Dax Kellie

This is so friggin good 🤩 Thanks for sharing, it’s a wonderful resource!

screenshot of my post

Big new blogpost!

My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more.

--> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful.
www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...

😯🧪🌏

Monkeys have rhythm Synchronizing movements to music is a hallmark of human culture, but its evolutionary and neurobiological origins remain unknown. This ability requires (i) extracting a steady rhythmic pulse, or beat,...

New in Science, Macaques tap to the beat.

Very cool study for its main result and its null one: consistent with nearly every other comparative study of music, monkeys don't differentiate beats by their relative strength—which even young children do innately. Monkeys have rhythm but not meter!

Ooo yes of course! I used {styler} so much to help me format messy code into something readable over the years, so {Air} is definitely an important part of this clean code workflow. Thanks!

Title slide with text: A guide to writing good code for the busy scientist Black text over stripey pale brown-green background

If you missed my talk but still want some tips for writing good code for scientists, my slides are here:

daxkellie.quarto.pub/a-guide-to-w...

All the links and references are there too in case you want to see more! 😀🧪🌏

#ESA2025 #rstats #quartopub

I am blinking with great enthusiasm for helping scientists code better 😆

White text on navy background: How to write good code in R for science

We all want to write good code…but…how?

In my talk later today, I’ll give all few tips I’ve learned about good scientific code writing that have really helped me & maybe they’ll help you!

Riverbank room 8, 2:50pm #ESA2025

Shandiya and me holding stickers in front of a poster. We are holding fun hex stickers and generally full of excitement

We’re at #ESA2025!

Come to the Atlas of Living Australia booth, located conveniently by the coffee cart!

Come grab a hex sticker and say hi to me & @shandiya.bsky.social while you’re there 😀☕️

Shandiya speaking behind a lectern

A slide from Shandiya’s talk with a green hex map of Australia on a beige background. The map shows areas with lots of data are near cities, but areas with less data are near deserts

A slide from Shandiya’s talk. Shows purple squares with stats of how much data a Data Mobilisation Program project of Click Beetles added to the ALA

@shandiya.bsky.social shows how huge data infrastructures like the ALA also show what we *don’t* know about biodiversity, but how Data Mobilisation programs & our new {galaxias} package can help people provide data to fill the gaps 👇👀

www.ala.org.au/abdmp/
galaxias.ala.org.au

🧪🌏 #ESA2025 #rstats

A fake spider in a web, with text: That’s no spider! It’s a decoy

For the first time, scientists have documented an unusual defense: Some species of arachnids build giant doppelgängers on their webs, creating a frightening deception that scares off would-be killers. https://scim.ag/487Myn0

An excerpt from the paper "Low neck mobility, combined with a mainly motionless posture, might have precipitated the decoupled eye movements and extensive eye rotation, and this association was previously reported in the seventeenth century. Thus chameleons, with their large orbits and extensive capacity for rotation, may benefit from the slack provided by the coiled optic nerve. Wavy fibers have been identified in the optic nerves of rats, which allow the nerves to “stretch”, but such fibers have not been found in the chameleon optic nerve. Convoluted optic nerve paths have been described in the larvae of the Ribbon Sawtail Fish (Idiacanthus fasciola). The eyes in the larval stage are supported by long stalks with a long optic nerve posterior to the stalk, but as these fish mature, the optic nerve shows gradual retraction and reduction of coiling. The occurrence of coiled optic nerves have also been reported among invertebrates; in the Stalk-eye Fly Cyrtodiopsis whitei long, coiled optic nerves develop inside the lumen during pupation, allowing for the rapid inflation and elongation of the eye stalks following eclosion."

The paper goes onto discuss how this long, coiled optic nerve trait is unique. Similar nerve structures are only found in a few animals, including the Stalk-eye fly which has some of the strangest eyes on the planet

Large-eyed animals like owls 🦉 have a trade-off between large eyes & short optic nerves, which lowers eye mobility (to compensate they evolved swivelly necks)

But chameleons 🦎 have long, coiled optic nerves with extra slack for eye mobility, allowing them to use their famous large swivelly eyes 👀🧪🌏

New #dataviz on summer heat-stress anomalies in Europe, 1950–2025. 🥵

This map shows hours with WBGT > 29.5 °C—extreme stress where work should be limited. Since 2010, positive anomalies dominate. 300h = 12.5 days of danger. It’s important to focus on the sub-daily exposure.

#rstats #climatechange

Picture of an owlfly resting on a cream-coloured wall. The owlfy is quite hairy and holds its black and orange abdomen at an angle from the rest of its body. It has translucent wings and long, striped antennae with very obvious bulbs at the ends

Spotted this beautifully hairy #owlfly (Acmonotus incusifer) this week.

One of the Split-eyed Owlflies, it seems this isn't a commonly observed species. There are only 5 observations in #inaturalist with all of those in Western Australia.

#ausinverts #Neuroptera #wildoz #insects #nature

Heard about this at #LivingData2025, if you have biodiversity data you want to share but are not sure how, I think this will be really useful.

Wowwww! incredible stuff

Bird migration is changing. What does this reveal about our planet? – visualised Bird migrations rank as one of nature’s greatest spectacles. Thanks to GPS tracking, scientists are uncovering extraordinary insights into ancient and mysterious journeys – and new threats that are re...

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Everyone deserves to see this beautiful piece of science communication.
🌏🧪🪶
There are many things I love about this, but I think number one is that it features the story a little known, but amazing seabird species, the Desertas Petrel.

Photo of Rukaya

Collage photo of the ALA galaxias development team

(1) 🥁 Announcing the 2025 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge winners!

First place: 🥇 @rukayaj.bsky.social (@gbifnorway.bsky.social) for BDQEmail

Sharing first place: 🥇 @daxkellie.bsky.social, Amanda Buyan, @shandiya.bsky.social and @rowdynerd.bsky.social (Atlas of Living Australia) for galaxias!

I’m a few episodes in and this podcast is *fantastic*

Seminar Posters — Ian G. Brennan

Another banger from @brennian.bsky.social who also designed our {galah} hex logo

He’s good at art 👇

www.iangbrennan.org/seminar-post...

This looks epic! Great work 🙌
(I’ll let Amanda know, she’s not on Bluesky 🤷)

VERY proud to release the first version of the OceanOmics per-site #eDNA reports: every site we sampled over the past 4 years, summarised and visualised. We have >5,500 samples over 950 sites, so eventually we will have 950 reports.

Features:
(Thread: 1/6)

Wow thanks Rukaya 😀 And likewise, congrats on *your* win for BDQemail, it looks like a great tool 🎉

Thanks Philipp! It was certainly a nice surprise 😀

Want to see what {galaxias} can do? 🤔

Check out slides from a talk we presented on galaxias this week at the Living Data conference:
martinwestgate.com/presentation...

Or, check out this intro video about galaxias:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO4-...

#rstats 🌏🧪🐟

galaxias has been a huge team effort, with initial discussions starting over 2 years ago 😮

The galaxias team members are @shandiya.bsky.social, @rowdynerd.bsky.social, Amanda Buyan and myself. We are excited to finally release it and let it swim! 🐟

We hope galaxias encourages more researchers to publish their data because they are already familiar with R or Python, so the barrier-to-entry is much lower!

Research data is so valuable for conservation, collected with robust methods & often in areas that are remote or difficult to access 🧑‍🔬

Once your data and metadata are ready, just run `build_archive()`, which will automatically build a schema file (meta.xml), zip and save your Darwin Core Archive to the parent directory.

You are now ready to share your ecological data with the world!

galaxias handles file conversion and file management when preparing a Darwin Core Archive

Want to use your standardised data? Run `use_data()`

Want to add your completed metadata? Run `use_metadata()`

galaxias will convert and save them in the right place