown that Spi1b affects fibrosis response.
Over this same time period, the population gained increased capacity for a fibrosis immune response that suppresses tapeworm infections, and the initially abundant tapeworm population declined accordingly.
In the earliest stages of adaptive introgression, beneficial immigration can drive genome-wide changes. In a new preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... colleagues & I document exceptionally rapid genomic introgression in a lake population of stickleback.
Nearly all PhDs take 5 years--with finishing in 4 a rare outcome. This is deliberately designed to eliminate the international powerhouse that is US postgraduate training.
I know there's a lot happening today, but this is sneaking in under the radar. This proposed new rule would absolutely crush foreign PhD students, potentially making it impossible for them to enroll with any certainty of their ability to finish www.politico.com/news/2025/08...
It’s mosquito screen style material.
remember folks, we cant have gun restrictions because if we do the federal government will occupy our streets, imprison people without due process, ship dissidents to foreign gulags and things of that nature
Currently in charge at NSF as of August 27, 2025:
Good suggestion! We have a ton of short reads so that should be informative. The short reads are getting turned into VCF files this week hopefully and we can add that to the to-do list
I bought a net to cover my peach tree this year
I suspect you are right that there are contaminants causing trouble that may be quite interesting in their own right
Very few reads.
One genome core (UConn) struggled to get pacbio data from Schistocephalus HMW DNA we sent them (after we tried a variety of failed extraction methods). Another (Yale) couldn't even get good DNA (despite flash frozen big samples). Another (McGill) got good DNA but poor loading on PacBio
We have lots of short-read sequence data but are struggling to assemble a good genome with them, and are two years into repeated attempts to use PacBio Revio on this species.
We've been trying to get a better genome assembly for Schistocephalus solidus tapeworms, and the PacBio Revio sequences fail for multiple samples, preserved many ways. We suspect some sort of inhibitor from this species. I'd love to hear thoughts about ONT as an alternative?
"work like this falls to the National Park Service, which was already facing staffing shortfalls when the Trump administration this spring directed additional cuts ... The service used to have 200 people assigned to maintain thousands of acres of trees and gardens in D.C., and now there are 20"
Call in support of Science to Congress. This dissent declaration is an objection and a warning of the trouble that this dismantling of public health #science will cause. 202-224-3121 After you call, Text ‘sign PQFDDW’to 50409 Or Click. Sign. Share. resist.bot/petitions/PQ...
It should tell you something when every federal agency has people within it, who make up the agency that are telling the world that things are not right and that the new policies will be bad for the agencies and for Americans. NSF, NIH, NASA, FEMA, CDC, etc… And this administration punishes them.
interested in causal inference and ecology? join our Slack to exchange ideas, papers, get feedback, ask and answer questions - let's start a community #causalsky
Foreign visitors to the US are down sharply from the year before, particularly from Canada. New article with analysis in The Economist.
Earlier this month, at the Senior Center of Mount Olive, New Jersey, ecologist Megan O’Rourke turned from overseeing federal research to a new challenge: persuading voters to elect her to the U.S. Congress. https://scim.ag/3Jz1i4D
This is of course brought to you by the same folks who had a full-on panic about some universities asking for diversity statements when hiring professors to teach diverse student populations. Because that was “ideological” but of course supporting Trump EOs is just … weather ?
Excited to announce a search for an Associate or Full Professor in Infectious Disease Modeling at Penn State's Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics. Details at link and below. psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/PSU_Ac...
Abandoned industrial buildings from an old quarry in Rocky Hill CT, covered with interesting graffiti in an overgrown forest.
This is a good example of why journals and editors matter. Even if the authors and institution were pressured to retrace, the journal editors are not obliged to enact the retraction.
“A law firm representing opponents of offshore wind farms is demanding that Brown University retract research that details links between the fossil fuel industry and anti-wind groups.” www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/c...
Good luck, America. www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump...
🚨🚨🚨FEMA employees just sounded the alarm with their Katrina Declaration. They’re warning that Trump’s dismantling is gutting disaster response, erasing climate science, and putting lives at risk. Read it, sign on, and stand with them.
This work is yet another reason why I am very proud to be involved in the leadership of @asn-amnat.bsky.social, and a member of @sse-evolution.bsky.social , both societies are trying hard to be actively engaged in helping their US-based members fight the current federal changes.
A new website is up reporting the impacts of federal cuts on the field of evolution and ecology. This survey was developed by @drk-lo.bsky.social following discussions within @asn-amnat.bsky.social ASN, joined by other societies. This is an important insight into the morale & future of our field.
83% of respondents said that federal policies since Jan 20, 2025 had "extremely negative impact" or "irreparable harm" on their field of science
and concerns about the future of long-standing federal programs such as the Bird Banding Lab, a 100-year federal program www.usgs.gov/labs/bird-ba... that "runs all federal bird permits and maintains the data for all birds banded (captured, measured, marked, and released) in the United States".
Respondents reported restrictions on free speech and travel, chilling effects on free speech and travel, censorship of scientific terms, concerns about the ability of the government to comply with legal mandates, reports of biased or removed information from federal sources, removal of climate.gov
Participating societies also include @entsocamerica.bsky.social , American Society of #Ichthyologists and #Herpetologists ,@cerfscience.bsky.social ,and @ecologicalsociety.bsky.social ,
Participating societies include @asn-amnat.bsky.social ,@sse-evolution.bsky.social , @systbiol.bsky.social @official-bweems.bsky.social , #WOCEEB , American #Genetics Society , @thewildlifesociety.bsky.social ,@amornith.bsky.social ,Western Society of Naturalists #WSN ,@scbnorthamerica.bsky.social
Almost 1400 members participated in the survey. Respondents to the survey were geographically distributed across the US and spread across career stages, as well as spread across academia, the federal government, non-profits, and industry. www.firsthandaccounts.org/impacts/2025...
Today 14 scientific societies in #ecology #evolution and #marineScience are publishing the results of a survey that finds negative impacts of federal policies on food security, flood mitigation, infectious disease preparedness, and wildlife conservation: 🧪👩🔬 www.firsthandaccounts.org/impacts/2025...
“The study authors asked GPT 4o-mini to evaluate the quality of 217 papers. The tool didn’t mention in any of the reports that the papers being analyzed had been retracted or had validity issues. In 190 cases, GPT described the papers as world leading, internationally excellent, or close to that”
The NIH is reported to distribute more than 80% of the world's public biomedical research funding. If the proposed presidential budget were to go through, slashing NIH funding by 40%, it would lead to a decrease of 32% (or nearly 1/3) of the world's public biomedical research funding.
Gearing up to teach Evolutionary Medicine this fall, and every lecture begins with an @smbccomics.bsky.social or @xkcd.com comic (with credits). This fills the gene drive gap. Thanks!!
Well damn, first spotted lantern fly in my property today (Glastonbury CT). So much for my wonderful fruit trees
Absolutely begin with History of Rome, or Revolutions; both by Mike Duncan.
Spending money on tacky gold shit while cutting cancer & vaccine research…thanks to the 🍊🤡 cult who voted for this BS 🤬
I always tell my students it is called a Meeting, not a Listening. You go to meet people. In the hallways, poster sessions, over meals. The talks are a catalyst for conversations when you meet.
Something more modest (which we did in 2024): recording it all and pushing to youtube. Still about 130k. 7k people have viewed those talks, usually watching 1-3 minutes of each. Functionally, we paid 20 bucks per pop for people to watch the intros to talks.
Yesterday the Supreme Court issued a convoluted, 36-page emergency order about NIH grant terminations. Two main takeaways: -$2 billion (not the government # of $780 million) in NIH grants will likely be re-terminated -future legal challenges will be much harder w/ @maxkozlov.bsky.social:
Many of us are using LLMs in coding and scientific writing. They are very helpful tools, but we need to be thoughtful as we integrate them into our work flows to preserve accountability, voice and trust. academic.oup.com/evlett/advan.... An editorial at @evolletters.bsky.social for discussion:
Please sign and share our petition to remove RFK Jr. www.change.org/p/rfk-jr-mus...
There is no solace for NIH funded researchers in this Supreme Court decision. Grants that were ripped away on dubious grounds, restored by a reasonable judge are now again terminated by an out-of-control Supreme Court. Labs will shutter, people will lose jobs. www.reuters.com/world/us/us-...
5-4 Supreme Court rules that NIH can terminate grants pending the full ruling. thehill.com/regulation/c... I have no (printable) words...
Some birds from the trip to Nova Scotia last week
A baby porcupine with its mama; photographed last week in Nova Scotia. Pictures taken on an estate of an Italian baroness (who rented out her guest house as an AirBnB on her 300 acre estate on a peninsula 30 min from Yarmouth) .
Excited for the big reveal of The Causes of autism on Sept 1, as HHS quack-in-chief Kennedy promised.
RFK Jr promised that he’d determine the causes of autism, by September. Instead, he gutted the agency and effectively shut down the area assigned to autism research. But maybe it will all come together in the next 10 days or so. www.propublica.org/article/rfk-...
This is the equivalent amount of land in the United States that Trump wants Ukraine to just hand over to a murderous Russian dictator. If Trump knew any history, he would know you don't appease monsters like Putin. #SlavaUkraini
Pickles! I’ll have to try that.
Highlights included visiting old Acadian towns; I’m told an ancestor on my mom’s side was the first Acadian child born in Nova Scotia.
Just home from a 2 week road trip with my kids through VT, NH, ME and Nova Scotia… feeling recharged and totally unprepared for the fall semester.
DC restaurant and bar scene have struggled since Covid, but was doing better, now, thanks to the stable genius … Great job asshole. www.washingtonpost.com/food/2025/08...
Two trees in the yard are bursting with peaches… what are your favorite recipes that use peaches. And better yet, your favorite ways to preserve peaches (eg recipes for jams, chutneys, etc)?
Despite squirrels stealing many peaches, this mornings haul from one of two peach trees was very productive
We're Hiring! Assistant Professor of Immunology and Molecular Medicine in MCB. Learn more and apply online: aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05096
Postdoc opportunity in disease ecology at @uniexecec.bsky.social with the excellent @btschirren.bsky.social and @andyyoung.bsky.social in evergreen Cornwall UK.
Can you imagine a US envoy handing a Nazi medal to the family of an American who died fighting for Hitler? Because this just happened: www.cnn.com/2025/08/20/p...
I'm looking to recruit a PhD student to study patterns of local adaptation and introgression across the spruce hybrid zone in the Rockies near Calgary. Projects can include field work, bioinformatics, pop gen theory, or comparison to plant/ conifer species yeamanlab.weebly.com/uploads/5/7/...
omg I love this LOVE this
We are hiring into 3 (THREE!) tenure track lines this year at Wake Forest — if you’re looking please reach out, I love chatting about our department! We are a vibrant group that love & embrace the teacher-scholar model 👩🏫
‘Kennedy, it seems, “can’t scientifically justify any of his positions,” Jake Scott, an infectious-disease physician at Stanford, who has analyzed Kennedy’s references to studies, told me.’ @jakescottmd.bsky.social
In @nytopinion.nytimes.com President Trump “feels no gut solidarity with the trans-Atlantic alliance and its shared commitment to democracy, free markets, human rights and the rule of law,” our columnist @thomaslfriedman.bsky.social writes.
In contrast the marine ancestral stickleback and low fibrosis population start with low expression, increase somewhat, but don't return to normal after.
Initially the fibrotic population has high constitutive expression of pro-fibrosis genes and inflammatory genes; on stimulation by tapeworm protein they rapidly increase these genes' expression, but then suppress them after a few weeks;...