Catherine Sheard

NEW JOB in #ornithology chasing #nutcrackers in Switzerland to understand seed dispersal patterns: buff.ly/Cx0OOQy

Acceleration hotspots of North American birds’ decline are associated with agriculture Human activities might have accelerated declines of population abundance, but this acceleration remains underexplored. Using 1033 North American Breeding Bird Survey routes, we analyze abundance chang...

Thrilled to share our new paper out in @science.org, led by François Leroy and Petr Keil! Using the Breeding Bird Survey, we document not only a continent-wide decline in bird abundance since the 1980s — but, crucially, the acceleration of these declines over time. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Estimating global bee species richness and taxonomic gaps - Nature Communications Bees are crucial for the maintenance of healthy ecosystems, yet rigorous estimates of their species’ richness are lacking. This study estimates taxonomic gaps for bees around the world and provides a ...

New paper alert! "Estimating global bee species richness and taxonomic gaps" suggests that we have thousands of bee species left to describe and decades of taxonomic work ahead of us. We also provide the methods needed to apply more broadly :)
doi.org/10.1038/s414...

probably my weirdest comparison with American friends is explaining that over here, if you don't have any higher risk factors, you can in fact go an entire pregnancy and birth and postpartum without ever seeing an obstetrician

BirdLife Emerging Scientist Scholarship - BirdLife International Are you seeking a career in conservation science and have a particular interest in seabirds or understanding species extinction risk? The BirdLife Emerging Scientist Scholarship could be for you.

🚨JOB ALERT🚨

We are looking for an emerging scientist with an interest in #seabirds and #conservation for a 🌟new scholarship position🌟

⏱️Deadline: 13/03/2026
🐧Fixed term 12 months, 35 hrs/pw
📌Cambridge/ Hybird

Come join our fantastic team!

Full #job details ➡️ tinyurl.com/BLIemergings...

Well that's cool

Pace of ecology drives the tempo of visual perception across the animal kingdom Nature Ecology & Evolution - Using phylogenetic comparative methods across 237 species from disparate phyla, the authors show that species with fast-paced ecologies have higher temporal...

Our new paper is now out showing how time perception in animals is linked to their ecology. Using data from 237 species we show temporal perception is faster in species that fly and pursuit predators www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🌐

A covarion model for phylogenetic estimation using discrete morphological datasets Abstract. The rate of evolution of a single morphological character is not homogeneous across the phylogeny and this rate heterogeneity varies between morp

Khakurel & Höhna (2026-02, Systematic Biology)
A covarion model for phylogenetic estimation using discrete morphological datasets
doi.org/10.1093/sysb...

🔊
Registration for BES Macro 2026 is open! Join us in a friendly conference, filled with macroecology, macroevolution and more!

Kava consumption and the rise of sociopolitical complexity in Oceania | PNAS Humans have been using psychoactive substances for millennia, despite their potential negative health and social consequences. According to some sc...

Kava consumption and the rise of sociopolitical complexity in Oceania www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

So why are parents who want their kids to be vaccinated, not actually doing it? the number one reason is because they can't get an appointment that they can make.

Rates are lowest, by a huge amount, in Westminster, Enfield, and a number of north London boroughs where median income is lowest.

Rapid and repeated evolution of pigmentation patterns in reef fishes - BMC Biology Background Pigmentation patterns are central to animal biology—shaping camouflage, signaling, and mate selection—and uncovering the mechanisms driving their diversification is key to understanding the...

Rapid and repeated evolution of pigmentation patterns in reef fishes

#ichthyology

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

1) I just learned the word lagniappe (lan-yap), which is a great word, but also

2) It's etymology is Quechua -> Spanish -> Lousiana French -> North American English!

Oh this is a very fun thread!

‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks Karen Newton was in America on the trip of a lifetime when she was shackled, transported and held for weeks on end. With tourism to the US under increasing strain, she says, ‘If it can happen to me, i...

A retired British primary school administrator with a British passport and a valid visa was shackled, chained and detained for six weeks by ICE

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Do you do macroecology and/or macroevolution? Want to hang out at the FRIENDLIEST CONFERENCE EVER? Come join us at Reading (or online! we're hybrid!) in July!

What an Olympics

Alyssa Liu wins gold with the superpower of not caring what other people think

Lots of out queer American athletes winning medals and deciding to marry each other

A dog joins a cross country skiing race

I sort of learn how curling works

Just A+++ all around

a screenshot of an email from Wiley to Catherine Sheard that says "Dr. Editorial Office has not provided a peer review report report"

Wiley, respectfully....what?

Me: passerines
Panopto: Pathfinder!
Me: passerines
Panopto: pasteurise
Me: Trivers-Willard hypothesis
Panopto: smell out-of-office?

Me: ...I give up 😂

Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords “kiki” and “bouba” with spiky and round shapes, respectively, a phenomenon named the bouba-kiki effect. To explore the origin of t...

Hey linguists -- chickens can distinguish bouba and kiki:

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Time-calibrated phylogeny of the family Drosophilidae showing major species groups, surrounded by representative adult flies that highlight the remarkable morphological diversity of this model insect group. The composite image was created using Microsoft PowerPoint. Fly photographs were taken by Darren J. Obbard and are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License with permission.

The #fly community aims to achieve a comprehensive genomic study of the Drosophilidae family. @pankajd.bsky.social @bernardkim.bsky.social @petrovadmitri.bsky.social @darrenobbard.bsky.social present a comparative gene annotation for 301 #Drosophilidae species @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4c3pyrI

Unrelatedly, I got called "chaotically brilliant" today, which I take a deep compliment, but I also had to apologise profusely to a colleague for dropping an organisational ball, so.

I think my professional persona could use a little less whimsy and a little more attention to detail 😂

Also, if you're a British citizen, you can, fun fact, get a British passport. Even if you're currently in another country*. Mine took 8 days all told, and that was the standard route (you can pay for it to be faster).

*Assuming the UK has an embassy there, probably.

Not to subtweet the Guardian, but, the fact that UK citizens need to enter the UK on their UK passport or CoE? 1) has been true for a very long time, they're just actually enforcing it now, 2) was made ABUNDANTLY clear when the ETA system went in, and 3) is standard for many other countries as well.

here you go

Postdoctoral Research Fellow within Climate Change Ecology  (295093) | University of Bergen Job title: Postdoctoral Research Fellow within Climate Change Ecology  (295093), Employer: University of Bergen, Deadline: Sunday, March 8, 2026

🌍Come work with us!
We are hiring a postdoc in Climate Change Ecology. In this position, you will work on Climate Change synthesis research, and assist the upcoming IPCC report (CH14: impacts on terrestrial, freshwater and cryosphere) 🌿🐸❄️ Deadline: 8 March

More information: tinyurl.com/2c83uakz

Color Survey Results Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter int…

I go back to this regularly, and it's always a fun and entertaining read: XKCD's color survey where he prompted ~230k users to write down color names for randomly shown colors. Data available online.

blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/c...

"Belugas travel to warm, shallow estuaries to give birth and care for their young. Knowledge holders inform us that some of these estuaries have been visited by belugas for several hundred years. But not just any estuary will do!"
A summary of our new BES paper by @jaclynaubin.bsky.social 👇

You: Catherine, of all the things you're annoyed about this morning, and/or of all the things that AI gets wrong, *this* is what makes it to bsky?

Me: I am a creature of chaos.

AI: today, Tuesday February 17, is Presidents' Day and Ash Wednesday

Me: ???

(Today is Mardi Gras, Lunar New Year, and the start of Ramadan. YESTERDAY was Presidents' Day and TOMORROW is Ash Wednesday.)