Never a dull trip to Portland! This Ischnoscia borreonella was definitely the stand-out moth of the weekend, a real surprise to @josscarr.bsky.social @hwitts.bsky.social and I as we failed to find Eudarcia richardsoni

Portland Bird Observatory@portlandbirdobs.bsky.social · last mo.

...aka Little Ghost - great vernacular Messrs Parson & Sterling! - perhaps the first time it's been seen at this site for more than 100 yrs. Returned last evening and on an adjacent scree potted three more and saw sev others flying - seems as though it's far easier here than at the only currently...

New preprint now available on BioRxiv ( doi.org/10.64898/202...)! Thank you to @bertaverd.bsky.social, Roger Benson and my other co-authors, Hannah Ugboma, Katharine Criswell and Mexford Mulumpwa.

Whole body elongation drives coordinated vertebral shape evolution in Lake Malawi cichlid fishes

Understanding how anatomical structures evolve requires disentangling the roles of integration and modularity in shaping morphological variation. The vertebral column, a serially repeated and regional...

doi.org

New Pre-Print Alert! Evolving initial conditions: an alternative developmental route to morphological diversity with Shannon Taylor and @jamesehammond.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The introduction and Part 1 of my South Africa blog are now published. Beware that this post is extremely long - so long, in fact, that I'm not sure how I'm going to find the time to keep this up for the rest of the trip tmbirding.blogspot.com/2026/03/sout... tmbirding.blogspot.com/2026/03/sout...

South Africa Part 1 - Johannesburg to Kruger

Birding Polokwane - one of the highlights of this leg This first blog post covers the part of our trip before we arrived in Kruger. I arrive...

tmbirding.blogspot.com

Excited to see one of my PhD chapters now published! We found a trade-off between the quality of host plants and how warm they were for a declining grassland butterfly (Small Copper, Lycaena phlaeas) and looked at how this shaped their egg-laying choices: doi.org/10.1111/een....

Really excited to present the results of a fantastic collaboration with Jesse Veenvliet @jesseveenvliet.bsky.social @mpi-cbg.de @poldresden.bsky.social 🤩 We find a unique mechanism for body axis elongation in mammals, different from other vertebrate species ➡️ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Collected leaf-mines of Dialectica scalariella on Viper's Bugloss/Echium vulgare from Freshwater Bay, Portland (VC 9) on 13th Sept - adults emerged on 25th Sept @portlandbirdobs.bsky.social @dorsetbutterflies.bsky.social

I am excited to share the first preprint from my postdoc work! We found that ligand-receptor pairs are not static and show an antagonistic spatial localization! We show ligand is important to fine tune the amplitude of Wnt oscillations ensuring robust tissue patterning! Check out the preprint!

Ina Sonnen@sonnenlab.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Preprint alert! We combined microfluidics, proteomics, and RNA-seq to map spatiotemporal protein expression during mouse somitogenesis and found a novel regulatory strategy: dynamic antagonistic gradients fine-tune signalling strength. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Out now in Seminars in Cell & Dev Biol! doi.org/10.1016/j.se... With thanks to co-authors @callumbucklow.bsky.social and @bertaverd.bsky.social

James Hammond@jamesehammond.bsky.social · last yr.

Latest work: Review on the evolvability of vertebral number, and the developmental processes underpinning it Written by Callum Bucklow, @bertaverd.bsky.social, and myself Check it out here: doi.org/10.32942/X2K...

🧪🚨Ever wondered why plant leaves 🍃look the way they do? Glad to contribute to work by Jamie Malone & team on developmental bias toward simple leaves! But there’s a backstory to it 1/4 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Developmental bias explains the evolutionary trend towards simple leaf shapes

The relative influence of developmental bias and natural selection on evolutionary outcomes remains a central, unresolved question in evolutionary biology. Here, we combine large-scale phylogenetic tr...

biorxiv.org

Haar kept moth numbers down at Findhorn dunes (VC 95) last night, with a meagre return of 15 species across two traps. However i did find a nice Portland moth / Actebia praecox resting on the heather, and an attractive Arctosa perita sought refuge (or prey) inside one of the traps

Great night mothing in Wytham Woods on midsummer's day - warm weather brought in 121 species including (presumed) Nemapogon ruricolella, Argyresthia glaucinella, and a very handsome Stephensia brunnichella @tmbirding.bsky.social #mothsmatter

In this Perspective, students from the 2024 Embryology Course share their experiences spending the summer at the Marine Biological Laboratory (@mblscience.bsky.social‬) in Woods Hole: journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

The Company of Biologists and the Woods Hole Embryology Course We explore the association of Development and @biologists.bsky.social‬ with the Woods Hole Embryology Course @mblscience.bsky.social‬ and hear from former students about the impact the course has had on them: doi.org/10.1242/dev....

From hydra grafts to butterfly gene expression, the 2024 @mblscience.bsky.social #Embryology Course was a playground for #discovery. 🌊 @planaria1.bsky.social Lab postdoc Ekasit Sonpho co-authored a reflection in @dev-journal.bsky.social on what made this summer so transformative: bit.ly/3ZIMRQu

What a fantastic essay by last year's @mblscience.bsky.social Embryology students! A perfect paean to the most wonderful science: "It's exhausting; it's exhilarating; it's Embryology." journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Embryology 2024: a summer like no other

Each summer since 1893, a small group of scientists from around the world have convened at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, USA, to work on the most exciting model ...

journals.biologists.com

Somitic Change Drives Changes in Vertebral Regionalisation in African Cichlids Despite Strong Canalisation of Somite Number https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.23.655800v1

Experimental embryology postdoc available in my lab at the @biology.ox.ac.uk @ox.ac.uk working on the evolution of vertebral counts. Reach out if you’re passionate about EvoDevo, enjoy lab work and microscopy and are into or could get into cichlid fishes. Deadline on the 16th June. Please share!

Excited to announce my second PhD manuscript is on bioRvix (biorxiv.org/content/10.1...). Thanks to all co-authors, including my supervisors @bertaverd.bsky.social and Roger Benson. Thread below...

African Cichlid Lake Radiations Recapitulate Riverine Axial Morphologies Through Repeated Exploration of Morphospace

African cichlids comprise more than 1800 species of freshwater fishes, with remarkable adaptive radiations in Lakes Tanganyika, Malawi, and Victoria that have given rise to extraordinary morphological...

biorxiv.org

Segmentation clock & tissue development are decoupled - explanation for evolution of flexible body plans? #EvoDevo #SegmentationClock Study from Verd Lab @bertaverd.bsky.social @oxfordmathematics.bsky.social 🆕 #preprintpeerreview @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social --> doi: doi.org/10.1101/2024...

Modularity of the segmentation clock and morphogenesis

Vertebrates have evolved great diversity in the number of segments dividing the trunk body, however the developmental origin of the evolvability of this trait is poorly understood. The number of segme...

doi.org

Previously only recorded once in the UK in 2018, records of Pammene juniperana have been increasing since 2022. Pleased to finally share this paper with @jamesehammond.bsky.social confirming that this lovely moth is breeding here, probably both on both wild and garden Junipers: shorturl.at/E2LrU

Latest work: Review on the evolvability of vertebral number, and the developmental processes underpinning it Written by Callum Bucklow, @bertaverd.bsky.social, and myself Check it out here: doi.org/10.32942/X2K...

LepiLED drew in thirteen Rannoch sprawler (Brachionycha nubeculosa) at Drynachan up the Findhorn valley, including some nice dark specimens. Conditions about perfect, 90 moths of 11 species for 1.5 hrs trapping