I don’t get a lot of opportunity to share the peacock-turkey battle photo I took last year, it looked like a dinosaur showdown:

Air quality. I grew up in the Los Angeles basin in the 70s and 80s and remember having to stay inside because the smog was so bad - Stage 2 smog alerts, they were called. Apparently they haven't had one of those since 1988. Haven't had a stage one smog alert since 2003.

Constantine@ajaxsinger.bsky.social · 17h ago

Food, man. Food is so much better than it was in 1986. All of it. Poor-people food, restaurant food, fresh food, frozen food. Food is just a hell of a lot better.

Avian traits link divergent population responses to environmental change across North America | Jennings et al. 2026 Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol...

Avian traits link divergent population responses to environmental change across North America

Jennings et al. show that local bird population trends across North America are shaped by multiple forms of environmental change, including light pollution, air quality, climate, and urbanization. Spe...

cell.com

Devastating news for all of us in Oxford - in Biology, and the many other communities he played such key roles in - that Prof Graham Taylor has died. Graham was a brilliant scientist, an instinctive leader & incisive thinker but most of all an incredible colleague www.mpls.ox.ac.uk/latest/news/...

Professor Graham Taylor

A message from Jim Naismith, Head of MPLS Division, to honour Professor Graham Taylor.

mpls.ox.ac.uk

"Drawing on an analysis of over 100000 articles in ecology-related disciplines [...], we show that the shift to pay-to-publish OA has already reduced participation by researchers from many middle-income countries." nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

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

Please stop saying “lockdowns.” There were never true lockdowns in the US, and it fuels far right narratives to repeat this inaccurate statement. You can say closures, you can say restrictions, or better, you can say public health measures which saved many lives.

Dr. Lucky Tran@luckytran.com · 6d ago

People still complain about “lockdowns” but we had none in the US. We had stay-at-home orders, where although businesses were closed, you could still go outside whenever you wanted. Other countries had far stricter rules, and yet have been much more accepting of them as they saved many more lives.

As someone who also virtually never* interacts with genAI, I am also confused by this, and I appreciate the discourse today attempting to explain. *I use it to investigate potential cheating, and also occasionally sit with students using it and see if I can help them in their learning process.

Kate Holzemer@katebits.bsky.social · 2d ago

Another thought: in his statement, Hank Green expressed quite a lot of shame about the "dopamine hit" he gets from using AI. As a non-AI user I don't really know what he's referring to here. Is the AI voice flattering him while also doing his job (presumably poorly)? Because that's big weird.

Me, five minutes ago: OMG I caught up with my editorial duties, gold star for me. Me, checking my email just now: Goddammit.

As a child, I vividly remembering a friend of my dad, who had recently moved to the US from Mozambique, explaining how terrifying hippos are IRL. At the time I was like "but, they're adorable herbivores???". Later I saw a hippo nom a thing, and I understood.

Cincinnati Zoo@cincinnatizoo.bsky.social · 2d ago

Happy 4th Birthday to our favorite 4 year old!!! Fritz celebrated with some treats all to himself!

📢 ASSOCIATE EDITORS WANTED Join us! IBIS is looking for Associate Editors to join our editorial team and support the peer review process Read more and complete the application form: bou.org.uk/ibis/vaca... #ornithology 🪶

Me, yesterday: Hadn't been hiking for a few weeks, had been pretty ill the last time I did hike, was running extremely low on sleep. Also me: An unexpectedly free weekend? Let's go on a walk with moderate elevation gain and more mileage than I've done since 2013. 😅

We have a twice a year shot that makes HIV 99.9% preventable. I can’t believe we’ve seen this in my lifetime. And I can’t fucking believe that we’ve erased so, so much of this progress to just be dick swinging, war mongering assholes of the world.

Hannah Harris Green@whatsitlike.me · 5d ago

We now have the technology to eliminate HIV and AIDS. But cuts to USAID mean it’s not gonna happen any time soon. My latest. www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

Just hit a new record for number of reviewers invited -- 24, and still counting. (If you're reading this and want to review a plant macroecology paper, lmk?)

RECRUITING 3 Senior Research Associates to develop responsible AI-enabled approaches to unlock animal behaviour for conservation. Roles include: 🧠 AI/Computer Vision 🐠 Behavioural Ecology 🌊 Marine Field Ecology Join @lec-reefs.bsky.social & @dsailu.bsky.social, Lancaster Uni, UK. Ads coming soon!

Today experienced the 24th day of year hitting 30C in London. For perspective in whole of 1980s we had 21 days.

The Office: Woman Holding 'HOT' Sign

ALT: The Office: Woman Holding 'HOT' Sign

static.klipy.com

A U.S. government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a state department presentation at a ⁠global conference www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

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

New pre-print where I model weasels as cylinders to estimate how changes in body size and shape affects thermoregulation. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Temperature profile from the meteorological station on roof of Oxford Physics this year (eodg.atm.ox.ac.uk/eodg/weather...) - really feels like a phase change in mid May - average daily temperature before & since have hardly overlapped. Currently heading into our *fourth* >30 C period this year

Third edition of my course on understanding phylogenetic comparative models and their inference! From finding the MaxLik, building an MCMC sampler to Markov processes, complex birth-death models and more. All welcome!

Transmitting Science@tscourses.bsky.social · last wk.

Dive Deep into Probabilistic Phylogenetic Comparative Methods 📅 October 5th–16th, 2026 http://www.transmittingscience.com/courses/evolution/introduction-to-probabilistic-inference-of-phylogenetic-comparative-methods-pcm-using-julia/ #TScourses #KeepLearning #Phylogenetics #EvolutionaryBiology

Oof. And also, this is basically the league table. (Don't @ me that it's not, I know, and I do not care.)

Caroline Ball@heroicendeavour.eurosky.social · last wk.

Overall data for the UK, by institutional spend. Eye-opening!

We just released a new open resource for studying evolution, ecology, colour, behaviour & biodiversity. OzButterflies 🦋 ✨ 4,000+ individuals 🌈 Visible + UV images 🧬 CO1 barcodes 📈 Spectral reflectance data 🏞️ 125 species doi.org/10.1093/data... @mherberstein.bsky.social @livuni-ives.bsky.social

EEB Mentor Match is now open! But apps due soon (8/17). Mentees: get help applying for grad school or fellowships in ecology & evolution. Mentors: senior grads, post-docs, or faculty in these fields willing to give advice Org by Diversity Cmte of @asn-amnat.bsky.social Pls share! eebmentormatch.com

EEB Mentor Match

Visit the post for more.

eebmentormatch.com

We're still looking for a Fish Collection Manager at the Sam Noble Museum in Oklahoma! Apply by August 1st. #MuseumJobs #TeamFish jobs.ou.edu/jobs/curator...

Curator Archivist - Norman, Oklahoma, United States

Pay Range: Targeted salary $18.99 per hour, based on experience Benefits Eligible: Yes Work Schedule: Monday – Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (may include some weekends) Travel: May be required For Be...

jobs.ou.edu

NEW: A large trove of Claude-generated documents have been exposed to the web and indexed by Google. We reviewed what appear to be real medical records, the full names and phone numbers of school-aged children, and company documents marked for internal use only. futurism.com/artificial-i...

A Whole Bunch of People's Claude Chats Are Publicly Accessible Online, and There's Some Wildly Private Stuff in There

A trove of documents generated by Anthropic's Claude were indexed by Google. They included medical records and student information.

futurism.com

Aberdeen is genuinely a fantastic place to live and Vicky is a top-tier human. Apply apply apply!

Vicky & The Sleight Lab@vs-marine.bsky.social · last wk.

Please share, I am hiring an evo devo postdoctoral research fellow! 📍: The Sleight Lab, University of Aberdeen, Scotland (5th oldest University in UK & English-speaking world) 📅: start after 1st December 2026 🐌: Evolution and Development (molluscs) ⌛: 3 year contract sleightlab.com/vacancies/

When an ECR writes a particularly good review, I as an editor like to send them an email letting them know this. It's, uh, probably weird to email a full prof, though, to tell them that their review was excellent? I don't want to be weird. But it is a really constructive and insightful review.

I normally celebrate all forms of language diversity because, y'know, it's fascinating, and also I (am not) (try not to be) an asshole. But. The way that Brits took the USian word "staycation" and made it mean basically the opposite is PERSONALLY INFURIATING. 😅

In case anyone is still listening: 14.500 excess deaths have been recorded during the June heatwave in Germany alone. At least 70% (i.e. ~10.000 premature deaths) r due to man-made climate change in 1 week. The conservative RKI numbers r certainly a massive underestimate! www.rki.de/DE/Themen/Ge...