Sydney McDermott

Bar plot showing the number of animals petted each month of 2025. Cats are shown in red, dogs in green, and stingrays in blue.

Pie chart showing the types of animals petted (cats in red, dogs in green, and stingrays in blue) as well as the different locations the animals were petted.

My 2025 New Year's resolution was to pet 100 animals. As I am a quantitative ecologist and spreadsheet enthusiast, I tracked my data somewhat obsessively - here are my results:
105 animals petted (85 dogs, 16 cats, 4 stingrays)
Best day: August 16 with 18 dogs at the farmers market

Be ungovernable

Brittle star swimming! Love this movement.

Despite everything we still live in a world where it is possible to see shooting stars and flying fish at the same time and I think that's wonderful (also I need everyone to know I just saw shooting stars and flying fish at the same time)

A small snail stuck to a window, seen from underneath

Usually, I'm outside a tank looking in at snails. Today, the snails were outside the lab, looking in at me

MOBS 1.0: A Database of Interspecific Variation in Marine Organismal Body Sizes Motivation Body size is a fundamental trait influencing an organism's life history, ecology, physiology and evolutionary dynamics. While extensive body-size databases exist for terrestrial vertebrat...

🧵New paper + open database drop!
The Marine Organismal Body Size ( #MOBS ) Database is now live—85,000+ marine species, from plankton to whales, with standardized size data.
A huge leap for biodiversity, conservation, and climate science. #science #marinelife onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Dissertation chapter 1 with
@drcraigmc.bsky.social ✅️

Here is a first look at the wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon as artificial hard substrate, which hosts a unique community of organisms compared to two other shipwrecks in the Gulf
of Mexico.
doi.org/10.3354/meps...

breaking news, white steam emerges from the Autoclave

A large squid drawn in blue with green eyes and red and orange chromatophores

A hermit crab drawn with a green shell, a red body, and blue eyes

A rotifer drawn in green

A horseshoe crab drawn in green with blue eyes

In honor of #invertefest, here are four of my whiteboard drawings from the invertebrate zoology lab this semester

A light blue diagram depicting the sea, with the water's surface at the top, and just below it is an outline of the Mary Rose, with the depth (12m, 40ft or 6.7 fathoms). There is a line showing the seabed, which takes a rapid dive into the vertical...

On the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, we thought we'd answer a question that's often asked,

"If they raised the Mary Rose, why not raise the Titanic?"

Allow our scaled diagram to explain...

I love #SkypeAScientist!!! Nothing brings me more joy than showing a bunch of high schoolers a giant isopod and seeing them lose it over how big they get

In the immortal words of Sabrina Carpenter: I can do a lot in 15 minutes. Thanks to everyone who came to my talk at the Benthic Ecology Meeting!

People are so ready to help you when they think you're opening a metaphorical can of worms, but when I show up with annelid specimens for class that I can't get open suddenly I'm the weird one

The Hidden Forests Below: A Review of the Ecology and Evolution of Wood Falls on the Deep Seafloor Wood falls—parcels of wood that sink to the deep-sea floor—represent unique and dynamic ecosystems that support a highly diverse and evolutionarily distinct assemblage of faunal communities. The faun...

🌳➡️🌊 Deep-sea wood falls aren’t just debris—they’re entire ecosystems! Endemic species, weird food webs, and nutrient cycling all depend on them. But natural observations are rare. What’s hiding in the abyss? Our new paper dives in. #DeepSea #MarineBiology onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

a painting of a pelican eel, giant isopod, sea pig, and vampire squid enjoying a tea party, while a colossal squid looks on; so large it nearly obscures the entire background.

Party tip: When throwing a deep sea tea party, it's generally recommended that you invite the colossal squid.

I didn't know about them either, but now that I do, I love them

I highly recommend judging a science fair. These kids with their enthusiasm and trifold boards made being a scientist under the current administration SO much more bearable today

I have not seen a crisis of this magnitude since yesterday

Sydney standing in front of a screen with various cnidarians on it. She is wearing comically large orange jellyfish earrings in her lobes and an orange coral earring in her cartilage

Do you think people can tell that I'm teaching #cnidarians today

Photo of a possum on a desk next to a keyboard and a phone, with its mouth wide open as if it’s screamIng

how your email finds me

This is the front page of a fraudulent research article that purported to show a link between vaccines and autism. The word "RETRACTED" is written across it in large red letters. Wikipedia: On 28th February 1998, a fraudulent research paper by physician Andrew Wakefield and twelve coauthors, titled "Ileal-Lymphoid-Nodular Hyperplasia, Non-Specific Colitis, and Pervasive Developmental Disorder in Children", was published in the British medical journal The Lancet.[1] The paper falsely claimed causative links between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and colitis and between colitis and autism. The fraud involved data selection, data manipulation, and two undisclosed conflicts of interest.

Today is Retraction Day, when we observe the anniversary of the retraction (Feb. 2, 2010) of the fraudulent paper that purported to show a link between vaccines and autism. 🧪#medsky

Photo of a small crab from NOAA’s social media. It’s covered in spikes

Just making sure that everyone is aware of this crab that NOAA scientists found

I don't, but maybe I should! They're easy if you want to make them yourself, I use printer safe shrink plastic and print whatever it is I want as an earring, cut it out, then pop them in the oven on a baking sheet at 325f to shrink. Then it's just getting creative with how I get them on my ears!

Lesson planning, aka making sure I have earrings for every phylum I will be teaching in my invertebrate zoology lab this semester

The aromatherapy candle I bought because it promised peace and relaxation just exploded at midnight the night before the new semester begins. An omen of only good things, I'm sure.

Occasional reminder that there’s no, “it’s too late, its over” for anthropogenic climate change. Every molecule of CO2 that doesn’t go into the atmosphere makes a difference. Preventing 0.1 degree of warming makes a difference. Every bit of climate resilience we build together makes a difference.

Yes!

A Hawaiian sea turtle in the water; only its head and the top of its shell are visible

A Hawaiian sea turtle seen from the side as a small wave breaks against it

The head of a Hawaiian sea turtle peeking above the water

Two Hawaiian sea turtles resting in shallow water at the edge of a beach

Deeply enamored with the sea turtles on Kauai

The wrongest belief about the deep sea is wronger than you know More people care about marine biodiversity and saving the ocean than ever before. But progress towards evidence-based conservation is hindered by widespread public misunderstanding of the key issue…

Here’s my post about public misunderstanding of the deep sea 🦑🧪🌎

www.southernfriedscience.com/the-wrongest...

How to translate the most common 30 words used in scientific names for fish (expanded, corrected)

(Data: rfishbase)