When I was a kid, a friend rejected evolution because he equated "mutant" with "diseased" and didn't want to descend from a "sick monkey". But now that "sick" has a positive slang meaning, maybe we should embrace the term. I'm proud to be descended from a sick (complimentary) monkey!

iNaturalist just updated the genus Bison to merge with Bos, as in cattle, reflecting recent genetic analysis and the fact they can readily interbreed. In fact all living American bison are directly descended in part from domestic cattle; the original wild bison is gone, and only Bos hybrids remain.

In a single generation, the default repetitive melody associated with sharks has changed from dun-dun dun-dun dun-dun to doo-doo doo-doo-doo-doo.

Background info for the audience prior to a production of Taming of the Shrew

A suctorial organism lives by sucking. That is, its whole strategy for life is just to suck. Consider adding this word to your regular vocabulary.

Two of the most iconic Pacific Northwest species are the Pacific chorus frog (Pseudacris regilla) and the Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii). Both are “false” (pseudo-). It’s the land of real organisms with fake names.

Hello, I am a brain. I crave dopamine above all things. I can freely administer dopamine to myself and I alone control it. However I can only do this according to arbitrary rules I have made up. Sometimes my rules don’t allow me to give myself as much as I want. This is the source of all anguish.

With cyclosporiasis in the news, note that the only treatment is trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, an antibiotic, i.e. something that targets bacteria and shouldn’t even work on a eukaryote but somehow sort of does. It will probably evolve resistance, so we need more options tailored to this taxon.

I mourn poetry's prominent role That internet acronyms stole. Because I don't know how To pronounce "lmao" So I can't write a verse with it, lol.

I just commented on the OMB's Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance and you can too (due TODAY)! If enacted, I'd lose my first amendment right to even make these comments, since I'd live in fear that I'd lose my grant-supported salary if I said the wrong thing. www.aps.org/initiatives/...

Yellowstone used to hand these out

I enjoyed Percival Everett's “James” (Huck Finn from Jim’s viewpoint). Has anyone done this with Kipling’s “Kim” from Teshoo Lama’s view? The two classic novels are very similar, but Twain’s story was already anti-slavery while Kipling’s is pro-colonialism so there is more room to subvert it.

Got my beach reading

Two separate congressional candidates in my district, one Democrat and one Republican, have hit upon an issue to unify Americans on both sides of the aisle: Aliens. I say we need to rule out whether any organism currently on Earth is an alien, so fund basic biology research and we'll go from there.

Read about cyclosporiasis outbreak? Wondering what exactly is this organism causing an uptick in explosive bathroom visits? Cyclospora is in the Weed clade as I define it here: adaptivediversity.wordpress.com/2026/06/13/t... So think of it alongside malaria parasites, seaweed cousins, and plants. 🪴

The Energetic Branches

I recently attended a parasitology conference, which has me thinking about ancient evolution. A lot of medically important parasites come from far-flung branches in the tree of life, weird groups o…

adaptivediversity.wordpress.com

“Mammoth” (well, “maimanto”) originally meant the animal not “generically large” and the coiner was a Russian who have known these fossil tusks for centuries. The person who popularized the “large” meaning also wrote some other words we celebrate today: “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”

DaddyJew@daddyjew.bsky.social · 8mo ago

the person who named the Woolly Mammoth should’ve been able to name more things

Throwback to the time I met Gene Cernan after writing an article about him

Three excellent books about fungus I've read this year: 🍄The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing 🍄How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics by Michael Pollan 🍄Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

A got to deliver a UU sermon last week, and you can hear my words here: uucvan.org/services/the...

Another excellent Anopheles pop genomics paper! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The origin, history, and resistance architecture of an invasive urban malaria mosquito in Africa

The invasive urban malaria vector Anopheles stephensi threatens 126 million city-dwellers in Africa. Controling An. stephensi requires greater understanding of its origin, invasion dynamics, and insec...

science.org

It’s so amazing that a snail carries its home everywhere it goes! -Me, a brain that rides around in a skull

Promising new program for modeling population history from genomic data, mrpast joins MrBayes and Msms in the family of evolutionary genetics software with formal gendered honorifics.

April Wei@aprilwei.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Excited to preprint our latest work (w/ Drew DeHaas, Zhibai Jia, Leo Speidel) on using ARGs for demographic inference. w/ applications using data from 1000 Genomes Project. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Coincident with the life of Dolly the sheep (1996-2003), cloning was a hot topic infused in the culture. And then abruptly we all decided it’s not actually that worrisome or interesting. Now it’s hard to even explain the earlier obsession to those who didn’t live through it.

The algae in the Reflecting Pool are mostly Desmodesmus, which happens to be the only chlorophyll-containing organism that can infect and parasitize human flesh. It's not really dangerous, but it's a pretty on-the-nose metaphor that nature is delivering to us. www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/...

Infection with a Chlorophyllic Eukaryote after a Traumatic Freshwater Injury | NEJM

Infections with chlorophyllic algae are uncommon. Invasive infection with Desmodesmus armatus developed in two patients independently after they each sustained a penetrating freshwater injury.

nejm.org

I get to lead another UU church service in Vancouver, WA! Come join us! The Empirical Divine: A scientific mindset doesn’t strip sacredness from the world, but allows us to see it more clearly. Come rekindle your awe at the miracle of existence in an astonishing universe. uucvan.org/services/the...

I came up with a fun way to picture the eukaryote phylogeny: adaptivediversity.wordpress.com/2026/06/13/t...

The Energetic Branches

I recently attended a parasitology conference, which has me thinking about ancient evolution. A lot of medically important parasites come from far-flung branches in the tree of life, weird groups o…

adaptivediversity.wordpress.com

You can tell how badly mosquitoes have been biting someone based on their immune response to insect proteins. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Integrated evaluation of antibody responses to mosquitoes and mosquito-borne pathogens using highly multiplexed serology

Antibody profiling via high-throughput serology reveals targets of immunity against arthropod vectors and pathogens they spread.

science.org

The Energetic Branches: A new way to picture the eukaryote branches in the tree of life, especially their diversity of parasites adaptivediversity.wordpress.com/2026/06/13/t...

The Energetic Branches

I recently attended a parasitology conference, which has me thinking about ancient evolution. A lot of medically important parasites come from far-flung branches in the tree of life, weird groups o…

adaptivediversity.wordpress.com

Important science happening at the Gordon Research Conference

Today I head to scenic Newport RI, for the Gordon Research Conference on Biology of Host-Parasite Interactions. Basically this image but about parasites.