Michelle McCauley

“Living organisms are assumed to produce same-species offspring. Here, we report a shift from this norm in Messor ibericus, an ant that lays individuals from two distinct species.” 🤯🤯🤯

Post ESEB, I was finally able to cross something off my bucket list: attending La Tomatina, the tomato throwing festival! (It’s all tomato, dw.)

This is how I imagine C. elegans feel in OP50 btw

In my defense, I DID read the instructions saying to go vertical… I just received them AFTER I printed the poster

Wanna talk mating system evolution? Come find me at #ESEB2025! I have a poster tonight (session 1, poster 169) on how dispersal can favor self-fertilization! Then on Thursday I’m giving a talk on how outcrossing is favored under a combination of mutation and antagonistic coevolution (S51.10 - Sex).

Variation in self-compatibility among genotypes and across ontogeny in a self-fertilizing vertebrate, Kryptolebias marmoratus

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

Dispersal and the evolution of sex differences in cooperation in cooperatively breeding birds and mammals Abstract. Sex differences in cooperation are widespread, but their evolution remains poorly understood. Here, we use comparative analyses of the cooperativ

Comparative study reports that sex differences in dispersal predict sex differences in cooperation across cooperative birds and mammals. Dispersal likely impacts sex-specific direct benefits or costs of cooperation:

doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...

Fenner et al. @andyyoung.bsky.social

Volume 38 Issue 6 | Journal of Evolutionary Biology | Oxford Academic Journal of Evolutionary Biology

⭐Issue 6 of JEB is now online!⭐

This issue is headlined by a Target Review from @josselin-clo.bsky.social et al. on #matingsystems evolution, accompanied by several #invitedcommentaries expanding on this key discussion comparing concepts in plants and animals:

academic.oup.com/jeb/issue/38/6

Meet the diabetes researcher behind Barbie’s new pink (insulin) pumps New line of dolls aims to help children with type 1 diabetes feel more included

“The kids went crazy... Kids were chanting, ‘Barbie!’ and they all got one, and they literally had tears.” www.science.org/content/arti... Nice story by @cohenjon.bsky.social for @science.org

Brb I have to go make a worm tower immediately

What does a hypothesis developed in plants have to do with C. elegans? Why are C. elegans so good at selfing? Come by my poster 419B at #worm25 and find out!

Fierst lab grad student and poster design wiz Tori Eggers (the famous TE) presenting on genome evolution and transposable elements (the less famous TE) at #worm25! Check her out at 473A! Go Tori!!

Incredibly happy with my fabric scientific poster from @spoonflower-social.bsky.social! High quality and wrinkle/crease resistant and folds up easily for travel! Only drawback is we had to trim it. 😉 (Thank you, Sandra and Kim💕)

I’ll be presenting at the International Worm Meeting in Davis! #Worm25

Evolution 2025: first time presenting this work and first talk as a postdoc! Can we experimentally show Red Queen dynamics underpin a coevolving host-parasite system as per theory? Time shift assays reveal a promising signal. 💃🏻👑

So proud of undergrads Jess and Pooja for presenting their work at Evolution 2025! They looked at how diet and genetic background affect nematode survival against a common bacterial parasite.

Towering behavior and collective dispersal in Caenorhabditis nematodes Perez et al. report that self-assembling nematode towers occur in nature and can function as collective dispersal structures. Using Caenorhabditis elegans, they establish a tractable empirical model t...

Nematode towers that you can get to grow in lab using C. elegans. Maybe a new, tractable model system for studying self-organization in the lab. 🧪

"Towering behavior and collective dispersal in Caenorhabditis nematodes"
by Perez et al. (2025, Current Biology)
www.cell.com/current-biol...