William B. Ludt, PhD

A job ad with multiple images, including the exterior of the museum, a view of collections (jars on shelves), and pictures of some cool, tropical fish but I don't know enough about fish to describe them other than to say they're pretty colors of yellow and blue/green

🚨We're hiring! The Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History is seeking a tenure-track split position as Assistant Curator of Ichthyology and Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences. Please retweet & share with colleagues! 🐟🐠🧪

Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/174674

New paper alert!!!🚨 in our new study we find that Antarctic icefishes added a new module in their skulls during their adaptive radiation special shout out to @mayaranevesbio.bsky.social who led this project!

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Attention students: the deadline for our fall collections study award coming up soon! Use the funds to come out and use our LACM specimens for your research.

What a cool study on early jawed bony fishes. Way to go @fishfetisher.bsky.social and colleagues!

Four large female Pacific Footballfish (a rare species of anglerfish) that have washed ashore in California recently and been preserved in museum collections for documentation and future research.

Over the past 5 years some rare Pacific Footballfish have washed ashore in California. How rare? 41 individuals ever recorded, rare. So @realfishdoc.bsky.social, @frable.bsky.social, Michelle Horeczko, and I wrote a short note summarizing this species. Check it out here: doi.org/10.51492/cfw... 🐟🦑

A great opportunity if you’re interested in fish macroevolution!

Every year this is a phenomenal resource for postdocs or others on the EcoEvo job market. Keep an eye on it for great job postings!

Great opportunity to work with a fantastic community of museum evolutionary biologists at the LSUMNS!

While scanning some fishes yesterday I came across this Bonytail Chub collected near Blythe, CA in 1933. You can't find this species in Blythe anymore, nor in the rest of California as it is critically endangered. Museum collections like @nhm.org showcasing yet again our changing planet 🐟🐠

Save the NSF The National Science Foundation is one of the world’s premier funders of basic science research (i.e. the fundamental di...

"Save The NSF" - a little blogpost I wrote to amplify the #SaveTheNSF mission.

The National Science Foundation is one of the world’s premier funders of basic science research; proposed federal cuts would derail how we do science in the U.S.

aguidetoacademia.blogspot.com/2025/07/save...

Fish time capsules prove plastic’s long reign Tucked away from the exhibit halls of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles (NHMLA), where visitors crowd around T. rex skeletons and a 10.8 pound gold nugget found in the Mojave desert, lies an u...

A nice writeup by @caseagrant.bsky.social on the historical microplastic work we're doing @nhm.org along with @nhmlagems.bsky.social, @jessdflores.bsky.social and @jazminenoamie.bsky.social. Take a look if you're interested in what we've found so far! 🐟🧪

caseagrant.ucsd.edu/news/fish-ti...

Being part of @prosanta.bsky.social's lab was a large, and formative, part of my academic upbringing. Glad I got see so many past and present lab members at this year's #JMIH25 meeting

And that’s a wrap on #jmih25! Great posters were presented by @realfishdoc.bsky.social, @jessdflores.bsky.social, @romanferraro.bsky.social and others from the @nhm.org Dept of Ichthyology. Overall a good time in St. Paul, MN!

This will be a great resource for future studies on neotropical fishes! 🐠🐟

We're hiring! 🎉

The KU Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum is seeking applications for a full-time Museum Education Coordinator. Application reviews begin Monday, June 9, 2025.

To apply or learn more about each job, click the link ➡️ rockcha.lk/xvx

I'm thrilled to announce that the Entomology department at the NHMLAC is hiring a full-time collections manager! 🪰🐜🕸️🦋 I'm biased, but the museum is a great place to work, and our department is full of fun, thoughtful people. Job description and information for applying are here:

shorturl.at/iRqOB

Even the most minuscule ants like this Strumigenys elongata get huge under the SEM. Courtesy of Giar-Ann Kung, Los Angeles, CA, 2009. © Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

There are hidden worlds all around us, too small to see with our own eyes. Ahead of this weekend’s annual #BugFair, explore those hidden worlds and the behind-the-scenes research made possible with this fantastic equipment in the Scanning Electron Microscope Lab! bit.ly/NHMSEM

Think you know everything about fish feeding? Check this out! So cool to see this paper come out by @mikemihalitsis.bsky.social and colleagues

Really cool paleo work by NHMLA's very own @jvelezjuarbe.bsky.social!

Coelacanths having a great week! First a new live sighting of the Indonesian species, and now this fantastic work on their musculature by Aléssio Datovo and the late Dave Johnson

As the school year comes to a close I always try to get the whole lab together before students leave for summer. Super grateful for this group of hard working employees and students that truly represent the positive impact that federal funds can have on lives and careers. I can't thank them enough!

Stumbled across our Australian lungfish, Neoceratodus forsteri, in the collections earlier today. Look at that weird pelvic fin!

Proud advisor moment seeing @jessdflores.bsky.social give her first conference talk and @jazminenoamie.bsky.social give their first conference poster yesterday at the SCAS conference

So cool!

3D model of jawless fossil fish

Check out the latest paper on a jawless fossil fish, and this time we were able to recreate a full 3D model! Thank you Lisa Schnetz, @nitroshutter.bsky.social, @gilespalaeo.bsky.social, @euphanerops.bsky.social et al. for having me on this
@nhm-london.bsky.social #fossilfish #CTscan #palaeotology

Graphical abstract for "The Diffusion Diaries: Diffusible Iodine-Based Contrast-Enhanced CT for Vertebrate Natural History Specimens", showing the number of scans : "252 scans of 205 specimens from 7 natural history collections" a plot showing how staining time increases with mass, log-transformed (bottom left), a pie chart showing the Tissue Condition scores (TCS) recorded for all specimens (bottom middle), and a screenshot of a lab protocol for diceCT'ing museum specimens (bottom right)

Cover image for Integrative Organismal Biology, showing cross sections through a fish, a tenrec, a frog, and a lizard at the bottom of the image, and a 3D rendering of each animal at the top of the image (colored in teal, grey, yellow, and pink, respectively)

🚨New publication alert!🚨 A big one! It might just be my *biggest* one: doi.org/10.1093/iob/... IMPORTANT THREAD! From the moment Dave Blackburn set me loose at the Florida Museum, I had a marvelous time using diffusible iodine-based contrast-enhanced CT (diceCT) to create anatomical datasets 🧪1/6

@jazminenoamie.bsky.social, not *Janine*.

All this work has been done by these two excellent early career researchers, @jessdflores.bsky.social and Janine Gallardo!

It’s Earth Day at @nhm.org today! If you’re around, come by and learn about the microplastic research we’re doing using fish specimens from our collection. This important work details microplastic consumption across 8 decades in CA! Funded by @caseagrant.bsky.social and @opc-california.bsky.social

I love coming across old documents like this publication written by Vic Springer in 1973 for the ASIH. The world has changed a lot in the last 52 years, and yet many things that Vic wrote about may still seem familiar to any ichthyologist on the job market today