Tessa Montague

Congratulations Annika! 🎉

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

Ahaaa it’s so cute!

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

a t-shirt design with an orange bee, clownfish, and lily, that says "Biology is bigger than binaries"

an brightly colored eel facts advent calendar, with 4 types of eels and 24 scratch off boxes. The eels include garden eels, american and european eels, ribbon eels, and a yellow moray eel

a love notes from nature advent calendar with the year 2026 on top, and a salamander sitting on a mushroom

a bunch of valentines, with a rosy maple moth, and a praying mantis

🚨🚨 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

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 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...

🚨 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

a group of Drosophila erecta fruit flies on a small food patch. flies on white background

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 🧠

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...

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...

Oo my advice made the list! 🧠✨

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...

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...

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...

Real Coral Reefs of Miami: A Q&A with the marine biologist behind a popular livestream Colin Foord discusses the Coral City Camera.

Check out an interview on the CCC with @popsci.com

Brain Ponderings podcast with Mark Mattson Podcast · Mark Mattson · Neuroscientist Mark Mattson hosts conversations intended for folks interested in what is known about the brain and what remains to be discovered. Here are a few of the major ...

I had a lot of fun talking about cuttlefish camouflage and my path to science on Mark Mattson's podcast, Brain Ponderings! 🧠✨🐙

open.spotify.com/show/39HsoeK...

www.youtube.com/@brainponder...

#neuroskyence #neuroscience #cephalopod #cuttlefish

Douglas Boyes Fund - Royal Entomological Society The Douglas Boyes Fund has been established in honour of Douglas Boyes (1996-2021), an esteemed entomologist specialising in Lepidoptera. The Fund aims to provide young people aged 14-18 with access…

Do you know a young person with an interest in insects? 🦋

The Douglas Boyes Fund aims to provide people aged 14-18 with access to entomology equipment, fostering their passion for insects and inspiring them to engage and share their interest with other young individuals 🔽

“Why Are We Funding This?” Long-standing myths about “silly science” have contributed to the reckless slashing of government-supported research.

Silly-sounding science is what happens when researchers do exactly what they are supposed to do, which is thinking freely and exploring new ideas with wide-open curiosity. 🧪

www.americanscientist.org/article/%E2%...

Excited to share the lab's 1rst preprint! Rapid high-res immunofluorescence is now possible in cultured & environmental diatoms thanks to 4-fold expansion microscopy. A step-change for comparative cell biology in one of the most important phytoplankton groups on the planet 🥳
tinyurl.com/m9s5su7s 1/2

Barbara McClintock portrait

🧬🌽 Happy Transposon Day! 🌽🧬

Today we celebrate the birthday of Barbara McClintock - scientist extraordinaire and discoverer of jumping genes. Still the only woman to have an unshared Nobel Prize in the biomedical sciences #TransposonDay2025

Cuts have consequences, illustrated. As seen on TV 📺

My ongoing request:

If your NSF or NIH grant was terminated--whether at Harvard or elsewhere--please report it here.

NSF: grant-watch.us/submit-nsf.h...

NIH: grant-watch.us/submit-nih.h...

Our trackers are actively used in lawsuits and are often the only record that terminations ever occurred.

Guess how much of the ocean floor humans have explored Hint: it’s less than 1% — a lot less.

It's often said that we have mapped Mars better than the bottom of our oceans. A new study by @oceandiscleague.bsky.social has now quantified this: we have visually explored less than 0.001% of the deep seafloor, 1/10th the size of Belgium. My latest for @nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Cuttlefish are known for dynamic, kaleidoscopic displays—and yet they seem to be colorblind. How does an animal that can't see color project color out onto its skin?

Just one of the enigmas discussed in our latest episode, w/ @tessamontague.bsky.social!

Listen: disi.org/the-cuttlefi...

New episode!! 🎙️📣

A conversation w/ @tessamontague.bsky.social about cephalopod camouflage.

Cuttlefish and other cephalopods can change their appearance—color, pattern, texture—with lightning speed. What's going on in their skin and brains that makes this possible?

Link: disi.org/the-cuttlefi...

Opinion | Science Suffers With Trump’s Funding Freeze America’s scientific enterprise demands reliable stewardship, not destabilizing political intervention.

My father-in-law, Jack Strominger, and I wrote a letter to the @wsj.com editor about the current threats to science due to Trump's funding freeze. Please repost! www.wsj.com/opinion/scie...

Most People Buy a New Phone Every 2.5 Years. There’s a Better Way Back Market and iFixit are partnering to encourage consumers to keep their phones in service for at least five years—and to pressure manufacturers to extend smartphone support to 10 years.

Replacing the battery & using an iPhone 13 for 5 years rather than 2.5 could cut emissions 49%, "which could prevent 15.6 million tons of CO2 emissions per year." That's as much as a small country. www.wired.com/story/back-m...

Harvard University Harvard University is devoted to excellence in teaching, learning, and research, and to developing leaders who make a difference globally.

Harvard redid its whole homepage to push back against the administration’s demands. I mean, this is just a website but I think it’s kind of a great PR move: www.harvard.edu

Natural Neuroscience Natural neuroscience departs from the classical reductionist approach, which emphasizes control at the expense of natural behaviors, by proposing a shift tow...

I highly recommend this inspiring new book by Nahum Ulanovsky! A plea for neuroscientists to embrace “Natural Neuroscience”: use emerging technologies to uncover meaningful behavior and neural representations in free-roaming animals exposed to real-world stimuli.
mitpress.mit.edu/978026204499...