Dax Kellie

Want to make your code better at running again in the future?

My talk next month will be filled with lots of tips about how to write sharable, reproducible R code and why it's good for science

Hope to see you there!
#rstats 🌏🧪👩‍💻

Wow, this is spectacular! Evolution of beak size in an urban population of juncos in response to the loss of supplementary food (bird feeders) during the COVID pandemic, and subsequent regression. Is the UCLA campus the new Daphne Major?
pnas.org/doi/full/10....

The Age of Academic Slop is Upon Us what happens when AI automates "normal science"?

I just finished a three-year term as an editor at an international relations journal. I began at the start of the LLM era but ended right in the middle of it. Our volume of submissions tripled and our desk reject rate rose to 75%. I have some thoughts.
open.substack.com/pub/hegemon/...

'Predator-free' fence project praised for restoring Kangaroo Island's native wildlife Five years after feral cats were removed from inside the Western River Refuge on Kangaroo Island, populations of endangered species have boomed.

Populations of endangered animals on an island have increased by 90-100% in five years, after effectively controlling non-native predators.
www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01...

Yellow and purple text on a navy background: Favourite albums 2025 10–Sault Choke enough –Oklou Lotus–Lil Simz 🥇The Passionate Ones–Nourished by Time LOVED–Parcels The Crux–Djo Getting Killed–Geese Baby–Dijon Guitar–Mac DeMarco Showbiz!–MIKE Honourable mentions DONT’T TAP THE GLASS–Tyler, the Creator Deadbeat–Tame Impala Big City Life - Smerz Joni’s Jazz–Joni Mitchell

I listened to 171 albums in 2025 apparently. These were my favourites 💿🎶🤘

Family, colleagues in 'disbelief' after leading scientist dies aged 52 University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Emma Johnston has died from complications associated with cancer, aged 52.

What a massive loss for science in Australia. Emma was a force, and responsible for many of my friends’ careers in biology. Very sad news, my condolences to her friends and family

www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12...

a young boy is covering his face with his hands while sitting on a bed . Alt: a young boy is crossing his fingers on both hands wishing for something as hard as possible

C’mon Santa please bring that ID!

These photos were made by talented scientists and citizen scientists (not me!). Photo credits are in the alt text

An orange, burly round christmas beetle on a green leaf, facing the camera. Photo by nature-lover2 2025 (CC-BY-NC 4.0 (Int))

An orange christmas beetle with green, shimmering colouration reflecting off of its exoskeleton, sitting on a brown leaf. Christmas beetles are well-known for their bright, reflective colouration (known as iridescence).

A bar plot showing observation counts of Christmas beetles since 1900 in the Atlas of Living Australia. The bars are red and the background is a beige/cream colour. The plot shows that despite huge numbers of Christmas beetles historically, there are relatively few records over the last 100 years of Christmas beetles. This lack of data makes it difficult to know why Christmas beetles seem to be disappearing. After the Christmas Beetle Count began in 2021, the number of observations had a large spike in number in subsequent years.

A series of 3 bar plots showing the number of observations of 3 taxa commonly misidentified as Christmas beetles - Argentinian scarab beetles (invasive), Golden stag beetles and June beetles. The growth of Christmas beetle records after the Christmas Beetle Count initiative began in 2021 coincides with a spike in data for these other taxa as well, a positive but unintended outcome of more people interested in recording Christmas beetle observations!

It's December!🎄 But where are all the Christmas beetles? 😕🪲

Share any Christmas beetle observations with @inaturalist.bsky.social to help figure out why they seem to have disappeared. Even if you're unsure, mis-ID'd observations are valuable too!

www.inaturalist.org/projects/chr...

🧪🌏📊 #rstats

A Pacific white-sided dolphin approaching a Northern Resident Killer Whale. Credit: University of British Columbia (A.Trites), Dalhousie University (S. Fortune), Hakai Institute (K. Holmes), Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (X. Cheng)

Killer whales or orca have been observed hunting with Pacific white-sided dolphins in the waters off British Columbia, Canada, and sharing fish scraps with them after making a kill, according to research in Scientific Reports. go.nature.com/4rZ08RJ 🧪

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*