JOIN ME ON TOUR! 🪱 I'm doing some exciting public events for my new book #TheWorldBeneathourFeet. They're a mixture of talks and conversation-style interviews, with exhibitions of my soil animal macrophotography! Tickets are available online, I'd love to see you there 🥰 @hodderbooks.bsky.social

Pro tip for writers: A very bad first draft is not a failure - it’s a great start, Congratulations! You can’t revise a blank page, but you can shape a bad one into something really great

60,000+ comments on OMB’s proposal to politicize grants. The lesson: speak up. It makes a difference & it’s not over yet. 🎁 wapo.st/44YL4t1

I'm just now reading @randomwalker.bsky.social's writeup of his ICML keynote. It is very insightful. Everyone thinking about the future of work in the age of AI should read this. www.normaltech.ai/p/what-will-...

What will be left for us to work on?

My keynote at ICML 2026

normaltech.ai

New in small snail science; Looks like an interesting paper by Crestohl and Bush; will have to give it a thorough read this week Quantifying size-related biases in the preservation and description of Cretaceous and Paleogene gastropods. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

I recommend this article about AI reasoning, where the author lets us in on his struggles w/ AI cognitive dissonance. Plus some priceless quotes from @rao2z.bsky.social. (My recommendation has *nothing* to do with the fact that I'm quoted in it too 😇) www.quantamagazine.org/is-ai-reason...

Is AI Reasoning Right for the Wrong Reasons? | Quanta Magazine

The idea that artificial intelligence can “reason” is more intuitive than ever. But intuitions can be wrong, and the science is far from settled.

quantamagazine.org

At #Botany2026, I was hoping to start recruiting for my lab group. If you are interested in polyploidy and population genetics, please reach out.

Our latest PNAS article with @landismj.bsky.social and Ammon Thompson on a new mathematical model for studying infectious disease dynamics with travel has been covered by WashU Arts and Sciences on its news site. Read it here: artsci.washu.edu/ampersand/ne...

New study reveals how COVID-19 likely spread between countries

A model developed by WashU biologists suggests infected foreigners were not the primary drivers of international outbreaks

artsci.washu.edu

Very cool pair of papers demonstrating little link between amount of additive genetic variation and amount of nucleotide variation within species: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Levels of additive genetic variation vary substantially between species

Adaptive potential determines how populations respond to environmental change. This study compiles evolvability estimates from over 170 multicellular species, revealing substantial variation across th...

journals.plos.org

Ecological Society of America announces 2026 award recipients – Ecological Society of America share.google/kdfLcABBwKAC... Proud of @haldre.bsky.social and grateful to the former and current Rogers lab/EBL stars who put together the nomination package. Send Haldre a "strong work!" #IYKYK

Congratulations Violet Onsongo on her new #dragonfly paper! Evolution and biogeography of the widespread dragonfly genus Orthetrum (Odonata: Anisoptera: Libellulidae): Massive dispersal in the tertiary - Systematic Entomology - Wiley Online Library resjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Evolution and biogeography of the widespread dragonfly genus <fi>Orthetrum</fi> (<fc>Odonata: Anisoptera: Libellulidae</fc>): Massive dispersal in the tertiary

Ancestral range reconstruction supports an early widespread Afro–Eurasian distribution, rather than a single-region origin, reflecting connectivity among Africa, Europe and Asia during the Tertiary......

resjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Understanding how reproductive isolation evolves remains a central goal of speciation research. The increasing availability of genomic data has transformed the field, resulting in research dominated by genomic approaches, but is this a good thing? Here, this question is evaluated 👇🧪

The identity crisis of speciation genomics

Abstract. Understanding how reproductive isolation (RI) evolves remains a central goal of speciation research. Quantifying RI is challenging, and researche

doi.org

From collections to conservation: the indispensable role of natural history museums The IUCN Species Survival Commission has published a Position Statement on the vital role of biological collections in biodiversity conservation iucn.org/news/202607/...

From collections to conservation: the indispensable role of natural history museums

The IUCN Species Survival Commission has published a Position Statement on the vital role of biological collections in biodiversity conservation: a formal acknowledgement that natural history museums,...

iucn.org

grateful to have received the lab's first NSF grant to study cyclical processes of speciation with new theory and tools (applied to Melanesian birds). ad to come, but I'll be looking for a postdoc with computational biology chops—please reach out! (and repost) www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...

🧪 🪲 🌋 🌡️ When are things too hot to handle? Our new paper on insect thermal tolerance across elevation in @pnas.org nas.org suggest perhaps not too far in the future. @gdfcf.bsky.social sky.social @alexandreloureiro.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵

Disentangling sampling bias to generate early-warning surfaces of forest ecological sensitivity: An integrated MaxEnt–CatBoost framework www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Internal decline and the final punch of mass extinctions in the extinction of clades. "Once proportional diversity fell below a critical threshold (mean of approximately 0.13), major abiotic perturbations acted as the ‘last straw’," nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio #EvoBio

This one of the best papers of the year: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC.... We know virtually nothing about dispersal in bees. Amazing field work to answer this question.

Fat‐tailed dispersal shapes connectivity in a solitary bee

Dispersal—movement potentially leading to gene flow—is a fundamental ecological process yet notoriously difficult to measure. For solitary bees in particular, determining the spatial scale of dispersa...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Phylogeny, classification, and evolutionary history of Neogastropoda: doi.org/10.1093/zool... #evolution #phylogenetics #systematics #mollusca

New preprint: 338 coleopteran genomes reveal exceptional rearrangement variation compared to other insect orders. Big congrats to @arf-mln.bsky.social, for getting this giant piece together. Big collaboration of @joanameier.bsky.social's and my groups. 🧵👇 doi.org/10.64898/202...

The ultimate tldr on the OpenAI "rogue model" hacking incident 😅 (h/t @linege1 on X) But it would be useful to know the prompts OpenAI gave to the model....

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

Incorporating sampling bias into ENM/SDM permutation tests: new methods and a case study on neotropical ants vist.ly/5bijx #Niche #Models #SDM

Two new 🐟 preprints! First with @cmartinez.bsky.social on diversification in a wonderfully wacky group of deep-sea fishes www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

To the #Evol2026 folks, I am recruiting MSc/PhD students (with or without their own funding) - please send people my way if you know of anyone interested in blending ecology & evolution!

Reminder, applications for the next round of the SSB mentor match are due July 12! Are you at #evol2026? Come find an SSB council member if you have questions about the program.

Michael Landis@landismj.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The @systbiol.bsky.social Mentorship Program is back for 2026-2027! The program pairs off mentees with mentors based on shared interests in systematics and biodiversity research. Low effort, high reward! 12 virtual monthly meetings. More info: www.systbio.org/mentorship-p... Apply by June 12th!

The @systbiol.bsky.social Mentorship Program is back for 2026-2027! The program pairs off mentees with mentors based on shared interests in systematics and biodiversity research. Low effort, high reward! 12 virtual monthly meetings. More info: www.systbio.org/mentorship-p... Apply by June 12th!

Mentorship Program

Last updated May 14, 2025

systbio.org

I will be recruiting Ph.D. students at #Evol2026 in Cleveland!

Dr. Elizabeth Santos@lizmillermacroevo.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I am recruiting Ph.D. students this cycle. Students interested in deep-sea fishes and phylogenetic comparative methods are an especially good fit.

palaeoverse is a community-driven R package of generic functions to help streamline palaeobiological analyses and improve code readability and reproducibility. This is our last version before a major refactor in Autumn, supported by funding from the @softwaresaved.bsky.social.