Maria Moiron

Really cool study, Oriol and team! And good news (somewhat?) for the Ibiza wall lizards! 🦎

Urbanization enhances biodiversity loss. Yet sometimes cities may *paradoxically* shelter species threatened by other components of global change

We studied if urban areas are sheltering an endangered iconic lizard 🦎 from a rapidly spreading predator 🐍 in Ibiza👇

📸G. Casbas

doi.org/10.1016/j.ge...

Come work with us! We are looking to fill a PhD (mountain forest management) and PostDoc position (forest adaptive capacity):
PhD: www.lss.ls.tum.de/fileadmin/w0...
Postdoc:
www.lss.ls.tum.de/fileadmin/w0...
Please feel free to share this opportunity with anyone who might be interested!

Well, I'd say... it really nailed the ‘perplexity’ vibe of your findings!

Two small brown spiders on their webs with white springtails. The smaller male spider is on the left, while the larger female spider on the right has a visible red mating plug that develops after her first mating to ensure paternity. Small white springtails, which serve as food for the spiders, are scattered on the silky webs.

Three stereo-microscope views of Mermessus trilobatus (dwarf spider): (a) an unmated female seen from above with a smooth epigynal, (b) a mated female showing the rounded mating plug covering her epigyne, and (c) a male with slender legs and elongated abdomen, all on a neutral background.

Tiny #spiders, huge impact! Meet #MermessusTrilobatus – a North-American dwarf spider that has stormed across #Europe in <50 yrs. We follow every silk thread of its success story 🕸️✨ Swipe through this thread for the highlights! #InvasiveSpecies #Ecology

Really like this illustration 👌👌👌 So good!

Cartoon illustration of a dark-haired, bearded researcher wearing a white lab coat and a small hoop earring. He scratches his head with a worried expression while standing in front of a presentation board. The board shows a zig-zagging upward line graph, a vertical bar chart, a circular pie chart, and several spider silhouettes, all hinting at invasion data. Three large black question marks hover above his head, emphasizing confusion. The background and chart elements use muted beige and brown tones that match the scientist’s lab coat and overall palette.

Wait...🤔 They're TERRIBLE at handling disturbance, get eaten more by native predators, yet somehow conquered 1,400km of Europe in 45 years? HOW?! 🤯 The answer in establishment might lie in their reproductive behaviour (work in progress - stay tuned!). But let's look at how they spread so fast! ⬇️

About 15-20 yrs ago, a bunch of reviews (inc. 1 by me) made predictions about the future of genomics in conservation. 1 yr ago at ICISB, Robin Waples assessed which of those predictions had been fulfilled. Sam May & Sam Rosenbaum now led the effort to turn this into a review:
doi.org/10.1111/mec....

Ooooh, one of our beautiful terns made it to the cover of the issue of Ethology that contains Melina's study on individual behavioral responses to novel stimuli: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Our neighbours at the Banter See are no fan of the terns. Luckily the terns don't give a shit. Oh, or maybe sometimes they do. :-)

And here it is - Justine's last thesis chapter got accepted too and can now be read as an open access paper in Environmental Research: doi.org/10.1016/j.en...

Belated but wonderful news: Kriszti Kupán has won a 3-year grant from the Bauer-Hollmann Stiftung for monitoring and developing an integrative #conservation management approach for threatened #ruffs and #dunlins at #Liminganlahti! 🥚🎉🐣

Such great news for the team and the birds! Big congrats to Kriszti! 🎉🥳

New publication by @commonternproject.bsky.social with @coralinebcht.bsky.social, @mmoiron.bsky.social, @matteobeccardi.bsky.social & @icbm-uol.bsky.social: 'Mercury levels in chicks of a long-lived seabird – parental effects and links with growth and survival'. doi.org/10.1016/j.en...

Disentangling nonrandom assortment, indirect effects, and joint plasticity as causes of phenotypic (dis)similarity between social partners Abstract. Social partners frequently resemble each other. These correlations between the phenotypes of interacting individuals (e.g., social partners, grou

@barbaraclass.bsky.social et al. assess how well different statistical models estimate indirect genetic effects and assortative mating when partner similarity is caused by multiple co-occurring processes
@jsmartin.bsky.social @mmoiron.bsky.social

academic.oup.com/jeb/advance-...

A fire salamander perching on a road.

We asked if salamanders with more warning coloration are bolder and produce more toxin! Read about it in our @mmoiron.bsky.social preprint "The bright, the bold and the toxic: do coloration, personality, and toxicity represent an integrated phenotype in fire salamanders?" doi.org/10.32942/X24...

Welcome Max!

At the SIBECOL conference, besides meeting old and new colleagues and learning a lot, my friend @ylndmc.bsky.social and I won a best poster award for our study on trait distributions - thanks to the organisers for such a nice conference!!

#SIBECOLAEET2025
@sibecol-aeet-25.bsky.social

68 nests with chicks now. ❤️

Here’s a video of a fun pilot study on tern personality aspects, in which Melina tested how the birds respond to a novel object placed at their nest. Linea from nest 431 did not care much about an orange cone making an appearance. :-)

Yesterday, Justine Bertram, the lovely soul in the center of this picture, successfully defended her PhD thesis. As throughout her time with the terns and at the @ifv-whv.bsky.social, she did a brilliant job. I could not be more proud, or sad that she is fledging now.

And here's another shout-out to the wonderful tern-and-quail team, which, led by Nathalie and @matteobeccardi.bsky.social, prepared a gorgeous hat for Justine. ♥️

Home - NaviSense NaviSense - International Cluster of Excellence Proposal for the Sensory Basis, Mechanisms, and Impacts of Animal Navigation.

Grateful & excited that more tern work will be funded through one of the 70 #ClustersOfExcellence granted by the @dfg.de today. From 01/01/2026, ‘Navisense’ will work to provide mechanistic understanding of animal naviation, and support conservation efforts. You can follow along here: navisense.org

Map showing the tracks (yellow lights) followed to check my set of boxes (red dots) in Wytham Woods

Now that the field season is coming to an end (first day off since late April, I decided to compile some stats of what I have done during the last month.

To check the 208 (reduced a bit in mid-May), I have walked a total of 446km with an accumulated elevation gain of 9431m!

Disentangling non-random assortment, indirect effects, and joint plasticity as causes of phenotypic (dis)similarity between social partners Abstract. Social partners frequently resemble each other. These correlations between the phenotypes of interacting individuals (e.g. social partners, group

Our paper on disentangling assortative mating and indirect genetic effects in empirical datasets has just been accepted in @jevbio.bsky.social ! It has been a long process (5 years in the making!) and I am very proud of the result 🥳
academic.oup.com/jeb/advance-...

Three common inferential errors when investigating context dependence in ecology. Consider a test of context dependence in its most basic form: a 2 × 2 factorial experiment, measuring an ecological response Y, to the crossing of factors X and Z, each with two levels. The analyst fits a statistical model with an interaction term to the data: Y ~ X + Z + X × Z, to test for and quantify context dependence. Three inferential errors are possible when the measurement scale or symmetry of the interaction are overlooked: detection and magnitude (Type D), sign (Type S) and misidentification of underlying processes (Type A).

Since we are still talking about interactions, I worked with some ecologists a couple of years ago on measurement scale, interactions and interpretation issues. I think some problems arise from failure to distinguish prediction from inference, a chronic problem in ecology imo doi.org/10.1111/brv....

Götz & Nathalie have started catching today. Kamala was 3rd to safely return her #geolocator. Nathalie will be analyzing the track soon, adding Kamala to a subset of 140 other birds for which she has collected data on the #migratorybehaviour as part of her postdoc funded by @sfb1372.bsky.social.

Good morning from the Banter See! Arrival is looking comparatively good this year. 321 registered birds so far (vs. 236 on the same day last year), and counting. #phenology #seabirds

Ten more days to apply!

Join us in Bayreuth to study how burying beetles use social behaviors to control harmful and beneficial microbial communities during family life!

New paper now out! 🚀 Evolution isn't just about selection—it's about how each generation changes the environment for the next. We experimentally show evolutionary feedbacks in action in fruit flies. 🧵 (1/) @pnas.org #NSF #SupportNSF