Pietro Pollo

New paper out! Why do ecologists study some taxa way more than others? 🐛🐠🐦

Surveying 868 researchers, we show that organism choice isn’t just about logistics, it’s also about emotions and context!

Simulated trait distributions for two groups with different shapes. Top left: distinct skewness. Top right: distinct kurtosis. Bottom: different correlations between two traits for two groups.

Differences between M & F are pervasive, but we often focus on #SexDifferences in the mean. @pietropollo.bsky.social @danielwanoble.bsky.social @itchyshin.bsky.social &co present #stats tools that allow comparison of #skewness, #kurtosis & correlations b'n groups @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4093nJs

Please contact me if you want to be nominated for a postdoc via this scheme - you need to live outside of Canada and I need to do so by 9 Feb (and need to start by March 2027) - www.ualberta.ca/en/graduate-... (I think you do need to have a competitive CV etc)

Please email me if you are interested

We've got ISSUES. Literally.

We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do?

arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563

A 🧵 1/n

Point of no returns: researchers are crossing a threshold in the fight for funding With so little money to go round, the costs of competing for grants can exceed what the grants are worth. When that happens, nobody wins.

Scientific funding is a net negative: "European taxpayers will have spent more on the funding process than on the funding itself, and the scientific ecosystem has been drained"

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Synthesis of Nature's Extravaganza: An Augmented Meta‐Meta‐Analysis on (Putative) Sexual Signals Conspicuous traits like bright colours and elaborate displays are widely thought to evolve through sexual selection, but evidence has been scattered. This meta-meta-analysis of 41 studies across 375 ...

I forgot to share that our paper came out a few months ago! We synthesise decades of research showing that conspicuous traits consistently predict attractiveness, condition, and fitness across animals. Check it out if you’re into sexual selection and signalling! doi.org/10.1111/ele....

Screenshot of article: Animal Behaviour Volume 229, November 2025, 123352 Effects of natural temperature variation on male perception of female scents in Drosophila melanogaster Roberto García-Roa, Almudena Castro, Enrique Font, Pau Carazo

🪰 Fruit flies! 🌡️ Temperature changes! 💋Mate attraction! 👃Pheromones!

Our November #ASABEditorsChoice for the #AnimalBehaviourJournal:

"Effects of natural temperature variation on male perception of female scents in Drosophila melanogaster"

Read here:
doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2025.123352

Our new preprint! The Acknowledgments problem, and what to do about it.
With @martonkovacs.bsky.social, @pietropollo.bsky.social, @philobolobstime.bsky.social, Losia Lagisz, & Mohammad Hosseini.

🌙🔊 How do we perceive light and noise pollution?
Your experience matters! ✨

Take part in this survey 👉 app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/salford/pl...

Your input will help better understand these growing problems. The survey is part of the European project PLAN-B.

#lightpollution #noisepollution

Statistical performance of animal cognition meta-analyses at the primary-study and meta-analysis levels. (a) Statistical power: Median power to detect the (true or bias-corrected) meta-analytic effect size; darker red bars indicate lower power. (b) Type M error: Median exaggeration ratio between estimated and true effect sizes; darker blue indicates stronger overestimation (values > 20 shown as “20+”). (c) Type S error: Median probability of obtaining a significant effect in the wrong direction; darker yellow-green indicates higher Type S error. Violin plots above each panel summarise distributions across meta-analyses. Each point represents one meta-analysis (matching a row in the bar plots), and the horizontal line denotes the overall mean.

"The statistical fragility of animal cognition findings: a meta-meta-analytic reappraisal"
doi.org/10.32942/X2Z...

Do you get confused when reading meta-analyses? Our new paper offers a practical guide to help researchers understand, interpret, and use them properly. We also show that the insights meta-analyses provide are often overlooked by those who cite them.

UPDATE: I saw it happen! At the Birds Canada research station at the tip of Long Point I watched an expert ever-so-gently and carefully put one of these tiny tags on a monarch. Let me walk you through the steps (1/4)

Sexual selection in wild populations of seed bugs: the role of size in pre-copulatory mate choice by females and males Abstract. Although sexual selection is a well-established part of evolutionary biology, controversies remain about the roles of males and females. For inst

Size does matter for mating success in two species of seed bugs in the wild. #sexualselection #lygaeidae #mating #naturalselection #malematechoice #sicily

doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...

@opheliasfritsch.bsky.social and Shuker

Absolutely nobody asked for this but I reformatted my animal yeetability thread into printable poster & zine files.

Introducing, the "Pocket Guide to Responsible & Sustainable Animal YEETING" featuring a revamped rating system. Download links below.

I wish there were more posts like this

Insect populations are rapidly declining even in relatively undisturbed landscapes, raising concerns about the health of ecosystems that depend on them.

esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Following funnel-web spiders — amazing work by Caitlin Creak:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Study initially by @braxtonjones.bsky.social, Danilo Harms and I (funded by NatGeo and AusGeo), taken up by Caitlin with Russell Bonduriansky and Mike Kasumovic. Congrats all, especially Caitlin! :)

Congrats, Fabian!

Spider Biology This attractive book covers all aspects of spider biology and will appeal to general readers interested in spiders as well as specialists (arachnologists).

🕷️#Arachnews alert! 🦂
New Foelix (the definitive reference for general spider biology, a must-have for every arachnologist & arachnophile) just dropped.

Now called Spider Biology, this is an completely rewritten & updated version of the Biology of Spiders (2011).
link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

YouTube video by Sabine Hossenfelder Scientific research has big problems, and it's getting worse

Sabine Hossenfelder: "Scientific research is broken. This has been going on for decades, and the situation is not improving. It's getting worse."
youtu.be/9yPy3DeMUyI?...

The cover of Bayesian Data Analysis book

The cover of Regression and Other Stories book

The cover of Active Statistics book

All three books I've co-authored are freely available online for non-commercial use:

- #Bayesian Data Analysis, 3rd ed (aka BDA3) at stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/book/

- #Regression and Other Stories at avehtari.github.io/ROS-Examples/

- Active Statistics at avehtari.github.io/ActiveStatis...

Our study, conducted with great care and attention, is out! It went through a meticulous community peer-review process under open science practices, and I’m proud to be part of it. The results may not be what we hoped for, but they are what we need to move toward real inclusivity in science. 💜

A black insect with a long curved appendage coming out of it at the top rests on a leaf.

No one does fancy appendages quite like treehoppers. Here's a particularly spectacular one, likely in the Genus Hypsauchenia.

📷 sukal on iNaturalist
📍 Thailand
🔗: www.inaturalist.org/observations...
#ObservationOfTheDay

The behavioural research literature is concentrated on certain taxa. Last chance to help us find out why by participating in a survey that takes only 5-10 min: unsw.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_.... Participation is voluntary and there are no negative consequences for choosing not to participate!

Photograph of a metallic blue/green beetle with a very spider-like body, a huge fake "abdomen" that is swollen and dented with even pits over its bulbous surface. It is otherwise ant-like, standing on a pure white stylized background.

The thing about entomology is, there are always weirder bugs than anything you could imagine on your own.

Here's Cysteodemus wislizeni, a blister beetle from west Texas.

"Ungeneralizable generalizations? A meta-meta-analysis of the influence of taxonomic bias on the study of behavior." - doi.org/10.32942/X2X...

Graph of R&D spending (% of GDP) versus Year, with coloured dots joined by lines showing different countries (shown in the key at the bottom of the graph) taken from Nathan Garland's article here: https://nathangarland.substack.com/p/productivity-reform-starts-with-public

Black text on white background. List of "concrete and tangible actions" for increasing productivity. Screenshot from Nathan Garland's article: https://nathangarland.substack.com/p/productivity-reform-starts-with-public

"Productivity reform starts with public science" by Nathan Garland @n8sci.bsky.social has some worthy suggestions for improving productivity.

In news we all know – but the Government seems to like ignoring – it'll help to fund more basic science research!

nathangarland.substack.com/p/productivi...

Are you a behavioural researcher?

Participate this survey from the University of New South Wales.
The research aims to learn more about why researchers choose organisms for research.

For more information, please contact p.pollo@unsw.edu.au
#science #ecology
unsw.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Brazil and Portugal should be green too

How a discovery in Yellowstone National Park led to the development of PCR - Richmond Scientific A discovery in Yellowstone National Park led to the development of PCR, the gold-standard COVID-19 tests used to fight the global pandemic.

Reminder: Nobel-prize winning PCR (1983), used in basically all genetic tech today, was only possible because of extremophile bacterium discovered in 1964 in Yellowstone funded by a small ~$80k NSF grant with no obvious application at the time. #science 🧪
www.richmondscientific.com/how-a-discov...