Excited to welcome Alice Funk as the first full-time PhD student in the Animal Evolutionary Ecology Lab at UCLouvain! Alice will study how common wall lizards 🦎 respond and adapt to heavy metal pollution in contaminated post-industrial sites in southern Belgium. Welcome Alice!

I’ll be joining the editorial board of FUNCTIONAL ECOLOGY as an Associate Editor, my number one ecology journal! Looking forward to contributing to such a HQ society journal that has published some of my most favorite organismal ecology studies. Thanks for the opportunity @funecology.bsky.social!

After years chasing lizards in pristine places abroad, now turning to our own backyard—seeing (whether and) how native herps cope with polluted, post-industrial sites 🇧🇪🦎 (Together with wonderful ULiège collaborators!)

Deadline for applying is 9 march. Don't miss out!

Simon Baeckens@simonbaeckens.bsky.social · 6mo ago

🦎 Funded 4-year PhD position on Lizard Evolutionary Ecology in our lab at UCLouvain (Belgium)! Apply before 9 March! jobs.uclouvain.be/Personnelsci...

Three field seasons 219 lizards 🦎 >1,000 hours of behavioural video scoring Proud of Ioanna Gavriilidi for getting this major chapter of her PhD on insularity and lizard behaviur published. Serious dedication!

Creatures of habit: similar but more repeatable behaviours in insular compared with mainland lizards

Island habitats often differ markedly from those on the mainland in many biotic and abiotic factors. Typically, they harbour fewer predator, competito…

sciencedirect.com

🦎 Funded 4-year PhD position on Lizard Evolutionary Ecology in our lab at UCLouvain (Belgium)! Apply before 9 March! jobs.uclouvain.be/Personnelsci...

Humans are transforming the natural world at an unprecedented scale and rate. We, at #UCLouvain 🇧🇪, are organizing a symposium on how organisms, populations, and communities respond to these human-induced environmental changes. April 29–30, 2026! Join us: www.uclouvain.be/en/research-...

Crossed the 100-paper mark as an editor for #BiologyLetters (@royalsocietypublishing.org). Still impressed by the quality and range of science the journal publishes. 🦎

First PhD paper out for Eleesha Annear—and what a start! Her work uncovers surprising variation in osteoderm size and shape across populations, sexes, and body regions in a cordylid lizard 🦎 academic.oup.com/zoolinnean/a...

We studied lizards from 12 Croatian islands and found substantial variation in their chemical signal profiles. Ecological factors didn’t explain it. Instead, divergence was best explained by non-adaptive processes 🦎🏝️ @oikosjournal.bsky.social nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

#AGW #ecosystems #biodiversity More frequent and intense, extreme events threaten the survival of animals and plants. But when stress thresholds aren't exceeded, they seem to accelerate #adaptation and short-term #evolution. And long-term? Under which conditions?. OA review & research program:

Evolutionary consequences of extreme climate events

Simon Baeckens and Colin Donihue review case studies of rapid evolutionary change in response to extreme climate events and sketch a framework for future studies in the rapidly changing climate of the...

cell.com

Under #climate change, extreme weather events are liable to become more frequent and intense. @simonbaeckens.bsky.social & Colin Donihue review the evidence for impacts on #evolution such events can have and how we can study them in the future. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Evolutionary consequences of extreme climate events

Simon Baeckens and Colin Donihue review case studies of rapid evolutionary change in response to extreme climate events and sketch a framework for future studies in the rapidly changing climate of the...

cell.com

Extreme climate events can catalyze rapid evolutionary change! in our new Current Biology (@currentbiology.bsky.social) piece, Colin and I argue it’s time to study their evolutionary consequences systematically — beyond opportunistic observations. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Evolutionary consequences of extreme climate events

Simon Baeckens and Colin Donihue review case studies of rapid evolutionary change in response to extreme climate events and sketch a framework for future studies in the rapidly changing climate of the...

cell.com

Day one at UCLouvain, day one of the Animal Evolutionary Ecology Lab! Eager to get started!

Thrilled to share our new paper out in BMC, part of my postdoc at @cornellvet.bsky.social! 🐘🐀 We found that larger mammals evolve more diverse morphologies, while smaller ones can explore many locomotor strategies without much change to their forelimbs. bmcecolevol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

Body mass evolution as a driver of morphological and ecological diversity in terrestrial mammals - BMC Ecology and Evolution

Body mass plays a fundamental role in the macroevolutionary dynamics of morphological, ecological, and phylogenetic diversification. Given biomechanical principles, large body masses in terrestrial ve...

bmcecolevol.biomedcentral.com

The talented Jindong Zhang analyzed 74,000+ papers, revealing how #biomimetic research relies on a narrow slice of biodiversity—missing out on nature’s untapped genius. In our paper, we call for broader, species-level, and comparative approaches! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A lizard in sight whets the appetite? 🦎 Read how conspecifics influence island and mainland lizards’ foraging decisions in @UAFunMorph's new paper by Ioanna Gavriilidi! Link to the full article: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lPDn1LenM...

Another PhD chapter published for Ioanna Gavriilidi @uafunmorph.bsky.social, now in @jzoology.bsky.social! She finds that island-dwelling lizards tend to rely less on chemosensory cues compared to their mainland counterparts. zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

On the flick of the tongue: male island and mainland lizards' responses to self and conspecific chemical stimuli

We compared the chemosensory recognition abilities of mainland and island Italian wall lizards (Podarcis siculus). Both populations discriminated between self and conspecific scents, but island lizar...

zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Excited to announce that I’ll be joining the Earth & Life Institute at UCLouvain (🇧🇪) as an Assistant Professor of Animal Evolutionary Ecology this September. Watch this space for upcoming opportunities for PhDs and postdocs!

Thinking about Elisabeth Vrba on this International Day of Women in Science. Sad to lose another one of the 'Three Musketeers' of evolutionary biology.