Rebecca Bliege Bird

We’re at the PREMIERE of “A Century after Nanook!” A documentary film by our own Dr. Kirk French!

What does US tax money (via #NSF research grants) pay for?

Example:
I employ 3-5 UG researcher in my lab w/NSF $$.
- They quit jobs in retail,
- Spend more time in scientific spaces,
- Gain confidence,
- GPAs rise,
- They graduate and join the workforce,

... and we get competent geoscientists.
🧪

Upon learning that yesterday would be my last day as a program officer at the National Science Foundation, I shared this parting message with my colleagues. The next few months will be frenetic and stressful for them. Here are some things that you can do to help them with the mission ahead. (1)

Hard to overstate how bad the Musk administration is going to be for American agriculture.

Dear Fellow College Presidents: We Need to Do More Than Wait This One Out Why civil society needs university leaders to speak up.

Michael Roth is one of the few university president who actually gets the urgency of the moment. slate.com/life/2025/02...

On February 17, we hope to see the largest peaceful protest event in American history. We want Donald Trump and his supporters in Congress to know that the American people will not surrender to fascism. Share this widely. Take your friends. Show up for your nation. #NotMyPresidentDay

Update: They were removed from our reviewer assignments completely. I'm so sorry to all those graduate students. Anonymous to protect the identity of the NIH employee I spoke to...I am on study section next month to discuss F awards. We were just instructed to put the F31-Diversity applications on the bottom of our priority list for review because there is a chance we may not be able to review them. My heart is breaking for the grad students and their mentors that put so much work into these just for them to be disqualified and thrown out.

Just in case you thought that removing DEI criteria would mean that everyone is competing equally: NIH is removing grad students from underrepresented backgrounds from the applicant pool altogether. Their applications will not be considered. Other students, not from these backgrounds, will be.

I feel so fortunate to be part of this ongoing #NSF funded work in collaboration with the Martu community.

#Solanum #TEK #ozplants #iamabotanist

list of banned keywords

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

Surprisingly (!!) we (Penn State) appear not to be capitulating. Yet.

What Fire Wants: Understanding the Enemy What long has been considered merely a chemical reaction perhaps is best compared to another all-too-familiar scourge — a virus.

The Hollywood Reporter asked for 700 words for a special section on the fires they have just published. Something looking at the fire itself.So I repurposed some sentences on 'fire as biology' and gave the notion a long leash. Alas, the title is *not* mine. www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/local-n...

How African Communities Are Taking Lead on Protecting Wildlife A new analysis shows that African wildlife increasingly depend on lands managed by villagers and herders. In many areas, locally-run conservancies now more effectively protect wildlife than national p...

"The people shepherding livestock across the continent's great open grasslands have been widely seen as the enemies of its charismatic wild mammals — to be fenced out of protected areas and policed by armed rangers. But that image is outdated..." @yalee360.bsky.social. e360.yale.edu/features/afr...

Male victimhood ideology driven by perceived status loss, not economic hardship, among Korean men Research published in Sex Roles suggests that male victimhood ideology among South Korean men is driven more by perceived socioeconomic status decline rather than objective economic hardship.

Despite patriarchy's persistence, growing numbers of men believe they have it worse off than women. And, new research shows this "male victimhood" ideology is most common among men who aren't facing hardship. Which means what they're really feeling is status loss. 1/
www.psypost.org/male-victimh...

Ecological functions (gold arrows) and feedbacks (teal arrows) of contemporary place-based coastal ocean societies. These reciprocal relationships, which develop over time through trial and error from ancestral practices, are mediated by governance principles, social norms, decision-making protocols, and intentional caretaking (i.e., management and conservation) actions. Illustration inspired by Bliege Bird & Nimmo (2018) and created by Arianna Augustine, Stz'uminus Nation.

Ancestral sea gardens across the Pacific Ocean, from the Pacific Sea Garden Collective (https://www.seagardens.net). Artwork by Lilly Crosby, design by Heather Earle, base map © Mapbox, © OpenStreetMap

Makah fishers congregating on Tatoosh Island, Neah Bay, Washington State, in the late 1800s. This island was also the site of Robert T. Paine's foundational research on keystone predation and trophic cascades for more than 40 years. In the late 1960s, Paine moved his research program from its original location in Makah Bay to this exposed outer coast island in part to reduce human influence on his experiments. Tatoosh is one of many ancestral settlements of the Makah Tribe and has a thousand-year-old shell midden that includes many of the macroinvertebrates (Friedman 1976) that were studied by Paine and his students and are still harvested by the Makah today. Photo reproduced with permission from the Bert Kellogg Collection of the North Olympic Library System, Port Angeles, Washington.

New open publication in @annualreviews.bsky.social on
"Including People in Our Models of Nature and Modes of Science" by anth faculty member @iainmckechnie.bsky.social & co-author Anne Salomon #historicalecology
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

🚨🏺🍑 Nature Ecology & Evolution (@natureecoevo.bsky.social) chose our work tracking the spread of peaches through Indigenous networks as one of ten ecology papers published in 2024 to be included in their Year in Review set! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Original: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Towards a ‘people and nature’ paradigm for biodiversity and infectious disease | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Zoonotic and vector-borne infectious diseases are among the most direct human health consequences of biodiversity change. The COVID-19 pandemic increased health policymakers’ attention on the links between ecological degradation and disease, and sparked ...

🚨 New paper coauthored by Dr. Sagan Friant and colleagues in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B!! “Towards a ‘people and nature’ paradigm for biodiversity and infectious disease” royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

LibGuides: March Mammal Madness: How to Play The official location for March Mammal Madness tournament information and resources! If you're learning, you're winning!

I'm realizing a lot of you probably aren't familiar with March Mammal Madness so here's what it's all about. You fill out your bracket of animal 'battles'. Then each battle will be narrated live by scientists here on Bsky in the most absurd and nerdy way possible.

libguides.asu.edu/MarchMammalM...

In just one month our Science article on Indigenizing Conservation Strategies in the Amazon has reached nearly 10,000 downloads! 🌱📖 #IndigenousKnowledge #AmazonConservation #EnviroAnthro

Iron age men left home to join wives’ families, DNA study suggests Study highlights role of women in Celtic Britain and challenges assumptions most societies were patrilocal

Gender roles have always been complex and flexible; time to retire for good the idea of “traditional” gender roles www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Anthropological Research in Science Education (ARISE) at Penn State is a summer institute in integrated anthropological sciences for historically underrepresented and underserved undergraduate students from the United States. APPLY NOW!

Terrific review by Eva Jablonka of @kevinlala.bsky.social and colleagues new book Evolution Evolving!!!

Cover of Elinor Ostrom’s book: Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. 💙📚
Day 15
#BookSky
#BookChallenge

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. 💙📚
Day 3
#BookSky
#BookChallenge

#booksky

read the article and check out the table in the supplementary materials for actionable goals and possibilities...

Stack of books with bright red cover and a Franz Marc image of monkeys running through a landscape with red mountains in the background.

🎉Publication day! The third edition of my book 'Sense & Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour' co-authored with @kevinlala.bsky.social is now available!

Paperback and eBook formats (Kindle etc):
global.oup.com/academic/pro...

#evolsky #philsci #philbio #PsychSciSky #HPbio #EHBEA🧪🏺

Genetic structure and common ancestry expose the dingo-dog hybrid myth Abstract. The evolutionary history of canids has been shown to be complex, with hybridization and domestication confounding our understanding of speciation

Brilliant paper demonstrating that dingoes represent a unique canid lineage that contrary to popular belief is not hybridized with dogs.

Dingoes should be protected as the unique animals they are, not persecuted.

academic.oup.com/evlett/artic...

🧪🌍🦊🐶 #AcademicSky

Interesting idea. I'm uncomfortable with this because of the implicit opposition of "anthro" and "bio". Humans are parts of biomes, are agents that change and shape biomes. Yet it's undeniable that new patterns are emerging that humans have influenced more than past biomes.

There are no “anatomically modern” elephants. Why do we treat humans differently? A quote from Phillip Tobias illustrates the strange way that we talk about human variation compared to other species.

The term “modern humans” really did originate in the late 19th century at a time when biologists and anthropologists took seriously the idea of end-directed evolutionary process.

johnhawks.net/weblog/there...

“One Health” needs ecology | PNAS “One Health” needs ecology

“One Health” needs ecology | PNAS 2024 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...