Kristen Wacker

Graphic with two parts, a map and a chart. Top section: A map showing intact tropical forests in northern South America, most of them in the Amazon River basin. Three locations are called out: 1 is in Panama; 2 is on the eastern border of Ecuador, near the borders with Colombia and Peru; and 3 is in Brazil, on the Amazon River. Undisturbed tropical forest areas are defined as areas where no disturbances were detected in a comparison of satellite imagery from 1990 to 2024. Bottom section: Dot plot with confidence intervals. For each of the three map locations, the chart shows the average annual change in mist net captures for insectivores and for the total bird community. For all three locations, the average annual change for insectivores is in the negative and is lower than for the total bird community.

Intact tropical forests are seeing mysterious bird declines. Is another “silent spring” brewing?

Learn more: https://scim.ag/4aCs0Er

Postdoctoral Researcher All Job Postings will close at 12:01a.m. CST (1:01a.m. EST) on the specified Closing Date (if designated). If you close the browser or exit your application prior to submitting, the application progre...

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...

Confounding fuels misinterpretation in human genetics | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences The scientific literature has seen a resurgence of interest in genetic influences on human behaviour and socioeconomic outcomes. Such studies face the central difficulty of distinguishing possible cau...

Full OA paper here: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

The Future Is Coming and It's (Literally) Sunny: Notes on the Solar Revolution I drove home to San Francisco from New Mexico last weekend, and in the western Mojave desert of California I passed in quick succession three vast renewable energy sites: the first was three solar con...

No one gets this moment any better than the ever-eloquent @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social, so much fun to be working with her on Sun Day
www.meditationsinanemergency.com/the-future-i...

In the early 1980’s, we began preparing separate spread wings to help illustrate features of birds that had never been accurately drawn.

Today our collection of spread wings is the largest in the world, preserving more than 40,000 specimens.

Moncrieff Lab | Bird Evolution The Moncrieff Lab is a research lab based at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History on the campus of the University of Oklahoma. Research in the lab involves museum specimens, fieldwork, and...

🐦🔬 Recruiting PhD students! 🌎🧬
I’m looking for 1–2 PhD students to join our team starting Fall 2026 at the Sam Noble Museum & University of Oklahoma.

Our research: 🐦 birds • 🌍 biogeography • 🌴 Neotropics • 🧬 population genomics • 🌱 speciation

👉 Learn more: www.moncriefflab.org

Please share!

North American bird declines are driven by reductions in common species Declines in North American birds are driven not by rare species vanishing but by sharp losses among formerly common species.

🚨 First PhD chapter is out! My work thus far, with @andy2dobson.bsky.social

We found that formerly common species have declined the fastest, on average.

📄 North American bird declines are driven by reductions in common species | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A new time tree of birds reveals the interplay between dispersal, geographic range size, and diversification Flight may affect the dispersal and evolution of birds. Using a new evolutionary tree, Claramunt et al. find that efficient fliers have broader geographic ranges, and speciation reduces range size, bu...

Not to state the obvious, but some birds fly better than others. The ones that are awesome at flying -- this means they can get around obstacles, right? Expand their ranges as needed? Maybe be a little less vulnerable to extinction?

Turns out it's SUPER complicated.

www.cell.com/current-biol...

Hidden white and black feather layers enhance plumage coloration in tanagers and other songbirds Colorful songbirds use hidden white or black feather layers to enhance plumage color, an optical trick well known to artists.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Registration for the SSB breakout meeting in Baton Rouge, LA in Jan. 2026 will be opening soon!

Registrants need to be SSB members, so make sure to check on your membership today and join/renew if needed: www.systbio.org

Check here regularly for updates: ssb2026.github.io

@systbiol.bsky.social

The macroevolutionary consequences of the association between frugivory and carotenoid-dependent plumage coloration in passerine birds Abstract. Biotic interactions influence evolutionary pathways, impacting diversification positively and negatively. Here, we examine the coevolutionary dyn

New diversification study led by Verónica Rincón Rubio. Carotenoid-dependent plumage and frugivory. Idea from the lab of ‪@agonzalezvoyer.bsky.social‬

doi.org/10.1093/evol...

Congratulations to our 2025 Early-Career Research Award Winners! Our James G. Cooper Early Professional Award winners are Teresa Pegan, PhD and Valentina Gómez-Bahamón, PhD; our Ned K. Johnson Early Investigator Award winner is Maria Stager, PhD.
americanornithology.org/aos-announce...
#AOSAwards

Secondary Sympatry as a Sorting Process Early explanations for the frequent observation of exaggerated trait divergence in sympatric versus allopatric taxa focused on secondary contact between allopatrically speciating lineages and emphasi...

New paper out in Ecology Letters (open access): I and Daniel Matute consider 'species sorting' -- a bias in the outcome of secondary contact following the allopatric stage of speciation -- as a reason for the much-observed pattern of elevated trait differences in sympatric close relatives

Island size shapes genomic diversity in a great speciator (Aves: Zosterops) | Biology Letters Islands have long represented natural laboratories for studying many aspects of ecology and evolutionary biology, from speciation to community assembly. One aspect that has been well documented is the...

My first paper as a member of the Manthey lab is out in Biology Letters! We used whole genome data from a classic "great speciator" (the Solomon Island White-eyes) to explore the relationship between island size and genetic diversity.

doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

This is growing; let me know which societies we're missing.

Add this to your browser's bookmarks for easy access to explore their publications (see posts of each journal in the pack) or to discover potential outlets for your research:

go.bsky.app/2YNcEzK

Demystifying Fundamental Theories in Ecology | The American Naturalist Abstract As scientists, our collective goal is to make scientific progress in the pursuit of an absolute truth about the nature of the universe, through a feedback loop of observation, theory, and exp...

New Special Feature aimed at increasing accessibility of ecological theories available now! Read "Demystifying Fundamental Theories in Ecology" by Rachel Germain & Sebastian J. Schreiber now ahead of print! www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

this is how I learned there are two, completely unrelated Vanity Fair magazines lol

not Vanity Fair 😂

1. Today the NIH director issued a new directive slashing overhead rates to 15%.

I want to provide some context on what that means and why it matters.

grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...