Kit Straley, PhD 🐦🤓💚

thank you!

thank you!!!!

two green birds are standing in a hole with the words time to party written above them Alt: two green parrots are standing in a hole and they appear to be “dancing” with the words time to party written below them

cross out party, insert sleep 😂

thank you!

Two people standing under a colorful banner that reads “Dr. Kit Straley congratulations!” The banner has a bird with a graduation style cap.

PhDone

A four panel comic titled Bird Sounds. In panel 1, labeled thrush, a wood thrush sings its beautiful eeohlay song against a forest background. In panel 2, labeled wren, a winter wren delicately sings tweedly tweedly tweedly. In panel 3, labeled warbler, a yellow warbler delicately sings sweet sweet. In panel 4, labeled heron in a death metal font, a heron screams KRAAGH against a background of fire.

Bird sounds.

Schematic of the structure of the paper. We looked at dietary differences between ages and sexes, seasons and habitat types. We looked at the identity of prey in the diet and the number of dietary items.

New publication! 🚨

If you're looking for a paper on what great tits eat then this is for you! 🦋🐛🐞🪲🐦

We looked at variation in diet using DNA metabarcoding and found lots of differences between adult and young birds and between habitat types.
@ucc.ie

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

we learn about the food web early on in school, but it’s another thing to witness the spectacular growth of herbivores, all through the power of native plants! insects are declining, and one way we can help is by providing them with their native host plants. 🐛🌿💚

suffering is happening right now and I’m sitting on my couch formatting ggplots. I’ve never felt more useless.

I keep being told to ignore it and focus but ignoring it doesn’t stop it from happening, and in fact if everyone ignores it to focus on their own little piece of capitalism it will just continue and escalate.

I know almost everyone hates their dissertation at the end, and I don’t hate mine, but wow is it hard to focus on writing this thing very few people will ever read or care about so I can earn my piece of paper while we freefall into fascism 🤦🏻‍♀️

beautiful! I also loveeee spicebush it smells so lovely.

yes! Promethea moth caterpillars go through 5 growth stages called instars before they cocoon. the lil guy is a 1st instar and the big one is a 5th instar. it’s amazing how much they change not just in terms of size but also colors!

A fifth instar Promethea caterpillar on sassafras leaves. The camera is focused on its posterior, where a pattern of 3 black marks looks like a cartoon face.

bonus smiley butt

I have no idea why my fingers look sunburnt 🤷🏻‍♀️ they aren’t.

caterpillars will never cease to amaze me. this is happening every day all around us. in the woods. in the parks. in your yard, especially if you have native plants!

great read, thank you for highlighting the important roles of arthropods and excellent research on this topic!

Scientists Are Tracking Worrying Declines in Insects—and the Birds That Feast on Them. Here's What's Being Done to Save Them Both In Vermont, researchers have investigated the types of creepy, crawly bugs that their avian predators consume and may have found the answers to keeping them both alive

Will habitat loss, insecticides and light pollution bring us another silent spring? Birds need insects. (By me, with photos by Melissa Groo.) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-shared-fate-180986805/

#birds #conservation #insects #animals

Top panels: graphs showing increases in spillover events, extinction rates, and temperature anomalies over the last few centuries. Bottom panel: a map of 10 pandemics since the year 1900. Four were linked to agriculture, two to wildlife use, and one to climate change.

🚨😷🧪 NEW: A growing body of evidence shows that pandemics, biodiversity loss, and climate change are part of a broader polycrisis - but there are no simple solutions. A sweeping overview of "Pathogens and planetary change" for the first issue of @natrevbiodiv.bsky.social, out now 🔓 rdcu.be/d6lHl

my results might by negative in not so exciting ways, but at least I can still make a nice color coded ggplot 🤷🏻‍♀️

niceeee. I miss finding their nests it is such an accomplishment. I love their little mrp mrps as you get close, so different from their other vocalizations!

this summarizes my experience nest searching for my dissertation 😂 we were originally going to include gray catbirds but the majority of field crew folks really struggled to find their nests - the habitat is so dense and the adults are so squirrely, diving into a giant maze of multiflora 🤦🏻‍♀️

Nothing abt this is quiet&people have been talking&posting& calling their electeds about it all week. It's been widely covered in the press, esp in the West. The Wilderness Society has an entire interactive built for people to see the lands affected in their area. www.wilderness.org/articles/med...

Cover image of the June issue of Nature Ecology & Evolution showing an illustration of a woodpecker flying into woodland at the edge of a typical UK farmland landscape. The cover line reads "Land-use legacies"

Our June issue is now live! www.nature.com/natecolevol/...

Featuring research on:

🧬Airborne eDNA
💰Costs of biological invasions
🌡️Genomic predictions of temperature adaptation

Cover illustration by Marco Lawrence, based on Bradfer-Lawrence et al. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The view inside of a small tupperware container full of Polyphemus moth eggs and newly hatched caterpillars. There are many. The eggs are cream colored ovals with a thick brown band and are tiny! roughly 3 mm. There are also little green caterpillars with brown faces crawling out of the eggs and up the side of the container.

they start out so smol 🥹

A small tupperware container full of Polyphemus moth eggs. These were laid by 2 females. I haven’t counted them but there are definitely over 100. The females are only held for egg collection for one night, and are then released into the wild to continue laying and finish their life cycle. I raise a subset of the eggs to pupation, and the rest are released as 2nd or 3rd instars in my unofficial “head start” program (I raise moths for science but also as a hobby, these are hobby eggs). The eggs are small (~3mm), oval, and cream with a thick brown band. Dark splotching on the eggs in this photo comes from the adhesive the female uses to attach them to plants when she lays them.

wow thank you for all the moth love, everyone! he is a male Polyphemus moth that I raised last year. he started out as a teeny egg like these (see photo) and through the power of native plants - Quercus rubra specifically - he was able to pupate, chill all winter, and emerge as an adult this year!

the background for this photo is a little scrungly (there were a bunch of breeding pairs of Promethea in that cube last night 🤷🏻‍♀️) but I couldn’t let her go without documenting her gorgeous patterns first.

A female Promethea moth rests with her wings open. She is standing on the green fabric bottom of a mesh cube. Her body is dark raspberry red and fluffy. Her antennae are feathery and dark yellow. Her wings have complex patterns and many colors - dark red, burnt orange, raspberry pinks, tan, black, and cream. Her forewings have a dramatic black spot near the tips. All of her wings have a thick tan border, and the hindwings have extra raspberry splotches in the border. There is a scallop-edged white line in the middle of her wings, and on the side of that line closest to her body her wings have more contrasting and vibrant colors.

for your consideration - another moth! this is a female Promethea moth who is getting released today. 🍃🐛🦋

absolutely. one year I had a particularly crafty catbird who took out several males before I figured out the culprit. luckily they seem to have forgotten they can hunt my deck, or I’ve just gotten better at getting to the moths as soon as they show up.

bluecorridors.org is live!

Watch whales doing their thing as they mooch and migrate throughout the year.

It is an honour to be involved in processing the data for this amazing living initiative. Looking forward to expanding it further!