Sean A. S. Anderson 🍉

Way to instantly evaporate the illusion your words at Davos meant anything. Pathetic, racist, supplicant nonsense.

I will never get used to the disdain our country holds for brown and Black children.

From Palestine to Iran to Sudan, we normalize the destruction of schools and hospitals and daycares. We reduce children to death tolls and their futures to rubble with no consequence or second thought.

Birds are vanishing from tropical forests. Is another ‘silent spring’ coming? As mysterious bird declines crop up in the Amazon and beyond, scientists suspect climate change may be to blame

tropical lowland birds aren't doing well -- this is an excellent article on what's happening featuring a slew of fantastic research projects
www.science.org/content/arti...

When someone dies in our field (I’m thinking of Dr. Hans-Dieter Sues), it’d be great for someone to aggregate all the positive comments and anecdotes about them on social media and send to their family. A lot of our lives are spent in our professional work but our families might not know impact.

🧪

This thread is amazing but as someone who writes obvious things for my own reference later, if a person were to see my marginalia, they would conclude I don't have a working brain

This genus is so fabulous

So glad we no longer have a regulatory state

More great stuff from a really great colleague -- huge congrats Ben!!

No evidence that haplodiploidy favors the evolution of eusociality | PNAS The potential role of haplodiploid sex determination in promoting the evolution of altruism and eusociality has been the subject of intense debate ...

📄 No evidence that haplodiploidy favors the evolution of eusociality 🐝🐜

⬇️
www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

My quote of the day

It might seem unfair to reward a person for having so much pleasure over the years, asking the maize plant to solve specific problems and then watching its responses.

Barbara McClintock

From blackouts to food shortages: How US blockade is crippling life in Cuba US pressure pushes island nation's 11 million people to the brink as Cuba imposes emergency measures amid fuel crisis.

The US is starving Cuba to death

www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026...

Actually I take this back, that word doesn’t refer to change in the lifecycle of an organism

Exaptation has a similar meaning

Really cool example on the use of comparative genomics to learn about key innovations in animals. In certain contexts 🐍 gene loss 💥helps adaptation!

SLiM 5: Eco-evolutionary Simulations Across Multiple Chromosomes and Full Genomes Abstract. Evolutionary simulations of multiple chromosomes, even up to the scale of full-genome simulations, are becoming increasingly important in populat

Slim 5 can now simulate genomes with multiple chromosomes like autosomes, sex chromosomes, mitochondria and chloroplast dna academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

The US is gearing up to literally starve Cuba into submission. It is absolutely criminal and obscene. And this to a country that everyone knows poses *zero* threat to the US.

The people of Cuba need our full solidarity in resisting this onslaught.

RIP to a true Canadian legend, first-ballot comedy hall-of-famer

Laboratory and wild Drosophila sechellia have conserved niche specialization phenotypes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.26.701819v1

"From the start, ICE has been a racial project, with its armed operatives targeting Black and brown people. Its categorical mission and lack of oversight are reminiscent of slave patrols tasked with hunting down fugitives. "In the wake of Good’s killing, politicians have claimed that ICE needs better training. The problem, as they see it, is the ramp-up of ICE under Trump, with a $75bn increase in funding. But Jonathan Ross has been with ICE for a decade. Ross wasn’t one of the subpar new recruits who can’t run a mile and a half; according to testimony he gave in December, obtained by Wired, he was a firearms trainer, team leader, and elite member of its special response unit – a Swat team. "Seen from this vantage, Good’s killing is not a “mistake” but a reflection of how the agency is designed to operate. Take it from the border czar, Tom Homan, who said: “There will be more bloodshed unless we decrease the hateful rhetoric.” In other words, Homan, who received an award for his service under Obama, after introducing the idea of family separation, is telling citizens that exercising their constitutional right to speech will prompt government agents to gun them down."

new by @hebagowayed.bsky.social and @victorerikray.bsky.social in @theguardian.com:
"Abolishing an agency that teargasses two-year-olds and shoots mothers in the street isn’t radical. It is basic human decency."
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

One of those sentences that gets wilder and wilder

This is so sad.

Uruguay’s Renewable Charge: A Small Nation, A Big Lesson For The World Uruguay built a power grid that runs 99% on renewables—at half the cost of fossil fuels. Here’s how its bold energy overhaul became a global model.

“Uruguay did what most nations still call impossible: it built a power grid that runs almost entirely on renewables—at half the cost of fossil fuels. The physicist who led that transformation says the same playbook could work anywhere—if governments have the courage to change the rules.”

Matching the movie to the mood

We know that the role of nocturnal moths as pollinators has been greatly underestimated in Europe, but this impressive new study shows that tiger moths (Arctiinae) are important generalist pollinators in a lowland rainforest in Ecuador #teammoth 🌎
royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

I think that’s Joseph and Clarence

Wow: Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention (named for Holocaust survivor Raphael Lemkin, who coined term "genocide") calls Clinton's remarks "genocide denial."

"Young people in the US are not stupid or gullible. They simply reject genocide – something the Secretary might consider doing as well."

Check out our cover article by @timjanicke.bsky.social and colleagues about the role of sexual selection in animal speciation. academic.oup.com/evlett/artic.... The beautiful illustration is by Katharina Bóth.

Israel has ‘de facto state policy’ of organised torture, says UN report Committee highlights allegations including dog attacks and sexual violence, raising concern about impunity for war crimes Israel has “a de facto state policy of organised and widespread torture”, according to a new UN report covering the past two years, which also raised concerns about the impunity of Israeli security forces for war crimes. The UN committee on torture expressed “deep concern over allegations of repeated severe beatings, dog attacks, electrocution, waterboarding, use of prolonged stress positions [and] sexual violence”. Continue reading...

Israel has ‘de facto state policy’ of organised torture, says UN report

Congratulations to Joe Felsenstein on being awarded the 2026 Mendel Medal!