I'm v excited to be recruiting a PhD student to work on badger behaviour and ecology! Starting date is March 2026; see the ad here, or message me for more details: www.gregalbery.me/s/March-2026...

@danahawley.bsky.social @richardlovesbirds.bsky.social Arietta Fleming-Davies

We know that wildlife provisioning can promote or inhibit infectious disease spread, depending on things like food quality.

What about pathogen evolution? Using math with a focus on birdfeeders and house finches, we found that high quality food selects for higher virulence!

doi.org/10.1086/738726

Integrating AI models into ecological research workflows: The case of terrestrial bioacoustics Data collected by autonomous sensors, including camera traps and acoustic recorders, have enormous potential to generate new scientific insights in ecology and related fields. Modern machine learn...

What is the role of AI in ecology? A great piece by a collaborator of mine discusses this thoughtfully, particularly with respect to analyzing sensor data.

doi.org/10.1111/2041...

New article out today. Read it here: open.substack.com/pub/kareemca...

So exciting to see this breakthrough on this fascinating story!

When the same journal immediately loves paper A but rejects paper B without review and you know that paper B fits the journals goals better than A...

A good reminder that so much depends on the editors/associate editors/reviewers that you get and their perception that day! Gotta just try again.

We scientists, like experts in other fields, have to do this all the time. We make arguments and decisions based on data COMBINED WITH our ability to decide which data are most important, how to interpret them, etc..

(4/4)

Experts are crucial: Data never speaks entirely for itself. You commonly hear things like “her offense is so much more impressive when you consider that she guards the other team’s best player every night” where experts have to interpret the data.

(3/4)

Data is crucial: Teams absolutely look at stats like points per game, shooting efficiency, turnovers per game, more advanced analytics, etc. when deciding whom to sign, start, etc.. You can’t make a solid argument without data.

(2/4)

Stressed by a crisis for public perception of science and elated by my Indiana Pacers forcing a game 7, I have been thinking about what sports teach us all about the uses of data and expertise.

(1/4)

I totally agree. When I peer review, I try to chip away at the problem by insisting on authors defining their terms and not using terms in unusual or heedless ways. But we need more and better solutions too! idk what they are yet...

We're all in this together! The midterms can't come soon enough... among other events...

We just got the same email. So destructive.

A grant proposal, which I and others spent dozens of hours on, was returned without review today. This is because NSF will no longer be making awards through the Biological Integrations Institute solicitation.

I am disappointed and furious at this latest ripple of the massive attack on science.

Thank you for these updates! So the hearing is over and Judge Young is deliberating/writing a decision?

Yikes. I haven't run into this issue yet from reviewers. Wow...

I think there are valid criticisms of science but I prefer it to the alternative of "just making stuff up"

(5/5) So we can't always rely on genetic variation in hosts to protect against disease! We often advocate for such variation, e.g., in crop science, but we need to be aware of times when it could backfire by promoting disease. Depends on density-/frequency-dependent transmission, time scale, etc.

(4/5) This is one example of a cool/scary phenomenon where R0<1 but endemic is also stable (this can also be driven by behavioral change, etc.). Scary because we use R0<1 as a measure of safety from disease. But a big enough pulse of infection can permanently shift the pop to epidemic/endemic.

(3/5) But for standing genetic variation in tolerance, the results are very different. With R0<1, we can get failed invasions. But if that failed invasion lasts long enough, host evolution of higher tolerance can raise R0 above 1, permanently shifting the host pop to the endemic state.

(2/5) Standing genetic variation in resistance, implying no resistance cost, protects host populations. R0 >1 for a disease-free host pop allows disease invasion, shifting to endemic. Resistance evolution lowers R0, eventually driving disease extinction, returning the pop to disease-free.

The figure is divided into a left panel titled "Resistance variation" and a right panel titled "Tolerance variation". The left panel shows a frog labeled "Disease-free" with a gold arrow labeled "R0 > 1" and "Invasion" leading to a frog with fungus shown on it labeled "Endemic". There is a purple arrow labeled "Evolution" and "R0<1" leading from the Endemic frog back to the Disease-free frog. The right panel is labeled "Tolerance variation" and has the same Disease-Free and Endemic frogs. There is a purple arrow labeled "R0<1" and "Failed Invasion" leading from the Disease-free frog and curving back to it. However, there is also a gold arrow that splits off from the purple arrow. The gold arrow is labeled "Evolution" and "R0>1" and leads to the endemic frog.

Standing host genetic variation typically protects in case of disease invasion, right? Well... Exploring implications of my new paper with @sabarra.bsky.social , a thread (1/5).

doi.org/10.1007/s002...

New paper: We know the minority of hosts hold the majority of macroparasites (aggregation). What about fungal pathogens? Turns out, they are MORE aggregated than macroparasites, lognormally distributed, and the distribution carries signatures of epidemic stage.
doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

Dreamed I was giving a chalk talk for a faculty job interview and one of the faculty brought their six year old. The kid kept interrupting with impressively relevant science questions but just incessantly and my talk ended up going quite poorly.

My brain upon waking: Ok gotta prepare for that.

Sex‐dependent effects of infection on guppy reproductive fitness and offspring parasite resistance We infected offspring of guppy, Poecilia reticulata, pairs in which either the father or the mother had previously been infected. We found that, in accordance with parental investment theory, fathers...

New paper out in @animalecology.bsky.social led by the awesome Izabelle Weiler and @rayinscience.bsky.social on how parental infection affects offspring quantity and quality. Spoiler: previously infected fathers had more offspring but mothers' had more resistant offspring doi.org/10.1111/1365...

Well at least full words like "resistance" always mean the same thing in a given field, right? Right? ...

I just gave my first chalk talk and it went pretty well thanks to supportive colleagues and mentors doing a LOT of work to advise me and let me practice. So this is one possible solution but does require lots of individualized support, to which some postdocs will lack access.

Postdocs don't usually get to watch faculty candidate chalk talks for confidentiality reasons. But postdocs really need to learn how these work to be competitive in the academic job market. Any ideas?

I would love to be added.