ISBE2026 final moments, with the Early Career Award presentations followed by the prestigious Hamilton Lecture delivered by Leigh W. Simmons

Honoured to be one of the winners of the early research career award at #isbe2026

Bob Wong@bbmwong.bsky.social · 2w ago

Congrats to the #isbe2026 early career researcher award winners 👏

For anyone that missed my talk at @isbe2026.bsky.social - never you fear! You can watch my talk and read more about the new Replication Studies section at @behavecol.bsky.social right here! laskowskilab.faculty.ucdavis.edu/2026/07/22/r...

Taxonomic bias strikes again!

The Perfect Specimen@perfect-specimen.bsky.social · 2w ago

We promised you @nhcooper123.bsky.social 's donut plots showing how the specimens in the podcast were split taxonomically. Here they are! With raw numbers in the alt text.

Let biological sex be multifaceted, as all biology is. And when you need to be precise in scientific research, be precise. Say ‘gametic sex’ or ‘chromosomal sex’ or ‘anatomical sex’, or whatever is appropriate to your own work.

Fascinating talk on the history of peer review from Melinda Baldwin at @icssi.org, with some parallels to current crises. Also I hadn't realized peer review was such an American thing.

📚Meta-analyses!⚠️Key pitfalls! 🔬Improved methodology! 🖥️Reliable syntheses! Our #EditorsChoice for the #AnimalBehaviourJournal: “Biological and methodological pitfalls of meta-analyses in ecology and evolution: Lessons from eyespot function studies” Read here: doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2025.123448

This study published in #ProcB shows that comparing cancer across animal species can be misleading if researchers ignore popularity bias doi.org/10.1098/rspb... | #Evolution #Epidemiology

Excited to share our new paper in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social on data and code archiving at @britishecologicalsociety.org journals. TL;DR: Data archiving rates are high, code archiving rates are low, documentation needs to be improved! besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.....

Data‐ and code‐archiving in the British Ecological Society journals: Present status and recommendations for future improvements

Data- and code-archiving are important components of open science, as both make research more transparent, reproducible, accountable and credible, allowing future researchers to build on previous ...

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Please improve acknowledgments sections to better credit research contributors! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... Our new paper on this topic begins by summarising three pathways to improve crediting of research contributors – 1. Loosen authorship restrictions.

Improving acknowledgments sections to better credit research contributors

Formal recognition of research contributions is critical for career advancement and the allocation of research funding. However, some contributions are mentioned only in the acknowledgments section...

tandfonline.com

🪼 Your tax dollars paid a scientist to squeeze jellyfish through cheesecloth. Osamu Shimomura processed tens of thousands on an NSF grant to understand why they glow. He found a protein that glowed green under UV light. Called it "green protein." Nobody cared. For decades.

🕷️Wolf spiders! 💌Courtship! 🦠Infection! 👀Visual receptivity! Our #EditorsChoice for the #AnimalBehaviourJournal: “Infection stress and mate assessment in wolf spiders: female mate choice varies with sensory mode of male courtship” Read here: doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2026.123540

Out today in @royalsocietypublishing.org - we show that crab spiders (the ones you usually see ambushing pollinators on flowers 🕷️🌸) get worse at hunting if their eyes are covered!🫣 Sounds obvious? It's actually quite surprising, here's why... 👀 (1/8) royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article...

@chrislhayes.bsky.social ICYMI, a piece that reminded me of Twilight Of The Elites, for obvious reasons. "a world with universal basic income is more meritocratic than a world without one" www.scottsantens.com/the-angine-d...

The Angine de Poitrine Argument for UBI

Why Angine de Poitrine's viral microtonal math rock KEXP session, Ireland's permanent basic income for artists, and Albert Einstein are three sides of the same human triangle Two guys in papier-mâc...

scottsantens.com

Three concrete recommendations that we make in our manuscript (osf.io/preprints/me...) on Acknowledgment sections: 1. Include ORCID numbers in parentheses after names of individuals in Acknowledgments. This will disambiguate their identities so that scholarly databases can index them.

New preprint out! 📢 We analysed 1.38M papers across 612 journals in ecology & evolution. We show the field is dominated by vertebrates: they’re studied more often, in higher‑impact journals, and get more citations + media attention than invertebrates, with little change in decades😵

EcoEvoRxiv@ecoevorxiv.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Taxonomic bias: a persistent issue in ecology and evolution doi.org/10.32942/X2B...

Do people react to animals in photographs in the same way as to real, live animals? To find out, more than 560 participants rated 62 invertebrate species for fear, disgust, and beauty: royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article... #RSOS

📢 New preprint out! tl;dr: Publish your code, add clear README's! 138 participants assessed data & code archiving practices across 1861 papers published at 7 @britishecologicalsociety.org journals, identified gaps & offered recommendations for improvement 🔗 doi.org/10.32942/X26...

Differences between M & F are pervasive, but we often focus on #SexDifferences in the mean. @pietropollo.bsky.social @danielwanoble.bsky.social @itchyshin.bsky.social &co present #stats tools that allow comparison of #skewness, #kurtosis & correlations b'n groups @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4093nJs

Please contact me if you want to be nominated for a postdoc via this scheme - you need to live outside of Canada and I need to do so by 9 Feb (and need to start by March 2027) - www.ualberta.ca/en/graduate-... (I think you do need to have a competitive CV etc) Please email me if you are interested

We've got ISSUES. Literally. We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do? arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 A 🧵 1/n

Scientific funding is a net negative: "European taxpayers will have spent more on the funding process than on the funding itself, and the scientific ecosystem has been drained" www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Point of no returns: researchers are crossing a threshold in the fight for funding

With so little money to go round, the costs of competing for grants can exceed what the grants are worth. When that happens, nobody wins.

nature.com

I forgot to share that our paper came out a few months ago! We synthesise decades of research showing that conspicuous traits consistently predict attractiveness, condition, and fitness across animals. Check it out if you’re into sexual selection and signalling! doi.org/10.1111/ele....

Synthesis of Nature's Extravaganza: An Augmented Meta‐Meta‐Analysis on (Putative) Sexual Signals

Conspicuous traits like bright colours and elaborate displays are widely thought to evolve through sexual selection, but evidence has been scattered. This meta-meta-analysis of 41 studies across 375 ...

doi.org

🪰 Fruit flies! 🌡️ Temperature changes! 💋Mate attraction! 👃Pheromones! Our November #ASABEditorsChoice for the #AnimalBehaviourJournal: "Effects of natural temperature variation on male perception of female scents in Drosophila melanogaster" Read here: doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2025.123352

Our new preprint! The Acknowledgments problem, and what to do about it. With @martonkovacs.bsky.social, @pietropollo.bsky.social, @philobolobstime.bsky.social, Losia Lagisz, & Mohammad Hosseini.

MetaArXivBot@metaarxivbot.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Improving Acknowledgments Sections To Better Credit Research Contributors: https://osf.io/t2uwe

🌙🔊 How do we perceive light and noise pollution? Your experience matters! ✨ Take part in this survey 👉 app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/salford/pl... Your input will help better understand these growing problems. The survey is part of the European project PLAN-B. #lightpollution #noisepollution

"The statistical fragility of animal cognition findings: a meta-meta-analytic reappraisal" doi.org/10.32942/X2Z...

Do you get confused when reading meta-analyses? Our new paper offers a practical guide to help researchers understand, interpret, and use them properly. We also show that the insights meta-analyses provide are often overlooked by those who cite them.

Royal Society Publishing@royalsocietypublishing.org · 10mo ago

New research from #RSOS: Harnessing meta-analyses' insights in ecology and evolution research buff.ly/KgahjlP | #Ecology #Evolution #ImpactFactor

UPDATE: I saw it happen! At the Birds Canada research station at the tip of Long Point I watched an expert ever-so-gently and carefully put one of these tiny tags on a monarch. Let me walk you through the steps (1/4)

Janet Hill@saskajanet.bsky.social · 11mo ago

So cool to visit the Motus workshop at Birds Canada headquarters. The Motus community is studying the movement of birds, bats and insects. This tiny radio telemetry device will fit on a Monarch butterfly 😲 #invertebrates #birds 🌿 www.birdscanada.org/bird-science...

Size does matter for mating success in two species of seed bugs in the wild. #sexualselection #lygaeidae #mating #naturalselection #malematechoice #sicily doi.org/10.1093/jeb/... @opheliasfritsch.bsky.social and Shuker

Sexual selection in wild populations of seed bugs: the role of size in pre-copulatory mate choice by females and males

Abstract. Although sexual selection is a well-established part of evolutionary biology, controversies remain about the roles of males and females. For inst

doi.org