Tessa Montague
@tessamontague.bsky.social
HHMI Hanna Gray Fellow in the Axel Lab @Columbia studying the neural basis of cuttlefish camouflage. She/her 🇬🇧 tessamontague.com
The first transgenic cuttlefish is here, and it is beautiful. Our story @science.org explores the challenges @tessamontague.bsky.social and others face when engineering cephalopods. #GMO-Cthulhu 🐙🧪 www.science.org/content/arti...
Scientists engineered a glowing cuttlefish. Why was it so hard?
Breakthroughs in genetically altering cephalopods pave way for new studies of perception, brain evolution, and more
science.org
I'm excited to share our new preprint: Generation of a transgenic cephalopod tinyurl.com/pc86jxz8 Cephalopods (cuttlefish, octopus & squid) are crazy critters that dynamically camouflage to their surroundings by changing the color, pattern, & texture of their skin, which they control w their brain.
Today’s rally to save the academy of natural sciences was incredible. Hundreds of people turned out. This is only the beginning. Follow along with save-the-academy.org
Happy #CtenophoreCtuesday! For your moment of zen, enjoy this video capturing the development of nine different species (including a very special Mnemiopsis leidyi). Can you guess the others without peeking? Spoilers in ALT & 🧵. Credit to @tessamontague.bsky.social & Zuzka Vavrušová. #evodevo 🌊🦑 1/3
NIH grants have been under political scrutiny since early 2025. But what does the screening process actually look like? What is being flagged? I spent a month digging into leaked docs and emails. We've published the 235-word list that are being flagged by an internal AI tool. And so much more. 🧵
Inside the new political screening that’s stalling NIH grants
Mandatory reviews by top health officials and checks for 235 disfavoured terms have left hundreds of vetted grant applications in administrative limbo.
nature.com
“A slow, heavy desert lizard called the Gila monster can go months between meals. In the early 1990s, a physician-scientist named John Eng grew curious about how it keeps its blood sugar steady across those long fasts… Years later, a synthetic version of that molecule became the first GLP-1 drugs”
Brian J. Enquist@bjenquist.bsky.social · 4mo ago“The entire National Science Foundation budget is less than what we spent in the first week of the war with Iran. The National Institutes of Health,… accounts for a fraction of 1 percent of all federal spending” www.nytimes.com/2026/06/20/o...
Do you know an outstanding aquarist? We're hiring a Senior Aquarist to help run our cephalopod facility at Columbia University. Our team maintains a colony of 250+ cuttlefish, develops new husbandry techniques (inc transgenics) & studies cuttlefish camouflage and social behavior. 1/3 [Pls repost!]
Hello #world, meet 1,000× Expansion Microscopy. A small gel would grow to the size of an Olympic swimming pool, while amino-acid-scale distances become visible with ordinary light microscopy. Led by Helena Hu from @eboyden3.bsky.social's lab, in collab with us. Story: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🚨 A wonderful review exploring the diversity of sensory systems across life and species-agnostic tools we now have to study them and to better understand principles of neuroscience! @tessamontague.bsky.social @kocherlab.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Nature-inspired neuroscience
The early decades of neuroscience drew inspiration from the rich diversity of animal life, but in recent years, the field has converged on a narrow se…
sciencedirect.com
Using light-activated CRISPR in zebrafish, we triggered synchronized DNA breaks and track the repair process. ⚡🐟⚡ Well ... DNA repair is very different in embryos compared to tissue culture cells. Embryos repair DNA breaks incredibly fast - within minutes! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Shape-shifting is a mainstay of fantasy and folktale. But, for certain creatures, it's just basic biology. Consider the cuttlefish. From our archive, an audience favorite interview, w/ @tessamontague.bsky.social! Listen: disi.org/the-cuttlefi...
Excited to share a new review by @kocherlab.bsky.social and me: Nature-inspired neuroscience We discuss diverse sensory systems and behaviors across the animal kingdom and argue for their integration into neuroscience. New tools in diverse systems are making this possible ✨ tinyurl.com/y5y9du27
Naming your biology LLM after Rosalind Franklin is… hell is not hot enough
I'm hiring! I have 2 open positions: 🔬 Postdoc 🧪 Research associate We study how animal multicellularity evolved by exploring the molecular logic of cell adhesion using cell biology, 'omics, and tool-building in non-model organisms. Come join us! Details and application links 👇 Please repost
I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be starting my lab as a SNSF starting grant professor at the Center for Integrative Genomics in Lausanne! I'm looking for PhD students who are fascinated about the neuronal basis of behaviour across species @fbm-unil.bsky.social
First 24 hours of embryonic development in 9 different animal species: (From left to right) Zebrafish, Sea urchin, Black widow spider, Tardigrade, Sea squirt, Comb jelly, Parchment tube worm, Roundworm, Slipper snail. Credit to @tessamontague.bsky.social & Zuzka Vavrušová. #ZebrafishZunday #devbio 🧪
Imagine wearing a #jellyfish as a helmet!?! Well, that’s exactly what this juvenile jack is doing! Mostly immune to its sting, the jack has taken the jellyfish prisoner. Shot using #scuba, out over the deep abyss, drifting at night. #blackwater #blackwaterdiving #scubadiving #gug
excited to embark on a new era @nsb-mbl.bsky.social w directors Lauren O'Connell (Stanford) + Bruce Carlson (WashU), new 6-week format for graduate students, postdocs & investigators. learn state-of-the-art methods & approach towards neural systems of behavior. deadline Feb 2. tinyurl.com/57476k4v
🚨🚨 WeeooWeeoo 🚨🚨 Black Friday deals at the Squid facts shop are LIVE! Here's the deal: When you buy calendars, stickers, and posters, you get the satisfaction of supporting science education FREE! Wow! What a deal! Who could pass this opportunity up? not me! That's for sure. SquidFacts.net
@hhmi.org Summer Undergraduate Research Experience - #CechFellows named in honor of Prof Tom Cech Deadline to apply: 12/22/2025 Spend 9 weeks in a paid, mentored biomedical research experience in an HHMI lab. See you next summer!!! www.hhmi.org/programs/cec...
Summer Undergraduate Research Experience | HHMI
The Cech Fellows Program is a paid, nine-week summer research experience empowering the next generation of scientific leaders.
hhmi.org
🚨 Attention undergraduate scientists and engineers! 🚨 Want to spend a summer doing research at MIT? Join us for the 2026 MIT Summer Research Program! Learn more and apply: oge.mit.edu/msrp/ @mitdeptofbe.bsky.social @mitcheme.bsky.social @mitkochinstitute.bsky.social
Excited to share our new #biorxivpreprint We discovered that the fruit fly #drosophila erecta requires food odor to mate and arousal is further enhanced by social group motion. Cross-species analysis of brain activity reveals a novel gate evolved from within a conserved circuit shorturl.at/gGYm7
Excited to share our new paper! ✨Natural habitat and wild behaviors of the dwarf cuttlefish, Ascarosepion bandense✨ tinyurl.com/bdew5x3s Our first cuttlefish expedition - diving in the dark to observe our cuttlefish in the wild... Check out the paper & new expedition tool on Cuttlebase.org 🧠
If you’re interested in ants, olfaction, gene regulation, or all of the above, here’s a new preprint from the lab for you. It describes an unorthodox mechanism of transcriptional interference by which ant olfactory sensory neurons produce a single functional receptor. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Transcriptional Interference Gates Monogenic Odorant Receptor Expression in Ants
Communication is crucial to social life, and in ants, it is mediated primarily through olfaction. Ants have more odorant receptor (OR) genes than any other group of insects, generated through tandem d...
biorxiv.org
Exciting new Ruta lab preprint by @annaryba.bsky.social et al. on the neural underpinnings of intraspecific behavioral variation: Strain variation identifies a neural substrate for behavioral evolution Drosophila www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Strain variation identifies a neural substrate for behavioral evolution in Drosophila
Sexual selection acts on heritable differences within species, driving the parallel diversification of signal production in one sex and behavioral responses in the other. This coevolution implies that...
biorxiv.org
Clearly amazing appearance around 888m in #MarDelPlataCanyon: Amphitretus sp. This telescope octopus has adapted to live in a place where there is nowhere to hide but in plain sight. Deep gratitude to @autsquidsquad.bsky.social for species ID. Description on Insta: www.instagram.com/reel/DNittGh...
