(1/4) Really excited that the first analysis of my PhD was published in Proceedings B! After analyzing half a million bird banding records across 92 species from @instbirdpop.bsky.social, we found lower female survival in 35 passerine species. doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

Female North American passerine birds have lower apparent survival than males

Abstract. Survival is a fundamental organismal trait which can vary by sex, yet the extent of sex-biased survival is largely unknown across most taxa. To a

doi.org

Congratulations Violet Onsongo on her new #dragonfly paper! Evolution and biogeography of the widespread dragonfly genus Orthetrum (Odonata: Anisoptera: Libellulidae): Massive dispersal in the tertiary - Systematic Entomology - Wiley Online Library resjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Evolution and biogeography of the widespread dragonfly genus <fi>Orthetrum</fi> (<fc>Odonata: Anisoptera: Libellulidae</fc>): Massive dispersal in the tertiary

Ancestral range reconstruction supports an early widespread Afro–Eurasian distribution, rather than a single-region origin, reflecting connectivity among Africa, Europe and Asia during the Tertiary......

resjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Y and W sex chroms are enigmatic. Compared to the rest of the genome, they show distinct structure and diversity, and are notoriously difficult to assemble. Work led by @mdalikova.bsky.social investigates these patterns for the W chromosome of silkworm, Bombyx mori www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Wrong but useful: Bombyx silkworm W chromosome assemblies are flawed but still capture strongly reduced diversity of repetitive DNA

Degenerate sex chromosomes ( e.g., the Y or W) remain among the most difficult regions of eukaryotic genomes to assemble because they are highly repetitive and structurally complex. While many recent ...

biorxiv.org

grateful to have received the lab's first NSF grant to study cyclical processes of speciation with new theory and tools (applied to Melanesian birds). ad to come, but I'll be looking for a postdoc with computational biology chops—please reach out! (and repost) www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Mitochondrial introgression in North American red-backed voles is facilitated by co-introgression at nuclear-encoded mitochondrial genes

Mitochondrial genomes encode for the proteins and RNAs that serve as the basis for aerobic respiration and energy production. Yet mitochondria depend on the nuclear genome for hundreds of additional g...

biorxiv.org

SOO excited to share this news!!!! @devonderaad.bsky.social is an amazing scientist and is going to build a stellar lab at AMNH!!

Devon DeRaad@devonderaad.bsky.social · 3w ago

This December (2026) I'll be starting my own research lab as a curator of ornithology at @amnh.org. We will seek to understand global avian biodiversity using evolutionary and conservation genetics, with the backing of the incredible AMNH ornithology collection. devonderaad.github.io

This December (2026) I'll be starting my own research lab as a curator of ornithology at @amnh.org. We will seek to understand global avian biodiversity using evolutionary and conservation genetics, with the backing of the incredible AMNH ornithology collection. devonderaad.github.io

Interested in joining a growing lab in LA? We’re hiring a postdoc!! Please spread the word to folks in your network and feel free to get in touch with any questions recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF11142

Excited to say that I will be starting as the Curator of Ornithology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History this fall! I can't wait to work with the newly renovated collection and continue my research program back in the Great Lakes. (1/3)

Feeling very fortunate to begin this next chapter @smithfellows.bsky.social . Thank you to everyone who invested their time, guidance, and encouragement along the way. Looking forward to the work ahead. www.kent.edu/esdri/news/k...

Kent State Biological Sciences Graduate Student Selected for Prestigious Postdoctoral Fellowship

Prashant Ghimire hiking towards high altitude with a long pole used for mistnetting birds (credit: Gh

kent.edu

New preprint from the last portion of my PhD! Despite low masked load, we found evidence for strong inbreeding depression in Devils Hole pupfish. The reason? A recessive lethal haplotype that causes a heart defect among developing embryos. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Long-term small effective population size, inbreeding, and a recessive lethal haplotype drive premature death in the endangered Devils Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis)

As anthropogenic habitat fragmentation and population decline accelerate globally, growing numbers of species face compounding demographic and genetic threats to long-term survival. Many populations a...

biorxiv.org

📢New warbler research!📢 A phylogeny of Myioborus (the youngest genus of warblers) plus a hypothesis for how they diversified in South America and a gene causing a color difference between hybridizing species. It was great co-leading this with Laura Céspedes Arias. doi.org/10.1093/evol...

Diversification and divergence in Myioborus warblers: insights into evolutionary relationships and plumage genetics

Abstract. Genomic data can provide valuable insights into the evolutionary history of rapidly diversifying groups and the genetic basis of phenotypic trait

doi.org

I’m so excited to be able to finally share that @devonderaad.bsky.social was awarded one of the AOS Early Professional awards this year!!! He’ll be presenting one of the plenary talks at the @amornith.bsky.social meeting in Amherst! 🥳🥳🥳

American Ornithological Society@amornith.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Congratulations to the 2026 AOS Early-career Award winners! Our 2026 James G. Cooper Award winners are Drs Devon DeRaad & Fengyi Guo. This year, the AOS awarded a Ned K Johnson Award to Dr Olivia M. Smith. These awardees will deliver plenary talks at #AOS26. americanornithology.org/aos-announce...

Congratulations to the 2026 AOS Early-career Award winners! Our 2026 James G. Cooper Award winners are Drs Devon DeRaad & Fengyi Guo. This year, the AOS awarded a Ned K Johnson Award to Dr Olivia M. Smith. These awardees will deliver plenary talks at #AOS26. americanornithology.org/aos-announce...

New story on the Avian Hybrids blog! A tangled trio: Rapid divergence and gene flow in the Buzzing Flowerpecker avianhybrids.wordpress.com/2026/05/13/a... Based on the @evojlinnsoc.bsky.social paper by @devonderaad.bsky.social et al. | #ornithology

A tangled trio: Rapid divergence and gene flow in the Buzzing Flowerpecker

Are we dealing with a true trifurcation?

avianhybrids.wordpress.com

I'm looking to hire a postdoc. Please share if you can!

This semester I developed and taught a course on applied population genomics. Lab activities proceed from the basics of the command line and Git to variant calling with workflow managers and a suite of downstream analyses (e.g., ADMIXTURE). All materials can be found here: elinck.org/genomics_eco...

get your fresh hot highly contiguous Clark's Nutcracker genome here: doi.org/10.1093/g3jo... (lead by @peterinnes1.bsky.social & feat. @mdcarling.bsky.social)

A chromosome-scale genome assembly for Clark's Nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana)

Abstract. Focal and intelligent passerine songbirds, corvids (Aves: Corvidae) have served as models for research on the genomics of hybridization and cogni

doi.org

Small migratory birds cross deserts and seas as part of their annual migration. But how? Our new study shows how thrush nightingales do it: by flying night after night and stopping during the day, when they remain innactive🐦➡️(1/3) doi.org/10.1098/rsbl... @royalsocietypublishing.org #BirdMigration

Wrote a fun little thing on gene tree discordance: authors.elsevier.com/a/1mzPI3QW8S...

Naming your biology LLM after Rosalind Franklin is… hell is not hot enough

My latest Digest for Evolution is now available online. One of my favorite pieces to write. 😉 Digest: Chance and necessity shape introgression patterns across three replicate avian hybrid zones academic.oup.com/evolut/advan... #ornithology

New paper led by Yu Mo, with @psudmant.bsky.social Ever wonder how extreme genealogical discordance can help you to find the genetic basis for trait variation? Wonder no more! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

👏 This year's winners of our Graduate Student Excellence Award have been selected - stay with us for the next few days to learn about their research. First is Anjali Gupta (@anjaligupta.bsky.social), PhD student at U. Kansas, researching genetic conflict. More on Anjali ⬇️ #society

I am SO grateful to my hardworking colleagues for creating this agreement. I know what it took. Proud to be a #Jayhawk, proud to be #UnionStrong. Ad astra!

Using coalescent demographic reconstructions, Zhou et al found that the extinct Baiji had undergone a bottleneck at the beginning of the Holocene but populations were recovering in the last 10,000 years until recent extinction from human activities doi.org/10.1038/ncom... #2026MMM #RIP

Our paper is on the cover of @currentbiology.bsky.social : a strawberry poison frog with the most common color morph, living up to its common name 🍓. In this issue, we uncover the genetic basis of color variation in frogs from Bocas del Toro, where blue, green, yellow, orange, and red morphs occur

Diana Aguilar-Gómez@dianaguilr.bsky.social · 6mo ago

The last chapter of my PhD is finally out !!!! In the same species, on neighboring islands, we see radically different warning colors emerge. Evolution in action: Selection-driven color variation in the aposematic strawberry poison frog, Oophaga pumilio: Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol...

I am SO THRILLED to share our first fully-lab lab paper!!!!!! Led by @hybridzones.bsky.social & @hagarsoliman.bsky.social, w/ a major assist from @pfschwarz.bsky.social!!!!!!!!!!!!! Read more below, if you're curious (you should be- it's AWESOME!!!!!!!) link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Introgression and parental conflict shape repeated occurrences of postzygotic isolation in Mimulus

Postzygotic reproductive isolation is often thought to accumulate as a byproduct of neutral divergence. Yet it frequently evolves rapidly, in line wit…

sciencedirect.com

I've slowly been reformatting notes from my population and conservation genetics course at Montana State University into a web book—a rough draft is now live here: elinck.org/popgen_conge...

And now an empirical example: @devonderaad.bsky.social, @lhdecicco.bsky.social, @peterhosner.bsky.social and colleagues show how rapid divergence, gene-flow and stepping-stone island colonisation obscure phylogenetic relationships of buzzing flowerpeckers. (8/n) doi.org/10.1093/evol...

Rapid divergence with gene flow creates intractable nodes in the tree of life: An empirical demonstration in the Buzzing Flowerpecker (Dicaeum hypoleucum)

Abstract. The avian tree of life contains a series of famously intractable nodes and controversial relationships whose resolution varies between studies de

doi.org