Takeshi Morita

🚨 Ph.D. Opportunity! 🚨 I’m recruiting students to start in the Spring Semester 2026 (Jan 2026) or the Fall Semester 2026 (Aug 2026) to study the behavior & neurobiology of mosquito-host interactions. Know someone who’d be a perfect fit? Please share! 🦟 #Mosquito #Neurobiology #VectorBiology #Itch

Teeth first evolved as sensory tissue in the armored exoskeletons of ancient fish, fossil scans find Anyone who has ever squirmed through a dental cleaning can tell you how sensitive teeth can be. This sensitivity gives important feedback about temperature, pressure—and yes, pain—as we bite and chew ...

New paper from the lab: Our teeth arose as sensory organs on the outside of the body of ancient jawless fish.!! Congrats to Yara Haridy and the team!
Background and video: phys.org/news/2025-05...
Open Access Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
News and Views: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

New preprint from the lab, led by grad student Brandon Pratt, on the encoding properties and sensorimotor function of proprioceptive limit detectors (ie, hair plates) in the fly leg.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Strange stripy orange fly with striped and spotted wings, and banded technicolor compound eyes. Long setae all over

Close shot of the creature's wild eyes, stripy yellow and maroon and hints of light blue and green.

Top view; wings are folded, they have a transparent outer edge with dark veins like zebra stripes, and orange with like blue-ringed octopus spots on the inner surface.

Face of the creature, both compound eyes visible.

Paracantha fruit fly, just cranking the style slider to 100 and seeing what happens.

I love it, is what happens. 💛

Photograph of a large, pale green and rusty brown assassin bug standing on bright yellow flower petals, its beak stabbed into the neck of a brown beetle with a red head, upside down, struggling.

Murder! In the garden.

(Zelus assassin bug with Mordellistena prey, Texas)