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Gavin Leighton

@gavinleighton.bsky.social

Evolutionary Biologist & Behavioral Ecologist, Associate Professor at SUNY Buffalo State. Studying mimicry in woodpeckers and the evolution of social behavior in birds. Opinions my own. He/him.

95 Posts1248 Follower663 Folgt
Jake Berv@jakeberv.bsky.social · 2w ago

Happy to share this 'capstone' project from my time as a postdoc @umich.edu, where we show that hierarchically nested bursts of body-shape evolution may underlie much of perching-bird diversification over ~50 million years. Free access link here: rdcu.be/fuxB1

Rates of passerine body plan evolution in time and space

Nature Ecology & Evolution - A reconstruction of the evolutionary history of passerine body plans over the past ~50 Myr shows rare bursts of phenotypic innovation near the origin of major...

rdcu.be

Gavin Leighton@gavinleighton.bsky.social · last mo.

Submitted a grant recently to IOS in the NSF and got this recent email. I’ve tried to stay up to date on the how the NSF has had to “restructure” after draconian budget cuts, but has anyone heard if IOS has been closed? The IOS solicitation/webpage is still nominally open.

An email received saying that a submitted grant has been reassigned somewhere else in the NSF
Mark Histed@markhisted.org · last mo.

Sotomayor’s dissent is an obituary for science, NIH, and NSF. “Seldom, if ever, has this Court worked such a profound bait and switch on a coequal branch: For more than 90 years, Congress believed, with this Court’s express approval, that it was allowed to create a workable Govern- ment…”

Today's decision profoundly undermines this reliance and, as a result, undercuts one side of the balance that the political branches struck. Put simply, today the majority reshapes our Government. Dozens of independent commissions are now likely to become purely executive agencies, shifting tremendous power over broad swaths of American life into the President's hands: the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, with responsibility for managing the Nation's energy supply, see 42 U.S. C. §7171(b)(1); the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which protects Americans against harms caused by dangerous goods, see 15 U.S. C. §2053(a); the Chemical Safety Board, tasked with investigating chemical disasters, see 42 U.S. C. §7412(r)(6)(B); the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, responsible for the regulation of nuclear power, see 42 U.S. C. 885841(a), (c), (e); and the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), charged with ensuring the integrity of the civil service, see 5 U. S. C. §1202. The list of agencies entially modified by today's decision goes on. Seldom, if ever, has this Court worked such a profound bait and switch on a coequal branch: For more than 90 years, Congress believed, with this Court's express ap-proval, that it was allowed to create a workable Govern-ment, including by granting certain agencies tasked with certain responsibilities some independence from Presidential control. In rejecting that project, after decades of prom- ising the po ical branches that structures like the FTC's were permissible, the Court creates an Executive Branch that Congress never dreamed of establishing and that it now has little hope of ever reining in. Cf. Learning Re-sources, Inc. v. Trump, 607 U. S. 229, 244-245 (2026) (opin-
Gavin Leighton@gavinleighton.bsky.social · last mo.

Has anyone at Colossal provided even a remotely plausible about how de-extinction is supposed to work without habitat protection or restoration? If they don't have some robust plan then you can probably bet on this company going under at some point and all these samples being lost.

WIRED@wired.com · last mo.

The move comes as the Trump administration is trying to weaken the act that’s meant to protect endangered species from going extinct in the first place.

Susana Wadgymar🌿🔬@smwadgymar.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Truly the death of science as we know it, as well as any societies and journals dependent on funding from U.S. scientists. **Public comments accepted through July 13.** 🧪 🌍 Email and call your representative every day, on top of leaving public comments here: www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) proposes to revise the Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance to improve government- wide policies and requirements related to the management of grants, co...

federalregister.gov

Science Magazine@science.org · 2mo ago

The White House today announced it plans to make major changes in how the U.S. government manages research funding. https://scim.ag/43HgW4s

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 2mo ago

Of all the harm this administration has done to US science, today's proposed changes to the way federal grants are awarded and administered is the most damaging yet. The text of the federal register document is impenetrably tedious by design, so here's an excellent summary of what it says.

elizabethginexi.bsky.social@elizabethginexi.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule. Russell Vought is going destroy American Science. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of...

Ross@rossengineer.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Worked at JPL while studying at Caltech back in the early 1990s. This is a nightmare-level theft of a planetary science & exploration powerhouse. It makes no sense whatsoever. Republicans' continued vandalism of NASA's science centers is intolerable.

Jaweed Kaleem@jaweedkaleem.bsky.social · 2mo ago

NASA is opening up management of JPL to competitive bidding for the first time in its history, forcing Caltech to compete for control of the lab it’s run since 1958. The current contract is worth up to $30B and runs through 2028. www.latimes.com/science/stor...

Jingyi Yang@jyang19.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Happy to see my PhD work on birdsong complexity published today! doi.org/10.1098/rspb... 🐦‍⬛ 🎶 ⬇️ Why are some birdsongs simple and some extremely complex? The answer is long thought to be ‘sexual selection favouring complex signals’. But - really?

Song complexity in suboscine birds: evolutionary drivers and ecological constraints

Abstract. Acoustic signal complexity varies widely in animals, from single notes to highly sophisticated vocal displays. In birds, vocal complexity can evo

doi.org

Gavin Leighton@gavinleighton.bsky.social · 3mo ago

If you click through to the 'contact' info for this program you'll see the contact email is "xlabs@nsf.gov" and the contact phone number is "(blank)". The actual text of this solicitation is barely coherent. 100% a scheme to funnel critical NSF money to private companies with no oversight.

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Cool, so NSF is now going to be used to essentially launder money to tech bros because universities are just too cumbersome and disciplinary oversight and regulations and accountability are all just too stifling for innovation. $1.5B for “X-Labs.”

Don Moynihan@donmoyn.bsky.social · 3mo ago

This is basically harassment of scholars willing to question the Trump administration’s targeting of Chinese colleagues. Innes already had the FBI investigate his lab and was given the all clear. Now USDA is shutting down the Lab, which focuses on making fungus-resistant plants.

IU plant microbiologist Roger Innes says the move Thursday evening is the latest instance of retaliation for a letter he wrote last fall on behalf of Yunqing Jian, a plant scientist postdoc at the University of Michigan who had pled guilty to smuggling biological material and making false statements. The letter to Jian's attorney, intended to be used at her sentencing, argued that what the Chinese postdoc had transported was not dangerous, but she was still ultimately deported. Her conviction triggered an investigation of Youhuang Xiang, a Chinese postdoc in Innes' lab, that led to Xiang also pleading guilty last month to smuggling loops of DNA known as plasmids. He was also deported.
Science Magazine@science.org · 3mo ago

Breaking news: Indiana University plant microbiologist Roger Innes has been locked out of his laboratory by the school in response to a request by one of his federal funders. The move comes after Innes complained about the government’s prosecution of Chinese postdocs. https://scim.ag/4tsDqRr

Gavin Leighton@gavinleighton.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Research from the lab on the evolution of size and plumage dimorphism in birds! Grad student Catherine Alverson examined how species move between size and plumage dimorphism categories. While those results largely recapitulated previous work, there was an intriguing new finding [1/3]

Phylogeny of bird species in the paper. The rings around the phylogeny represent traits. The silhouettes represent bird species in the paper.
Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 3mo ago

More details on the firing of the National Science Board. The NSF now has no director, deputy director, or board. They have issued almost no new awards in 2026. The plan appears to be to completely destroyed the agency. The details are horrifying and have Russ Vought written all over them.

Board Ouster Raises Further Concerns About NSF’s Future

The White House axed all members of the board overseeing the National Science Foundation Friday, leaving the agency with no board, director or deputy director. It finally provided a reason Monday afte...

insidehighered.com

Mike Kaspari@mikekaspari.bsky.social · 4mo ago

NSF LTER program “archived”. LTER=“Long Term Ecological Research”. This program has been incredibly successful, incredibly frugal for what they accomplish, and…of course…targeted by evil know-nothings. My heart is breaking.

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Catherine Sheard@sheardcat.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Are you (or something you know) looking for a PhD? Like trait macroevolution but also yearn for an applied topic? Think plants are neat? Want to live in beautiful northeast Scotland?! 🌊🐬⛰️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 I'm advertising a PhD in my lab! Deadline April 22, email me any questions. www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

QUARTILES DLA CASE: Trait-based drivers of the ornamental plant trade at University of Aberdeen on FindAPhD.com

PhD Project - QUARTILES DLA CASE: Trait-based drivers of the ornamental plant trade at University of Aberdeen , listed on FindAPhD.com

findaphd.com

Catherine Sheard@sheardcat.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Well damn, this is cool. Birds That Don't Exist: Niche Pre-Emption as a Constraint on Morphological Evolution in the Passeroidea | Chia et al., 2026 | Ecology Letters onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Birds That Don't Exist: Niche Pre‐Emption as a Constraint on Morphological Evolution in the Passeroidea

We use topological data analysis to reveal a persistent morphological gap in a major group of songbirds (superfamily Passeroidea). The gap remained unoccupied for millions of years, even though nearb...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Joshua G. Schraiber@jgschraiber.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Russ Vought hates American innovation and scientific leadership and is committed to destroying it

Michael D. Green, PhD@michaeldgreen.phd · 5mo ago

“Since Trump took office 13 months ago, NIH has posted only 84 NOFOs, down from 787 in the previous year. Many more are in limbo. NIH has 323 opportunities listed as ‘forecasted.’ “ Seems like an innovative and exciting research environment for early career folks! www.science.org/content/arti...

Dan Baldassarre@evornithology.bsky.social · 5mo ago

This is why Democrats rightly didn't stand in response to Stephen Miller's gross pledge of mindless nationalism at the State of the Union last night. When these crimes are being perpetrated by the state, the citizenship status of the victims is irrelevant. www.investigativepost.org/2026/02/25/b...

Blind refugee abandoned by Border Patrol dies in Buffalo.

A nearly blind refugee abandoned by Border Patrol miles from his home dies in Buffalo after having been missing for nearly a week.

investigativepost.org

Eliot Miller@eliotmiller.bsky.social · 6mo ago

If you thought regular bird listing was for nerds, wait til you get a load of phylolisting. @snacktavish.bsky.social

Birds of the World | The Cornell Lab@birdsoftheworld.bsky.social · 6mo ago

MAJOR NEWS! We just launched an awesome new tool! The illustrated Birds of the World Phylogeny Explorer lets users trace any bird’s lineage, compare species relationships, and explore major evolutionary milestones with a click of a button. SHARE and EXPLORE! birdsoftheworld.org/bow/news/phy...

IMAGE SHOWS GRAPHIC OF CORNELL LAB OF ORNITHOLOGY PHYLOGENY EXPLORER TOOL.