Catherine Sheard

Flu cases at record levels as ‘tidal wave’ of illness hits the NHS Flu cases are 56 per cent higher than this time last year and 10 times higher than in 2023

This year's flu season is not looking good 😬😷

www.independent.co.uk/news/health/...

JOB ALERT! 🦜🔭🌿
Are you passionate about #Birds, #Ecology, #Fieldwork, #Research?
The University of Salford is looking for a #ResearchTechnician to assist with ecological monitoring of #Ringneckedparakeets in Manchester, UK.
More info & how to apply 👇
Hurry! Closes 15 Dec
@salforduni.bsky.social

Trump’s attacks on DEI may hurt men in college admission A government order that colleges disclose details about their applicants suggests that advantages by gender may face the same heightened scrutiny as purported racial preferences. That threatens to acc...

When I worked at Brown, it was an open secret: many more women applied than men, so to keep a rough gender parity in the student body, men got a big boost in admissions.

Trump's attacks on DEI may hurt men in college admissions.
hechingerreport.org/an-unexpecte...

A screenshot of instructions that say: 9. The data from the TAS exercise will not be 100% accurate. Does this matter? 9.1. The data is collected in order to obtain an indication of how time is spent over a range of activities and seeks to capture an accurate picture to inform our research and teaching costs. 9.2. Submissions should be as accurate as possible. If staff time allocations are materially inaccurate the TRAC return and resultant research recovery rates will be compromised. 9.3. Materiality should be considered when completing the schedules, since small percentage variations at an individual level will have limited impact at an aggregate level.

...what.

Finance seems frustrated that I'm confused by this, but it turns out the answer is August - November. Because I love retroactively accounting for every hour of every workday for the past four months, with no heads-up that this would be happening.

Email: The Time Allocation Collection Period is 1 August - 30 November. Please fill in this form for these dates.

Form: The Time Allocation Collection Period is 2 December - 27 January. Please fill in this form for these dates.

Me: Hello mysterious time lords (aka Finance). Which of these is true?

Seedling growing in the forest

University of Birmingham, UK, are advertising a permanant position (Assistant or Associate Professor) in *Forests under Global Change*. A wide net has been cast - ecology, physiology, modelling, remote sensing, functioning, biodiversity, management... 🌲🌱🌳🌳🦌🌳🛰️🐿️🌲🔬🌳
www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPS459/a...

Check out our cover article by @timjanicke.bsky.social and colleagues about the role of sexual selection in animal speciation. academic.oup.com/evlett/artic.... The beautiful illustration is by Katharina Bóth.

Oh god, the typos in this thread. As I said, frazzled.

Anyway I now need to prep for my next meeting, but tl;dr, I think I'm worried that research culture folks (again, not UoA, just generally) are focused on the wrong things.

Some things may not be alterable. For example, Aberdeen is harder to get to than, say, Edinburgh, and a lot of people commute in. This brings challenges, but also opportunities, and the trick is to harness those strengths and creatively circumvent barriers.

The popcorn, by the way, was horrifically terrible, 0/10 do not recommend the "fizzafying lemonade" Butterkist flavour. (But 9/10 for novelty, which I value possibly moreso than taste.)

Are the goals of the university aligned with those of the sector? Or at least internally consistent? A university telling people not to publish in Nature is meaningless if the sector (e.g., future job prospectives, grant panels, etc.) value Nature papers.

How are resources being allocated? (salary, research funds, perks, etc.) Is it a transparent process? Is it a fair process?

What sort of behaviours are being rewarded, through resources and/or status? How are these being measured? Are these criteria transparent and constructive?

What sort of tone are the senior people setting? (At all levels -- more senior PhD students to more junior PhD students all the way up to HoS to other profs.) What bad actions are being tolerated?

Another aspect is logistical. Are there clear and easy-to-locate trainings for the various systems? Are the various administrative policies good uses of people's time? Are internal deadlines reasonable? How arduous are the gatekeeping processes (for both applicants and gatekeepers)?

Part of research culture is going to be the very basic social and physical environment. How are offices allocated? Are there enough meeting/socialising spaces? Is there heating? Are there enough toilets? Is everyone allowed to use said toilets? Are people being harassed by others on campus?

I've been running around like a headless chicken all day and am very frazzled, so I am going to eat some popcorn and see if I can muster some thoughts about research culture.

(These are not necessarily subtweets of anyone at my institution, I'm just thinking out loud.)

Yup, can confirm, is accurate 😂. (And who knew there was a connection between transphobia and unsafe food storage?!)

Cutting lines or even whole departments is the frontal assault on higher ed, but another low key war of attrition is the slow accumulation of grinding, meaningless additional tasks concerning syllabus templates, learning outcomes, institutional pablum, and ever more intricate evaluation hoops.

I'm recruiting a Ph.D. student for Fall 2026.

Interested in comparative studies and trait evolution in fishes?

Send me an email with a CV and research interests. Please take a look at my website (jcorush.github.io ) for more information about my research.

#hybridization #minnows #mudskippers

Also, while real Brits parallel park like normal people, the type of parallel parking you have to learn for the test is freakin' weird.

(I really, really, REALLY struggle to reverse left and right, which among other things means that when driving on the left, I completely fail at forward bay parking to the left.)

Quote from my driving instructor about my terrible parking: "Well, you're basically equally split between the two spaces. So, uh, whatever you just did, do the exact opposite of that?"

Speciation by sexual selection: 20 years of progress. Twenty years ago, a seminal paper summarized the role of sexual selection in speciation as the coordinated evolution of (male) courtship signals and (female) preferences leading to prezygotic (behavioral) isolation between divergent lineages. Here, we discuss areas of progress that inspire an updated perspective. First, research has identified multiple mechanisms of sexual selection, in addition to female mate choice, that drive the origin and maintenance of species. Second, reviews and empirical data now conclude that sexual selection alone will rarely lead to reproductive isolation without ecological divergence, and we discuss the assumptions and possible exceptions underlying that conclusion. Finally, we consider the variable ways in which sexual selection contributes to divergence according to the spatial, temporal, social, ecological, and genomic context of speciation.

Anisogamy (the binary sex concept) helps explain variation within-species, but, interacting with ecology, it also helps explain speciation itself: 🧪 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Even so, that's gorgeous!!!

Understanding partial migration: linking genetic, developmental, and environmental drivers Partial migration, where some individuals in a population migrate while others remain resident, arises from the dynamic interplay of multiple non-exclusive eco-evolutionary mechanisms. These mechanism...

Preprint!
Ever wondered why individuals within the same species migrate differently? Or what drives some animals to become partial migrants? Then, this paper is for you!

Our new paper synthesizes the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that shape partial migration.
Link: doi.org/10.22541/au....

🚨Two funded PhDs on the evolutionary ecology of antipredator colouration 🦋 with myself and Iliana Medina.

One in Swansea tinyurl.com/4thtbph6 deadline Jan 12th @crocus-dla.bsky.social

The other in Melbourne - deadline Jan 1st

Please share among potential students!

Tetrapod vocal evolution reveals faster rates and higher-pitched sounds for mammals Abstract. Using the voice to produce sound is a widespread form of communication and plays an important role across diverse species and contexts. Variation

Now out in Evolution @journal-evo.bsky.social

Tetrapod vocal evolution reveals faster rates and higher-pitched sounds for mammals 🐘🦉🐸.

Mammalian hearing likely allowed the rapid diversification of their vocalizations.

Open access here:
doi.org/10.1093/evol...

#bioacoustics #animalcommunication

a map of the global diversity of medicinal plants, at a very mysterious spatial scale that I don't understand (it's country / state, except when it's not). There is high diversity in the tropics, with particularly high diversity in East Africa and East Asia.

Where are the medicinal plants? Where humans have had a while to look for them.

Paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
CB summary: www.cell.com/current-biol...

100%!