What are the conferences/meetings that plant evolutionary ecologists in the UK attend? It seems silly for us to be siloed by taxonomy, so I’m keen to explore how we can encourage greater discourse. Please RT.
Greg Walter
@gmwalter.bsky.social
Ecological and evolutionary genetics, mainly with plants Lecturer & ARC Future Fellow, University of Tasmania Otherwise cycling, camping and birding!
This is thoughtful and worth your time.
Ran Blekhman@blekhman.bsky.social · 2w agoEveryone says AI will accelerate science. I don't think it will -- at least not in biology, and at least not soon. New post where I explain why, and how the productivity paradox can be resolved: blekhman.substack.com/p/why-ai-wil...
i see a particular grievance regularly on here: "a paper I reviewed came back to me at a diff journal. the authors didn't address my concerns at all." seriously what are you doing accepting to review the same paper? let people breathe & have another chance. let them decide what's worth addressing.
Matt Weiner@mattweiner19.bsky.social · 2w agowill the next reviewer have the same objection? if you revise to address the objection, will the next reviewer say "I don't see why the paper spends so much time addressing this objection that no one could possibly have"? who knows
Very happy to see this study out! The transition from outcrossing to selfing involve convergent patterns of flower trait covariation academic.oup.com/aob/article/...
“Academic science is not only about productivity but also deep understanding, creative solutions & training critical thinkers as next generation of researchers. Now is the time for our community to evaluate whether AI products help or hinder these.“ @lmesseri.bsky.social & @mjcrockett.bsky.social🧪👇
The uncritical adoption of AI in science is alarming — we urgently need guard rails
Artificial intelligence is rapidly accelerating scientific output, but risks narrowing inquiry, weakening judgement and undermining how scientists are trained.
nature.com
Botanical parasitism of an insect by a parasitic plant: Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol...
Botanical parasitism of an insect by a parasitic plant
Egan et al. report the discovery of a new trophic interaction in nature whereby a parasitic plant attacks multiple species of insects that manipulate plant tissue when the two co-occur on a shared pri...
cell.com
New paper out in Evolution Letters! @evolletters.bsky.social We explore the legacy of past warming at the rear edge of Campanula americana. Spoiler alert: we did not find higher drift load as often expected at the rear edge, but strong local adaptation! doi.org/10.1093/evle...
Fast developers in native habitats show higher survival in new environments suggesting development time forecasts adaptive potential in Sicilian daisies. By @gmwalter.bsky.social and @jonbridle.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/evle... @gmwalter.bsky.social Image credit A Moro at Wikimedia
Now out in Evolution Letters - Ongoing adaptation of the partridge pea boosts fitness across generations and helps buffer populations against harmful environmental change. By Ruth Shaw et al. Image credit Patrick Alexander doi.org/10.1093/evle...
So happy to see the 2nd chapter of my PhD out! doi.org/10.1093/evol... Here, we studied populations sampled from their local elevational edges and centers on mountain slopes, and characterised the variation in G-matrices (comprised of growth and leaf investment traits) among these populations. 1/5
Variation in the genetic architecture of ecologically relevant traits along elevational gradients
Abstract. Species are confined within spatial boundaries, which may be determined by various factors. An understudied one is the genetic non-independence o
doi.org
I'm a data scientist @ourworldindata.org and I need help from a botanist or someone local to Kyoto, Japan! 🌸 We present one of the world’s longest climate records: 1,200 years of peak cherry blossom dates in Kyoto. The researcher who maintained it, Prof. Yasuyuki Aono, sadly passed away last year.
New Evolution Digest out! 🎉 Does balancing selection maintain fitness variance? Yes, when drift and environmental fluctuations are in play! I discuss why this matters for plant adaptation to climate change. 🌱🌡️ doi.org/10.1093/evol... @sse-evolution.bsky.social @journal-evo.bsky.social
Digest: Drift and environmental fluctuations reveal fitness variance under balancing selection
Abstract. Why natural populations harbor high additive genetic variance for fitness remains an evolutionary puzzle. Connallon and Czuppon (2026) show that
doi.org
Nice to see this out! Thanks to all the coauthors. Really appreciate the work from the editors and reviewers at Evolution Letters.
Evolution Letters@evolletters.bsky.social · 4mo agoFast developers in native habitats show higher survival in new environments suggesting development time forecasts adaptive potential in Sicilian daisies. By @gmwalter.bsky.social and @jonbridle.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/evle... @gmwalter.bsky.social Image credit A Moro at Wikimedia
The breeding season 2026 has started, our 72nd breeding season!
@animalecol-nioo.bsky.social · 5mo agoWe have a new record 🚨 the warm month of march in the Netherlands had its effect on the first laying date of the Great tits! Breaking the record by two days the first egg date this year is 21st March. One blue tit went even beyond that and noted a first egg date on 19th of march! #breedingseason2026
Excited to share my second thesis chapter is published today as part of this issue 🎉 Exploring variability in physiological traits between (and within) individual fish can help us understand how metabolic performance and growth rates change in response to factors like warming temperatures 🔥 🧪🐟🦑
Exploring metabolism–growth relationships within and across individual fish
Abstract. Differences in growth rate and metabolism between individual animals can influence survival, reproduction and competitive social dynamics during
doi.org
Royal Society Publishing@royalsocietypublishing.org · 5mo agoA new issue of #PhilTransB celebrates variability in animal #physiology research. Read #OA: buff.ly/mAzN7wF
Fish will have to adapt to a warming world, what will that adaptation do to fisheries yields? We answer that question today in Science. I’ll summarise our findings very briefly in this thread www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....
Evolutionary adaptation to global change reduces sustainable fisheries yields
Global warming is altering the fisheries that underpin food security, but projections of these impacts generally exclude evolutionary processes. We describe a model that forecasts how fish will adapt ...
science.org
What an amazing feat- congrats to everyone!!!!!!!!!! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Rapid evolution predicts demographic recovery after extreme drought
Populations that are declining as a result of climate change may need to evolve to persist. Although evolutionary rescue has been demonstrated in theory and in the laboratory, its relevance to natural...
science.org
Happy to share out latest work in Ecology Letters! We show how how genetic differences in plasticity determine fitness at different environmental scales from native to novel elevations. @jonbridle.bsky.social @jameswclark.bsky.social Many thanks to the reviewers! doi.org/10.1111/ele....
Preprint up now! With @ferrisifolius.bsky.social, we found positive selection on leaf shape plasticity across the altitudinal range of the cutleaf monkeyflower. This experiment was a HUGE personal undertaking. If you give it a read, I’d love to hear your thoughts! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Phenotypic plasticity is broadly adaptive across an elevation gradient in the Cutleaf Monkeyflower
Phenotypic plasticity is a key mechanism by which organisms can cope with environmental heterogeneity, but its evolutionary consequences depend on how plastic responses align with the broader adaptive...
biorxiv.org
A bit late, but really happy to see my first PhD paper out! We studied trait-elevation relationships in multiple traits spanning growth, size (both above and belowground) and leaf economics to understand whether these align at within- and among-species scales. academic.oup.com/evlett/advan...
Alignment across taxonomic levels in strategies rather than in traits along elevational gradients
Abstract. Trait variation along environmental gradients can indicate the different strategies that organisms have evolved in response to environmental hete
academic.oup.com
1. My first ever paper is out! With @euantheyoung.bsky.social @lummaalab.bsky.social @erikpostma.bsky.social @hannahdugdale.bsky.social How do older siblings, and their sex and age, affect the survival of younger siblings? Find out by checking below. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....
Age- and sex-dependent associations between the number of older siblings and early-life survival in pre-industrial humans | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Siblings are an important part of an individual’s early-life environment and may therefore play an important role in shaping an individual’s survival. The quantification of sibling effects on survival is challenging, however, especially in long-lived ...
royalsocietypublishing.org
woah this is genuinely, utterly WILD Ant queens of one species produce males of another species, so she can then mate with them and produce hybrid workers! This is so gloriously weird I can't quite compute it 🤯🧪🐜 www.nature.com/articles/d41...
‘Almost unimaginable’: these ants are different species but share a mother
Ant queens of one species clone ants of another to create hybrid workers that do their bidding.
nature.com
First post here 😬 .. hi everyone! Our new paper is the first from my short foray into a non-plant system! [don't worry, back to plants!] We show how clinal patterns in climate tolerance and plasticity are environment-dependent! doi.org/10.1098/rspb... Thanks to ProcB and the reviewers!
Variation in temperature but not diet determines the stability of latitudinal clines in tolerance traits and their plasticity | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Latitudinal clines are routinely used as evidence of adaptation across broad climatic gradients. However, if environmental variation influences the strength of latitudinal clines, then clinal patterns...
doi.org
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/...
and, @stuartmcdaniel.bsky.social ! My favorite part of this paper: the collaboration started after I sent Meng a biorxiv preprint from Stuart's lab.. She contacted him with questions about that work, and the collaboration grew from there.
Genome Biology and Evolution@genomebiolevol.bsky.social · 12mo agoYuan, @stepheniwright.bsky.social, @johnstinchcombe.bsky.social, et al. examined signatures of selection across life stages in the angiosperm Rumex hastatulus and the moss Ceratodon purpureus. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evaf138 #genome #evolution #PlantSky
Sophie Buysse's paper on short stamen loss in Arabipsis is published in this month's Evolution issue!! academic.oup.com/evolut/artic... @journal-evo.bsky.social
Evaluating the roles of drift and selection in trait loss along an elevational gradient
The evolutionary mechanisms underlying loss or retention of traits that have lost function are poorly understood. Short stamens in Arabidopsis thaliana pro
academic.oup.com
John Maynard Smith on adaptationist cleaning up their act following the spandrels paper. From Dinosaur Dilemmas, NYRB April 25, 1991.
SO excited for #Evol2025 @sse-evolution.bsky.social!!!!!!! The Coughlan lab has a stellar line up of folks giving talks (on lab projects and beyond!)- please check them out! We welcome all feedback and would love to hear from you!!!
I'm so excited to be at #evol2025!! Lab talks: "Adaptive and maladaptive plasticity in leaf number among populations of A. thaliana" from Sophie Buysse at 9:30 in Sunday in Adaptation V
Shout out to this excellent & thorough paper: Leaf venation: structure, function, development, evolution, ecology and applications in the past, present and future A compendium, really, especially if you include the supplemental info. #PlantScience 🧪 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Leaf venation: structure, function, development, evolution, ecology and applications in the past, present and future
The design and function of leaf venation are important to plant performance, with key implications for the distribution and productivity of ecosystems, and applications in paleobiology, agriculture a....
nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com