Wouter van der Bijl

Congratulations Dr. Fong! First PhD from the UBC Mank Lab! @squarehare.bsky.social

Led by my talented PhD student @justine-armg.bsky.social we’re running a #meta-analysis of #cross-sex-genetic-correlations in fitness components.

If you have unpublished data or know of studies that might not appear in a systematic search, please reach out, we’d love to include them!

Please share!

Now out! How important is social experience in male mating behavior? @corrallopeza.bsky.social found that experienced males were more likely to coerce non-receptive females, but did not change overall preference onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... w/ @vdbijl.bsky.social @idarolti.bsky.social

Please help! We are looking for tissue-specific RNA-seq datasets or pubs with both male and female individual gene expression data, not pooled, from animal species. If you know of any relevant resources, please drop a link in the comments or send me a DM. Also, please help spread the word - thanks!

#rstats
It is with profound sadness I heard that my long-time friend and colleague, John Fox passed away this week.
He was the author of {car}, {effects}, {Rcmdr}, ... and numerous influential books. I will miss him greatly.
www.john-fox.ca

Team fish - we need your help! We are trying to build a database of all the fish chromosome-scale genomes where sex chromosomes have been identified. Have you build one or some? Do you know someone who has? Can you post the link in the comments? Please spread the word and repost! Thank you!

Join us! 🧬🪰🎉🔬

We are currently advertising two #PhD projects to study the #evolution, #development and #genomics of sexual traits in stalk-eyed flies.

Deadline for applying is Wednesday, January 7, 2026. Get in touch for more info!

So Google Scholar now links to an.. 18+ website to read my latest @natecoevo.nature.com paper. 🤔

It does include some guppy mating behavior.. but this seems like an overreaction.

The Nonprofit Feeding the Entire Internet to AI Companies Common Crawl claims to provide a public benefit, but it lies to publishers about its activities.

NEW: Common Crawl, the massive archiver of the web, has gotten cozy with AI companies and is providing paywalled articles for training data. They’re also lying to publishers who have asked for material to be removed. “The robots are people too,” CC’s exec director told us when we asked about this.

Did you publish part of your PhD work in Evolution or Evolution Letters this year? You may be eligible for this award! Papers must have been included in a 2025 issue to be eligible. Apply by January 30: shorturl.at/CnVo6

@journal-evo.bsky.social @evolletters.bsky.social

Sexual selection and speciation: a meta-analysis of comparative studies Abstract. Understanding the drivers of biodiversity is a central goal in evolutionary biology. In particular, sexual selection has long been proposed as a

Does #SexualSelection fuel #Speciation?

Our new #meta-analysis of comparative studies finds support for a positive relationship, but the rather moderate global effect suggests it’s not necessarily a dominant force.

doi.org/10.1093/evle...

Wanted to look at the review history of a JEB paper from a mere two years ago - but hosted on publons so gone forever?

Thanks Andrew!

While we all share our sequencing data freely, image datasets like these are still often kept private.

I am only aware of a single other study on guppy coloration (there are many!) where images are available, and it's also from our lab (Morris et al. 2020).

I hope this can improve in the future!

Our paper on the genetics of guppy color patterns has now been assigned an issue in NEE: doi.org/10.1038/s415...

With this paper, we also publish all 14,100 guppy photos used in the study, including before and after alignment and ornament extraction:
doi.org/10.20383/103...

Now published @natecoevo.nature.com with @annika-nichols.bsky.social, our latest on the evolution of 𝘴𝘭𝘦𝘦𝘱 across 𝟲𝟬 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘀 of cichlid fishes! doi.org/10.1038/s415...
with members of the @schierlab.bsky.social and Salzburger labs, as well as the burgeoning Shafer lab @uoftcellsysbiol.bsky.social

The relationship between sexual dimorphism and intersex correlation: do models support intuition? Abstract. The evolution of sexual dimorphism (the difference in average trait values between females and males, SD), is often thought to be constrained by

Full paper now out in GENETICS:
The relationship between sexual dimorphism and intersex correlation: do models support intuition?
🔗 academic.oup.com/genetics/art...
#Evolution #QuantGenetics @GeneticsGSA

Editorial: Accountability, voice, and trust - responsible use of GenAI in scientific publishing Over the last few years, the development and rapid advancement of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatG

Many of us are using LLMs in coding and scientific writing. They are very helpful tools, but we need to be thoughtful as we integrate them into our work flows to preserve accountability, voice and trust. academic.oup.com/evlett/advan.... An editorial at @evolletters.bsky.social for discussion:

Yes I personally prefer to use “deep learning” over “AI”. Not much use for LLMs for now (but perhaps for eg meta-analyses in a couple of years?), but transformer architecture may still hold a lot of promise for sequence data.. Time will tell.

And yes, we used unets for segmentation.

Deep learning reveals the complex genetic architecture of male guppy colouration - Nature Ecology & Evolution Guppy colouration is a very diverse trait under natural and sexual selection. Using a combination of high-resolution phenotyping and genomic analysis, the authors reveal the genetic architecture of th...

Guppies! ;) I didn’t talk about it, but we also use triplet learning to do GWAS on whole patterns: doi.org/10.1038/s415.... There were quite a few posters on neural nets for image analysis and this is a domain where one can be effective with modest sample sizes.

ESEB Day 3! Molecular clocks & identifying ghost lineages; marrying micro & macro evolution; female polymorphism; balancing selection in round-nose grenadier; the genetics of guppy colour polymorphisms; modelling genetic interactions; antagonist selection in flying ants

#eseb2025 #eseb #sciart

Just in time for her #eseb2025 poster on Thursday, @squarehare.bsky.social 's paper on the Poecilia bifurca sex chromosomes was published today academic.oup.com/g3journal/ad...

I hate conference apps with a passion.

This website seems odd, it assumes MEPs will vote along country blocks, not European or individual parties?

I’m really sorry to be missing #eseb2025, but for those sorting out their conference plan there are several lab talks and posters about what we are up to. Spoiler, they aren't all talking about guppies, or even fish! 1/n

The next generation of colour pattern genomics - Nature Ecology & Evolution Convolutional neural networks and genetic association analysis decode the evolution of colour pattern diversity and its underlying complex genetic architecture in the Trinidadian guppy.

‪A really lovely commentary on @vdbijl.bsky.social's paper by Nidal Karagic and Claudius Kratochwil in @natecoevo.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thanks Will, hope you’re doing well!

Deep learning reveals the complex genetic architecture of male guppy colouration - Nature Ecology & Evolution Guppy colouration is a very diverse trait under natural and sexual selection. Using a combination of high-resolution phenotyping and genomic analysis, the authors reveal the genetic architecture of th...

Guppy colouration is a very diverse trait under natural and sexual selection. Using a combination of high-resolution phenotyping and genomic analysis, the authors reveal the genetic architecture of this complex trait www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is amazing work and a great thread, revealing the hidden genetic complexity behind the equally complex pigmentation patterns. Check it out! 🧪