The first fleet had 60 nationalities and ethnic backgrounds among convicts, crew, and marines. 15 people of African descent. Multicultural Australia.
Marcel Cardillo
@marcelcardillo.bsky.social
Australian National University. Macroevolution, macroecology, biogeography, biodiversity, conservation. www.macroevoeco.com
Really nice memoriam to Robert Ricklefs by Brian McGill: dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2026/06/11/r... Ricklefs got ecologists to think big: about the role of history, biogeography & macroevolution on ecological patterns. More than anyone, his work shaped the course of my career.
Robert Ricklefs – in memoriam
Robert Ricklefs, a giant of ecology, passed away on Sunday. It is hard to overstate the extensive impact Bob had on the field. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the US,…
dynamicecology.wordpress.com
Phylogenetic Patterns in Hunting and Extinction Risk in Primates zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Phylogenetic Patterns in Hunting and Extinction Risk in Primates
Globally, hunting is a significant threat to non-human primates, potentially increasing their risk of extinction. Larger-bodied and more evolutionarily distinct species are at higher risk, although s...
zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Hakea season has started. My favourite genus of Australian plants! Western Australia has 3/4 of all the Hakea species and most of the well known horticultural cultivars.
This is such an important and engaging book (including an excellent chapter on our work on evidence-based conservation). Makes a completely compelling case for learning what is effective and then doing what we know works and not doing what we know doesn’t work.
Not much mention of it in Australia, though its officials were there. Colombia and the Netherlands this week hosted nearly 60 countries for the first dedicated international talks focused on how to transition away from fossil fuels www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Could Santa Marta climate talks mark ground zero in push to ditch fossil fuels?
Colombia hosted nearly 60 countries at pivotal time on world stage for fight to transition to a clean energy future
theguardian.com
Vale Peter Raven, champion of plants and biodiversity. 'In one of his lectures, he described biodiversity as “the whole business”—the sum of organisms, their variations and the communities they form. It was a plain phrase for a concept of considerable scope.' news.mongabay.com/2026/04/pete...
Peter Raven, botanist and advocate for biodiversity, has died, aged 89
Life on Earth is often described as a web, but for much of modern science it was catalogued as a ledger: names, specimens, distributions, relationships drawn in careful lines. Over the course of the 2...
news.mongabay.com
Researcher degrees of freedom should be more widely appreciated in the biological sciences too. Social sciences & psychology are way ahead of us in that regard.
Joris Frese@fresejoris.bsky.social · 4mo ago📄Published Today in Nature: 500 researchers reproduced 100 studies across the social & behavioral sciences to assess their analytical robustness (led by @balazsaczel.bsky.social & @szaszibarnabas.bsky.social). Article: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Preprint: osf.io/preprints/me... TLDR: 1/11
If we want to conserve evolutionary history, we need to think about this: change the phylogenetic methods, and you change the conservation outcomes. New paper led by honours student Mina Kearns, with @alexskeels.bsky.social & @keaghanjames.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Surely there was a more direct route to Hobart than that
This is why @biogeographyjfab.bsky.social and other diamond OA journals are so important. Send us your awesome biogeography papers and do the field a solid! nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
Payment‐based open access is biasing scientific participation from the Global South in ecology
Opening access to the products of scientific research is widely considered a key step toward both fairness and better science worldwide. Since the 1990s, different forms of open access (OA) to journa...
nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
My long-time friend and colleague, the legendary Paul Ehrlich, died on Friday at 93 years old. He had a good innings, but I’ll miss him www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/b...
Paul R. Ehrlich, Who Alarmed the World With ‘The Population Bomb,’ Dies at 93
nytimes.com
This is Iran. These are the people being murdered in our name.
📢 Including fossil tips in your phylogeny can double your continuous trait model fitting accuracy! Updated preprint out now on @ecoevorxiv.bsky.social. 🔗 doi.org/10.32942/X27... with @pedrolgodoy.bsky.social @macroecoevoale.bsky.social and @bethanyjallen.bsky.social
Quantifying the Impact of Fossil Age on Reconstructing Trait Evolution Using Phylogenetic Comparative Methods
doi.org
I was once marooned on a tiny island with a paranoid lighthouse keeper and a Texan who cooked nothing but burritos with eyeball-burning amounts of chilli.
Kayla Cromer Official@kaylacromer.bsky.social · 5mo agoTell me a random fact about yourself that sounds fake but is 100% true.
We are a rich enough country to be funding 37% of all basic research proposals, not just considering "the best" 37% and then maybe only funding 12% in the end.
After a few years of benign neglect I am rebuilding bionames.org, which is a database of 5.4 million taxonomomic names for animals, linked to half a million DOIs and 278K PDFs. Dream is for every species name to be linked to its original publication using a persistent identifier #PID
BioNames
bionames.org
Forecasting extinction risk for future-proof conservation decisions: Trends Ecol & Evolution www.cell.com/trends/ecolo... Should conservation focus on threatened species? Or should we be proactive and protect species before they become threatened? This paper explores how to get the balance right.
Forecasting extinction risk for future-proof conservation decisions
Conservation prioritisation emphasises currently threatened species, but there are strong arguments for complementary, more proactive approaches based on forecasting future extinction risk for unthrea...
cell.com
I take Wikipedia for granted. Reading this Jimmy Wales interview reminded me in our Fantasyland age what a remarkable and important creation it is. True pillar of civilization. Runs on only $200 million a year. Requires our support. So I’m finally donating. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/m...
The Culture Wars Came for Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales Is Staying the Course.
nytimes.com
It’s that time of the year again when Australian companies celebrate the fact that it’s almost the Friday after a pilgrim thanksgiving holiday in America by providing discounts to unrelated goods Well fuck that We’re raising our prices by 10% and donating the difference (+ an extra 15%) to charity
Fuck Black Friday — The Shovel
We're raising our prices by 10%
theshovel.com.au
Surprisingly difficult to get hold of the full list of EPBC amendments... But here's the list of amendments put out by The Greens
Greens amendments secured in EPBC negotiations | The Australian Greens
greens.org.au
Online now: Forecasting extinction risk for future-proof conservation decisions. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Should conservation focus on threatened species? Or should we be proactive and protect species before they become threatened? This paper explores how to get the balance right.
The Greens have secured an inquiry to find out why job & program cuts are being rolled out across the CSIRO! It will consider the impacts of the funding cuts, the importance of public funding for science & CSIRO’s future funding & resourcing needs.
The dismantling of Science in #Australia continues... I remember that hopes were high in 2022 that the new Labor Government would end the decade-long decline. We are now in the second #Albanese term, and things are worse than ever. ABC News article: www.abc.net.au/news/science... #PlantScience
Over five years after cameras were set up within a sprawling Western Australian landscape, an elusive “chuditch” has been filmed for the first time. au.news.yahoo.com/camera-captu...
Camera captures rare Aussie predator believed extinct across 70km landscape
A $5 million project has helped change the region, allowing for the animal's return.
au.news.yahoo.com