Houston folks! Join us for the next Rice Science Café— just in time for Halloween!!! 🎃 Creatures of the Dark: The Secret Lives of Houston’s Bats with Dr. Andrea Rummel 🦇🦇🦇 Oct 29 @ 6 pm Drop of the Creator Spirits Co. This is a free event! All ages welcome!

@sternarchella.bsky.social once again bringing incredible things to UTCT. I love getting huge stinky fish heads in the lab ❤️

Kory Evans Ph.D@sternarchella.bsky.social · 3d ago

If you need me, I’ll be staring at this alligator gar scan all day. The fish was so big that I had to drive all the way to UT Austin to scan it. This particular animal has a tooth the grew straight through its skull

If you need me, I’ll be staring at this alligator gar scan all day. The fish was so big that I had to drive all the way to UT Austin to scan it. This particular animal has a tooth the grew straight through its skull

👀 Must be the season of the fish. Squidfacts.net

Mentally I’m here. Caught some awesome alligator gar in the San Jacinto River yesterday. Happy to see so many giants thriving so close to the Houston metro area

Saw this massive alligator snapping turtle while fishing in Buffalo bayou today. Feels like I saw an ancient guardian of the bayou.

From one of our volunteers at the museum today. OOF.

Sarah McAnulty, Ph.D.@sarahmackattack.bsky.social · 3w ago

If you care about keeping the Academy of Natural Sciences open to the public in Philadelphia, I need you to read and share this thread. Trish Wellenbach was sent from the mayor's office to oversee the Academy of Natural sciences situation. She needs to hear from us. Here comes the action item:

Um. The William Penn foundation offered bridge funding to keep the academy of natural sciences open for a year, and the people in charge said “no one is helping things by offering Band-Aids”. Jesus Christ. share.inquirer.com/KXxZTj

William Penn Foundation offers funding to keep Academy of Natural Sciences museum open

A Drexel spokesperson did not say whether the school had declined the offer, but said, “No proposal has been presented that would provide a permanent, sustainable path forward" for the museum.

share.inquirer.com

We have *six days* left until the Academy of Natural Sciences, North America's oldest Natural History museum, is scheduled to close it's doors. Here are *six reasons* why we cannot - and will not- let that happen.

🚨🚨 1. New preprint! We examine whether the diversity of transcontinental freshwater fish radiations, such as killifishes and cichlids, might be driven by marine ancestry in the aftermath of an asteroid impact! Retained salinity tolerance explains their biogeography and diversity!

Really excited to share our latest paper with you! We examine patterns of skull shape evolution in an awesome group of fishes and show that they rapidly innovated following the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs. urldefense.com/v3/__https:/...

Selection, constraints, and contingency drive mosaic patterns of evolution during the carangarian adaptive radiation

Adaptive radiations generate remarkable morphological diversity, yet traits often diversify at different rates and modes, producing mosaic patterns of evolution. Modularity, the semiautonomous organization of traits, can shape how selection and ...

urldefense.com

Attention Philadelphia! We're hosting a rally to demand that Drexel University maintain The Academy of Natural Sciences Museum open to the public. Join us on Tuesday morning at 10am in front of the academy. Please spread the word, we need all hands on deck! RSVP here: luma.com/1qwnrqz2

This is in fact NOT over, The Mayor's office is sending Trish Wellenbach over to figure something out. LFG. Here's a gift link: share.inquirer.com/XmTqjD

Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University names a temporary interim leader

Patricia “Trish” Wellenbach, the city's deputy mayor and former president of the Please Touch Museum, will be senior adviser to the Academy of Natural Sciences. She's on loan from the mayor's office.

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Sarah McAnulty, Ph.D.@sarahmackattack.bsky.social · 2mo ago

People in Philadelphia are furious. It’s not just scientists throwing a fit about this. Curious to see how it shakes out.

I've been seeing a lot of "well I guess this is the way things are now" "ah another line of evidence that we are a fallen empire", attitude that I am begging people to shake off. There are people working their butts off to make things better. Please don't give up. Join us.

Keep making noise, it’s working! www.inquirer.com/education/ac...

Academy of Natural Sciences and Drexel University reach tentative terms on the academy’s future

Patricia “Trish” Wellenbach, the city's deputy mayor and former president of the Please Touch Museum, will be senior adviser to the Academy of Natural Sciences. She's on loan from the mayor's office.

inquirer.com

I feel like I’m going to throw up

This is actually heartbreaking. This museum is my favorite place in the entire city and inspired me as a child and as an adult. There’s gotta be a way to save it. www.inquirer.com/education/ac...

The Academy of Natural Sciences is closing its museum after nearly two centuries

The closure does not affect the rest of the institution, which builds and maintains the collections and conducts research through departments such as the Patrick Center for Environmental Research.

inquirer.com

After studying bats for more than a decade, I finally got to go to Bracken Cave. This is the largest bat colony in the world with an estimated 15-20 million bats. We were able to see both the evening emergences and the bats' return in the morning. Incredible!!

Spiny turbots are a small family of flatfishes whose eyes don’t completely migrate to the other side of their heads. At the right angle they look like cyclopses

Have officially arrived at JMIH!

Hundreds of thousands of bats emerge from a large Mexican-free tailed colony in East Texas. The bats gave us a spectacular show with plenty of daylight left, emerging about 20 minutes before sunset 🦇

Second, our big effort to (1) make a new fish tree (2) date it (3) define taxon names (4) build the largest fish CT scan dataset to-date (5) answer ecomorphological questions- whew! @sternarchella.bsky.social @arciladk.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New paper out today! @sternarchella.bsky.social and I review how modularity and integration influence adaptive radiations and diversification. Read it here: rdcu.be/fpcSX

If you catch a lot of fishes you have to make sure to Id them properly. Here HoWan and Sato are id’ing a bunch of lanternfishes that we caught in the Yakushima port

At a particular port in Yakushima, you can see beautiful coral reef fishes during the day, and catch deep sea lantern fishes at night using a flashlight and dipnet

Took a brief break from collecting to catch @laurenhennelly.bsky.social ‘s wedding with @arummel.bsky.social back to the fishes today

We’ve also been doing some fish printing. Scored this massive sailfish fin that was sitting is a discard pile at the fish market. Printed it as well

Collected some of my favorite parrotfishes today, these Calotomus have beautiful orange masks and strikingly lack beaks instead they have a bunch of tiny individual teeth in their jaws. Instead of coral these guys mostly eat macroalgae

The Evans Lab is back in Kagoshima, Japan chasing fishes around!

Goby gummies? Yes, goby gummies. New lab paper out by @chemingson.bsky.social besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...