Very good. Labour has done a few good things, but not nearly enough & have been pushing further to the right since the reshuffle post-Rayner. Starmer will never be popular & ought to have backed Burnham. With the Greens ahead, Labour will have to change tack or be replaced.
Nice walk at Newborough today.
beautiful. Hope she has a happy life!
male palmate newt in the garden pond. First daytime spot this year.
Looks interesting. Nice to see someone talking about ancestral species.
Possibly Pseudotropheus fuscoides (currently considered as a junior synonym of P. fuscus). Needs more investigation!
I was horrified Mandelson was brought back by Starmer. He was always 'the voice of the super-rich' in the Labour government. In the 1990s, people had decent living standards & public services were not bad, so it was kind of OK. Not after 16 years of austerity. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Cool discussion of social insect evolution and how to navigate the Xosphere. With my wonderful daughter. www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_46...
Part 3 of my Malawi cichlid ID guide is out. I realise i haven't done part 2 yet! It is in progress. ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...
Another new preprint, this one intended for a peer-reviewed journal, reports a new species of Lake Malawi cichlid, which probably attacks mouthbrooding female cichlids to feed on the eggs and larvae they are carrying. Preprints are not valid taxonomic publications.
ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...
A stocky blue and black barred fish.
Chindongo minutus, a small, but fiercely territorial cichlid from the rocky shores around Nkhata Bay, Lake Malawi. Males defend 'algal gardens', picking off nutritious material from among the tough attached filaments & a spawning site among the rocks. The drab females are able to range more widely.
Thanks. At this stage, it is mainly backing up our collaborative genomic paper in Science, but I am planning to use the flexibility of the preprint format to build it up to be comprehensive! Also, its free access, which should help other researchers (esp. in Africa). www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Part 1 version 1 of my Malawi cichlid ID guide is out now. 2 more parts for follow, with my intention being to revise, expand and improve each over time. This one is essentially a companion to our whole genome sequence paper in Science (Blumer et al. 2025). ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...
Amazing development of the genital tassel on the dominant male Oreochromis squamipinnis (Lake Malawi endemic).
Percopsiformes phylogeny showing three independent cave colonization events
Check out our new paper! We find cavefish colonized caves 3x and global cooling events may have influenced these events.
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
Diving beetle at RSPB Conway. Colymbetes fuscus?
A bundle of axolotls
Butterwort- carnivorous plant
Lake Malawi cichlids: even common, big, spectacular species are often a taxonomic mess, like these Taeniolethrinops species. Much work needed!
Yes, thats it. Lots of trawlers in south. Fewer people & less demand in north. And not many previous trawl surveys with good specimen collection / photo records / ID experts.
Front garden
Seaside bluebells yesterday.
Only described in 1977, Lethrinops microdon, once the dominant species in the bottom trawl fishery in southern Lake Malawi, had disappeared completely by the late 1990s. We rediscovered it in very deep water at the northern end of the lake in 2023.
Lethrinops micrentodon is another species that seems to have disappeared in the southern parts of Lake Malawi but cropped up again in the north. It has a similar pharyngeal bone to L. stridei & L. microdon (many tiny closely-packed teeth) but fewer gillrakers. It feeds mainly on sedimented diatoms.
Early pink campion yesterday, near Bangor golf course
Lamps on Bangor Pier. Love the attention to detail! Why not just make it lovely?
Wild cherry trees have got extrafloral nectaries to reward ants. Didn't know about this before. I was taking pics of the flowers and spotted this. Amazing. Not many ants about at the moment, but something to look out for later on in the year!
Never seen before (unless you follow me on Fb), here is a Lake Malawi Protomelas with unusual square-ended oral jaws & lots of teeth (5-6 rows). Caught in shallow water near Ngara (Karonga District), we got quite a few from 2 different trawls, so it doesn't seem particularly rare in the area.
I first distinguished this species from a specimen at Cambridge from our 2016 survey. Nice to find some more specimens in stronger breeding colours and from the opposite end of the lake in the 2023 survey.
Might have rediscovered Lethrinops macracanthus, a deep water Lake Malawi cichlid missing since the early 1990s.
