Marta Shocket

Considering the challenge in suggesting we eat more plants, proposing insect products seems ridiculous.

But it's received $1B to try to scale & now ~80B insects are farmed.

It can actually emit as much as some beef & has major risks.

My first in the Drawdown Explorer:
drawdown.org/explorer/dep...

With WaPo locked into a death spiral, CBS effectively an arm of state news, and public media facing massive budget cuts, it's more important than ever to follow and support independent media.

Meme of two identical pie charts stacked. The pie chart are divided into equal quarters with a legend on the right. The top pie chart says: Nobody Will Remember: Your salary How "busy" you were How many hours you worked How many Gucci bags you owned The bottom pie chart says: People Will Remember: How much you knew about bugs The time you spent learning about bugs If you knew facts about bugs that made them smile If they learned to love bugs because of you

Hello Insectphile Friends!

I’m giving a casual presentation to a “ladies lunch” group next week about insects. I can talk for days about insects, both scientifically & emotionally, but that’s just me.

Tell me & help me, what should I include about why YOU love insects?

Hugs & Bugs!
💚🪲

🌿

dplyr 1.2.0 dplyr 1.2.0 fills in some important gaps in dplyr's API: we've added a new complement to `filter()` focused on dropping rows, and we've expanded the `case_when()` family with three new recoding and re...

dplyr 1.2.0 is out now and we are SO excited!

- `filter_out()` for dropping rows

- `recode_values()`, `replace_values()`, and `replace_when()` that join `case_when()` as a complete family of recoding/replacing tools

These are huge quality of life wins for #rstats!

tidyverse.org/blog/2026/02...

A global map showing that most people don't talk about or hear about climate change regularly (except in Scandinavia - I believe this is the Greta Effect!). Source: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

A global map showing that most people are worried about climate change. Source: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

Most people are worried about climate change - but most don't hear or talk about regularly.

That's why I started my free newsletter Talking Climate. Every week I share good news, not so good news, and what people can do.

If you aren't a reader yet, see below. I have 6 different ways to subscribe!

Texas A&M Bans Plato - Daily Nous Drop the race and gender material from your course and the Plato readings, or teach a different course. You have a day to decide. That's a paraphrase of what Martin Peterson, professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University, was told by university officials today about his upcoming "Contemporary Moral Problems" course, due to start next

Texas A&M says PLATO may be gender or race ideology

I mean, they are so close to getting the criticisms of the western canon 😹

dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...

Stoked to be part of this awesome group and study "Priority climate and health modelling needs" just out in @thelancetplanet.bsky.social.
Thanks to @wellcometrust.bsky.social for hosting the meeting where these ideas were spawned.

An #rstats question for package developers: If my package maintains a cache to minimise data downloads, is it sensible/preferred to put an automatic cache cleaner (delete anything older than x days) in .onLoad, or to just mostly leave cache maintenance to the user (with appropriate helpers)?

Two years ago we got together in a beautiful mountain to learn and develop #rstats packages for ecology

After {labeleR} (ecologyr.github.io/labeleR/) and {BlueCarbon} (ecologyr.github.io/BlueCarbon/), {mappestRisk} is now officially out! See thread by lead author @dario-ssm.bsky.social 👇

A top-down image of 12 various moths on a green egg carton.

Do you do moth trapping in the UK? We'd love your help! 💡

At @ukceh.bsky.social we're training & testing AI to detect multiple moths in a single image.

Send us top-down photos of multiple moths on egg trays to support this work.

More info & form: forms.gle/e3HzBPEd7RVV...

#mothsmatter #TeamMoth

@franwin.co.uk drove a massive rework of rTPC this year, making package maintenance much easier. rTPC now supports 49 different model formulations, vignettes are updated, & you can parallelise model fitting using new purrr & mirai, which is DOPE. #rstats 🧪

padpadpadpad.github.io/rTPC/article...

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA

10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

Sometimes you get a nice shot in dreadful light. Unfortunately the water was reflecting the sun right back at me as this great blue heron picked up a baby American alligator. #birds

You still have 5 days to apply for this awesome postdoc opportunity in the Environmental Data Science Innovation & Impact Lab at the University of Colorado-Boulder! This could be your backyard!

Two years post-doc position on viral phylodynamics available at CERP.
cerp-epi.com/fr/careers/

Introducing my new #rstats package {kitchensink}

Not sure what the right model to fit is? Should you allow random intercepts, slopes, both? What do Bayesian methods say?

Just call {kitchensink::throw} to fit every possible model and see how your results differ!

Thanks to everybody who chimed in!

I arrived at the conclusion that (1) there's a lot of interesting stuff about interactions and (2) the figure I was looking for does not exist.

So, I made it myself! Here's a simple illustration of how to control for confounding in interactions:>

Mean daily temperatures predict the thermal limits of malaria transmission better than hourly rate summation - Nature Communications Malaria transmission is sensitive to temperature and models of malaria typically account for daily fluctuations in temperature through a ‘rate summation’ approach. Here, the authors conduct experiment...

New paper out! A common computational approach to predict organismal fitness and distributions in the field could vastly overpredict the potential range of thermal suitability for malaria transmission relative to performance characterized at constant temperatures: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"Mean daily temperatures predict the thermal limits of malaria transmission better than hourly rate summation" new paper now out in NatComm, led by @martashocket.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1038/s414...

I received a heartbreaking email today: A paper in a special issue I’m editing is being retracted because one of its authors is afraid of losing their job and their legal status in the U.S. if they publish a scientific study on evolution. Yes, on evolution, nature's engine of diversity.

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: MIDAS Webinar Series - March 2025. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar. Title: Lessons Learned from Modeling COVID-19: Steps to Take at the Start of the Next Pandemic. Speaker: Jacob Barhak Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic spurred many computational modeling efforts. Man...

Don't miss this week's MIDAS Webinar Series featuring Dr. Jacob Barhak.

Date: Friday, March 28 - 1:00 - 2:00p EDT.

Topic: Lessons Learned from Modeling COVID-19: Steps to Take at the Start of the Next Pandemic

Register in Advance: pitt.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

If you hate statistics like I do, then you'll love my free lectures. Putting science before statistics, 20 lectures from basics of inference & causal modeling to multilevel models & dynamic state space models. It's all free, made with love and sympathy. 🧪 #stats www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

This is a great resource! I just watched the first video and it inspired so many ideas for the quantitative ecology course I’m designing for the fall semester.

At this point, it is obvious that it is not safe for scholars to travel the US. There are no easy solutions for conferences scheduled in the US this year but it should be cleary to everyone involved that they cannot just go ahead as planned.

1/35 New paper out! @jamesTstroud and I dive into why long-term studies are crucial for understanding evolution. They reveal processes impossible to detect in short timescales and capture rare events that transform our understanding of evolutionary dynamics.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

NIH cancels funding for landmark diabetes study at a time of focus on chronic disease The Trump administration has canceled funding for an ongoing 30-year, nationwide study tracking patients with prediabetes and diabetes, researchers said.

“The Trump administration has canceled funding for an ongoing 30-year, nationwide study tracking patients with prediabetes and diabetes, researchers said, at a time when top officials have emphasized their determination to curb the incidence of such chronic conditions.”

This was a fun review to work on with James deMayo. We highlight genome-enabled studies from the last ~20 years that provide lab and field perspectives on (often rapid) thermal adaptation. Thanks to JEB for fantastic editorial support!

Exploring R Package Usage in Academia I am running a quick survey to find out which R packages academics use the most in their research and teaching. The goal is to see which tools are essential, spot any gaps, and maybe even discover som...

Hi there, my student is making a survey about the use of R packages in Ecology, could you please spend two mins on filling it 🥹 Very appreciated! And if you could spread it further (RT), that would be just awesome. ❤️

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

An album of over 200 pressed seaweeds collected by an anonymous Victorian collector. A transcribed poem is pasted as title page, it begins: "Oh call us not weeds, we are flowers of the sea."

I saw this at UW-Madison Special Collections 🌊📚
CA 19285

#seaweed #herbarium #naturalhistory

** Upcoming quantitative conference: **

📈 Environmental and Ecological Statistics Conference 📈

1-3 July, Lancaster, UK. Contributed abstract submission closes 1st April.