Scott P. Egan

On the hunt for galls! PhD student Maryam Faghihi & #NSF post-bacc Skyler Godwin are collecting galled oak tissue for a RNAseq project at #RiceUniversity!

Cool! Sounds fun!

Wait, what?! Really? Cause they look like apples too when you cut ‘em open! 🍎🍏

One of my favorite parts of teaching is when I get to fanbo, err, promote my awesomely smart friends! @scottpegan.bsky.social @pedrobd.bsky.social @brendanoloughlin.bsky.social

Cool slide! Thanks for featuring some of our lab’s work! 🙏

Beetle larva covered in 💩!

Neochlamisus leaf beetles cover their egg in frass, making a bell-shaped covering for the egg. Then, larvae hatch, put the case on their back, and add to it as they grow.

Black swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes), north of Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana. #biodiversity #mothweek

FOUR TT positions in ecosystem ecology at Odum School of Ecology, 2 aquatic 2 terrestrial, over next 2 years! visit www.ugajobsearch.com/postings/439... for more info.

The ‘Tree of Life’ in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. A southern live oak (Quercus virginiana) planted circa 1740. The trunk has a circumference of 35 ft (10.5 m) and a canopy crown spread of over 160 ft (49 m)!! This tree proceeded the American revolution and the rise of Napoleon.

Scientists In Texas Found A New Species Hiding Under Their Noses - Sciencing Scientists at Rice University in Texas discovered a new parasitic wasp species, Chrysonotomyia susbelli, parasitizing the galls of local gall wasps.

Article on #NewSpecies of parasitoid wasp we discovered last year on #RiceUniversity campus! Great work led by @brendanoloughlin.bsky.social in collaboration with Mike Gates, Pedro Brandão, & me.

www.sciencing.com/1905663/texa...

The Way Parasitoid Wasps Lay Their Eggs Has Inspired Horror Films What are parasitoid wasps? Learn about these wasps that have a gruesome but fascinating way of surviving.

I was recently interviewed for @discovermag.bsky.social about the amazing world of parasitoid wasps!

www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth...

😂😂😂

The humid, hot Gulf coast delivers! 🍄

Artistic license.

“Mushrooms were the roses in the garden of that unseen world, because the real mushroom plant was underground. The parts you could see - what most people called a mushroom - was just a brief apparition. A cloud flower.”

From ‘The Year of the Flood’ (2009) by @margaretatwood.bsky.social

Green darner dragonfly (Anax junius) perched on my index finger.

Green darner dragonfly (Anax junius).

… and Huxley was the grandson of TH Huxley - Darwin’s bulldog - who was a contemporary and forceful supporter of Charles Darwin, and a proponent of evolution. The history of the study of #evolution at #RiceUniversity is strong. (4/4)

Huxley’s first hire in the new Biology Department at #RiceUniversity was Drosophila geneticist & future @nobelprize.bsky.social
laureate Hermann Muller. (3/4)

Huxley was also the first director of @unesco.org, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund (@wwf.eu), and the secretary of the Zoological Society of London. He was also a president of the British Eugenics Society. (2/4)

Julian Huxley (1887-1975) was an evolutionary biologist & leading figure in the Modern Synthesis. He was also the founding faculty member of the #RiceUniversity Biology Department (1915), where I now work 100+ years later … (1/4)

Welcome to Texas! 🤠

#editorbio @scottpegan.bsky.social joined #teamJEB this year - a broadly trained evolutionary biologist that specialises in the study of speciation, the evolution of ecological specialisation, and eco-evolutionary dynamics of plant-insect interactions at the population scale

Excited to join the team @jevbio.bsky.social!!!
🧬🐛🪲🐜🪰🔬🐞🦟🦋🦗🧬

😍😍😍

Darwin lamenting the existence of the parasitoid...

"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [a family of parasitoids] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.”

I ❤️ #insect themed graffiti! Especially when it’s a tiger beetle at #CadillacRanch near Amarillo, Texas. Artist credit: Dan Duran!

Hurray!!!!

Great running trails in Athens, Georgia, for #Evol2025! 🏃🏃‍♀️🏃‍♂️ @runnersworld.bsky.social

Do former UT undergrads count? 🤘

🧪