#UMN has closed their dental clinic with no warning or explanation, and in flagrant violation of their contract with UMN grad workers - this is the only dental care covered by our health plan!
If associated w/ UMN, please sign/share the petition to stop this: actionnetwork.org/petitions/um...
Picture of DOGE guy Nate Cavanaugh
Screenshot of my DOGE letter “Dr. Joseph Rezek Dear NEH Grantee, This letter provides notice that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is terminating your federal grant (Grant Application No. FEL29509824) effective April 3, 2025, in accordance with the termination clause in your Grant Agreement. Your grant no longer effectuates the agency's needs and priorities and conditions of the Grant Agreement and is subject to termination due to several reasonable causes, as outlined in 2CFR§200.340. For instance, NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President's agenda. The President's February 19, 2025 executive order mandates that the NEH eliminate all non-statutorily required activities and functions. See Commencing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy, E.O. 14217 (Feb. 19, 2025). Your grant's immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities. Any objections or appeals to this termination will be managed in strict accordance with the President's Executive Orders,
Last year, this guy (left) from DOGE used ChatGPT to find NEH grants that were too “DEI” for Trump, and canceled them, including mine, as shown by the letter I received last April (right). Huge new NYT article on the back story link below
Want a reliable way to tell the two cryptic giant hummingbird species apart while birding in the Andes? Use your ear! 🎶 In a new @fieldornith.bsky.social J. Field Ornithology paper, we show how their vocalizations differ clearly—making sound a slam dunk for identifying them in the field.
Genomic erosion in the assessment of species' extinction risk and recovery potential
academic.oup.com/jhered/advan...
logo for SPrOUT: Species Prediction of Unknown Taxa - a line drawing of a plant with two green leaves emerging from a flask containing multiple DNA helices. Logo designed by Lisa Limeri, with images from the Noun Project flask from Noun Project user Humam flower from Noun Project user Vanicon studio DNA from Noun Project user Akhmad Zaini
Figure from the linked preprint, showing the relationship between the number of Angiosperms353 reference genes and Accuracy of detecting plant families in mixed reads. Based on several z-score values, SPrOUT is generally at 98% accuracy with fewer than 100 genes.
New from our lab! Introducing SPrOUT: Species Prediction of Unknown Taxa.
We developed and tested a novel method to ID plants in mixed DNA with Angiosperms353 using cumulative phylogenetic distances. >98% accuracy to family level for in silico and real test data.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
The University of Texas System’s Board of Regents unanimously approved a rule requiring its universities to ensure students can graduate without studying “unnecessary controversial subjects,” despite warnings it could leave them less prepared for the real world.
Also, not sure how field diagnosable the songs are (sonograms are definitely different), but I love this paper for importance of postzygotic isolation in true resistance to introgression: academic.oup.com/evolut/artic...
Depends on how assortative you're thinking! Plenty where there is still notable hybridization (e.g. great plains contact zone taxa, arguably Vermivora). Plus true measures of assortative mating are hard and rare, further challenged by confounded plumage/behavior.
Hot take: folks are too focused on the AI emphasis of the PRFB & missing the most concerning part of the solicitation.
The heavy emphasis on bio-AI integration for “technological advances” is a concerning degradation of NSFs mission to fund basic biological research.
Police departments in targeted deep-blue cities keep on saying they’ll try to stop ICE from breaking the law and then they do jack shit except occasionally arrest some protesters.
Its notable they’re even saying these things, but lets focus on what their actions have always and continue to tell us.
The Wyoming Game & Fish Dept. is hiring two Black Rosy-Finch technicians to conduct alpine surveys in Wyoming's high elevation mountains during June 1st to Aug 31st 2026: www.governmentjobs.com/careers/wyom.... Spread the word!
The AOS is pleased to congratulate lead author Bryce W. Robinson as the winner of the 2025 AOS Wesley Lanyon Award for the best integrative science paper published in one of our journals over the past two years by an early-career ornithologist. americanornithology.org/aos-announce...
#AOSawards
So proud of Master's student, Celina Eberle, who #published her undergrad #research in @peerj.bsky.social, which dives into the #invasion #history of American Bullfrogs into #NewMexico waterways!
peerj.com/articles/204...
Moral of the story: let's be more careful about stocking 🐸 #UNM #UNMBiology
Me at my poster
Noisy pitta stickers
If you happen to be at #TIBS2026 and really like mangroves and macroecology, come swing by my poster (1024) to hear about my work modelling the Pleistocene range of mangroves and the drivers of faunal specialisation in this habitat. I also have a limited no. of Pitta stickers to give away! #TIBS26
LSU Museum of Natural Sciences is hiring a postdoc! Come join our very active and supportive museum community. Applicants can work with any of the major divisions: 🐀🦜🦎🐸🐠
Review begins February 15th, please share!
lsu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/LSU/job/0119...
MBE | SLiM 5: Eco-evolutionary Simulations Across Multiple Chromosomes and Full Genomes
Haller, Ralph & Messer present SLiM 5, a major extension of the SLiM simulation framework for simulating multiple chromosomes, enabling a heightened level of realism for full-genome simulations.
🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf313
#evobio #molbio #compbio
It’s official: I’m joining the School of Earth, Environment, and Sustainability at the University of Iowa as an assistant prof starting Fall 2026!
I’ll be recruiting multiple grad students and postdocs to join my lab, so if you’re into disturbance ecology and conservation science… watch this space!
New paper out. If you like colorful birds, hybridization, and phylogenetics, read on! 🧵https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003501
Check out our cover article by @timjanicke.bsky.social and colleagues about the role of sexual selection in animal speciation. academic.oup.com/evlett/artic.... The beautiful illustration is by Katharina Bóth.
Your daily Avian Hybrids story!
A genetic test of the theory of island biogeography using the Fiji bush-warbler
avianhybrids.wordpress.com/2021/06/30/a...
#ornithology
EEB Postdoctoral Fellowship @ U.Toronto app deadline Jan 15 2026. Opportunity for independent research, encourages collab across labs/disciplines. Lots of great folks to interact with, Come join us!
eeb.utoronto.ca/employment-2/
I have a new preprint demonstrating a genome-architecture-aware approach to inferring species trees and introgression landscapes from a small number of genomes. If you are interested in phylogenomics, birds, or hybridization, this is for you! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Check out our short warbler hybrid paper out today, including a new unofficial common name. Carotenoid people will find some little tidbits of discussion about how these hybrids can help us understand regulation of yellow feathers.
I'm not familiar with the precise tree, but there is enough variation in mask extent and crown color that one has to wonder about ILS/ancient gene flow! Wonder what ASIP's doing....
A figure showing the "core" and "periphery" of lowland forest in South America, a figure showing the genetic structure of our population genetic simulations, and a figure of three alternate divergence histories simulated.
Look forward to more about Solomon Island phylogeography in the future, but in the mean time, @lukemusher.bsky.social and I have a pre-print that highlights how a similar phenomenon can occur on continents (with bias in both topology and branch lengths): doi.org/10.1101/2025...
A map of the New Georgia Group, a photo highlighting a phenotypic intermediate, and a plot highlighting its 50/50 intermediate ancestry.
One big question that still lingers is when this gene flow occurs. Theory suggests that dispersal start high and declines over time in island birds, but it is hard to observe modern inter-island migration. But we found a lucky breadcrumb: an F1 inter-island hybrid (formerly intergrade, now split).
A three part figure. First, a Sankey diagram showing that very few SLiM colonization simulations (discussed earlier in the thread) produced results with Makira sister to all other populations. Second, an image showing example levels of gene flow and divergence history used for coalescent simulations. Third, a complicated tile plot showing that the Makira sister pattern (i.e., biased inference) dominated for a wide range of effective population size values, mean dispersal distances, and time between splits in the phylogeny.
Although we have some evidence suggesting biased inference in this system, we wanted to generalize these findings using coalescent simulations with gene flow based on island biogeographic theory. For a wide parameter space, the Makira-sister pattern dominated regardless of the split history.
Figure of the Solomons showing gene flow within the Bukida group, from the Bukida group to New Georgia and Malaita, and from only Malaita to Makira. Inset shows a cartoon version of these four groups with theoretical levels of gene flow among these island groups, highlighting the isolation of Makira.
So what could explain the dominance of this topology? Well, it turns out the island most isolated from propagules is also most isolated from gene flow from the central Bukida group. This was both true in theory and with tests of gene flow.
Indeed, when we ran simulations of colonization history with SLiM, we found that only ~1% of simulations produced a colonization history consistent with this topology. Note that the GIF has very low population size/dispersal rate for visualization.
