Laura Lagomarsino, PhD

Awesome- enjoy Cape Town! It was a really fun city to vacation in.

I got to see ‘em in Boulders Beach near Cape Town last year, and I love the little weirdos so much. They’re so clumsy on land- like a bullet in water, but slipping on discarded banana peels in all directions on land.

I hope to see Welwitchia one day too!

“These days, if you’re not a mad scientist, you’re not paying attention.”

@standupforscience.bsky.social

Love it! Makes me miss my hometown.

This local Wolfdog joined an Olympic ski event and triggered the finish-line camera. This is Nazgul. He snuck into a cross-country skiing sprint this morning and raced the homestretch with some competitors before being escorted home. 14/10 someone get him a medal

Love this lab, love this PI, love this time of year in Louisiana 💜💚💛.

We should talk more about the graduate admissions crisis that's taking shape in the US.

Talking to colleagues across universities, many graduate programs are slashing admission numbers and reducing class sizes substantially for the upcoming academic year.

This is shortsighted

Replication studies: a win-win for early-career training and behavioral ecology Replicating previous research builds confidence that results are real and meaningful. But close replications are rare due to limitations in resources and d

How do we know our research results are REAL? We replicate them! Most folks agree but lament on how hard it is to publish these replications.

My dearest gentle reader, lament no more! Delighted to unveil: Replication Studies, a new section of Behavioral Ecology 1/

academic.oup.com/beheco/artic...

Can't excuse the "tator" spelling unless they were invoking gators, though. That has always bothered me as well!

Though no longer made here, Zapp's is very ~Louisiana~, and those chips are found everywhere here! I bet torula yeast makes 'em a hint meaty, and the spices are typical crawfish boil spices. Also, no flashing needed to get beads at Mardi Gras, despite popular imagery!

Yum! BioGrads does an international lunch potluck event each year that looks similar. So many new foods to try!

Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Biology (PRFB)

Holy shit: it's an RFP for the NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology (PRFB). Hello old friend www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

I love what a supportive and fun friendship you guys have developed! It’ll be fun to watch you both blossom in your postdocs.

Laymon and I stand in front of a cake.

Six people raise their glasses at a restaurant.

Welcome Dr. Laymon Ball into the world! @laymonstera.bsky.social rocked her PhD defense today.

Laymon holds a bouquet and smiles in front of Tiger Stadium with a large LSU sign in the background.

My student @laymonstera.bsky.social is defending her @lsubiosci.bsky.social @lsuscience.bsky.social PhD thesis today! If you're at LSU, join us in LSA A101 at 1pm for Laymon's talk: "Disentangling Mechanisms of Speciation in a Florally Diverse Neotropical Plant Clade, Hillieae (Rubiaceae)".

Laymon holds a bouquet and smiles in front of Tiger Stadium with a large LSU sign in the background.

My student @laymonstera.bsky.social is defending her @lsubiosci.bsky.social @lsuscience.bsky.social PhD thesis today! If you're at LSU, join us in LSA A101 at 1pm for Laymon's talk: "Disentangling Mechanisms of Speciation in a Florally Diverse Neotropical Plant Clade, Hillieae (Rubiaceae)".

Yay! Love to see it (even when I’d also rather not have an AI summary at the top of my searches).

Honored that this famous botanist is on the road to Baton Rouge now, to be at my student’s defense tomorrow! Here I am with Charlotte in front of a buttonbush at the cafe your friend started in STL 😃!

This is Callie. She is trained to accurately detect bowel cancer in order to provide rapid diagnoses through non-invasive testing. Some might call it lab work, but Callie is actually a sprocker spaniel. 14/10 incredible job, Callie (IG: medicaldetectiondogs)

Glad to see their maintaining a strong botany catalogue early in the go of it! Yes, it’ll be interesting to see how the merger changes the department.

Is this not from an institution that just got rid of their Botany department?

There's a lot going on right now. But I just want to take a moment to celebrate the recent accomplishments of the truly incredible young scientists I get to work with on a daily basis in my lab. #proudPI

Here are some of their recent accomplishments (a thread):

Woooo!!! You got this. Glad I got to celebrate with you!

A new extreme of meiotic evolution:

✔️ 𝗻𝗼 crossovers
✔️ 𝗻𝗼 gene conversion
✔️ 𝗻𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗹 meiosis & fertility

Sex mimics clonality without becoming asexual, in the holocentric multicellular eukaryote 𝘙𝘩𝘺𝘯𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘢 𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘶𝘪𝘴.

more about it:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Home - Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota

One little thing you can do if you’re feeling helpless tonight: throw a few bucks to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. They’re reportedly stretched thin for obvious reasons and could use some help if you can offer it.

www.ilcm.org?ref=badfaith...

Congrats!!!

And it's out indeed! Huge congrats to @josanesousa.bsky.social, @gabrielalima19.bsky.social, @perezlouise.bsky.social & Hannah Schof! A true tour-de-force that highlights how emerging model systems can shed new light on long-standing macro-evolutionary questions. Go #axolotl, #polypterus #zebrafish!

*whispers* All Zoom meetings should have a 40-minute limit 🤫.

A four-panel comic titled "how to get into nature". In panel 1, a person kneels in the woods, looking down at a red-backed salamander, and the text says "notice a living thing." In panel 2, the text says "notice some other things that live near it," and there's a starflower, springtail, ant, little wood satyr butterfly, and salamander on the leaf litter. In panel 3, covered in creatures, plants, and a colorful starburst, the text says "Notice the connections between them, discover the wider ecosystem, learn about its histories, and find yourself following links from bedrock to stratosphere, between biotic and abiotic, at scales both microbial and massive, until you’re hopelessly overwhelmed by the wonder of it all." In panel 4, the text says "Fall into a daze and let moss engulf you." The person from the first panel is still kneeling in the woods, looking happy as moss slowly engulfs them, and they're saying "This is for the best."

How to get into nature.

A letterpress card in cream with all caps writing: R.E.M. GAVE ME UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS FOR HOW I'D FEEL AT THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT.

A greeting card for my Bluesky friends

NSF building on Eisenhower Av. HUD now owns.

Destroying the NSF mural in the foyer. Of the Eisenhower building.

The National Science Foundation sign on our Eisenhower Av building is now gone.

The NSF mural in the foyer is removed and torn off in sheets.

We were supposed to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the agency in May 2025. That never happened.