Liam Dougherty

The consequences of rising temperatures for animal fertility Nature Reviews Biodiversity - Thermal stress reduces fertility in animals at temperatures below lethal, yet these sublethal effects remain underrepresented in biodiversity forecasts. This Review...

Happy to be able to share our review of the consequences of rising temperatures on animal fertility, led by @rhondasnook.bsky.social with @liamdougherty.bsky.social and Claudia Fricke. Research is getting active in this area but there's still a lot of unknowns...
rdcu.be/e7uGm

Amazing! Replication studies will now be accepted by Behavioral Ecology.

Overwintering drives rapid adaptation in Drosophila with potential costs to insecticide resistance Abstract. Winter is a formidable challenge for ectotherms that inhabit temperate climates. The extent to which winter conditions drive rapid adaptation, an

Happy to see our paper out now in the January edition of #Evolution 🧪 !
Using #drosophila in outdoor mesocosms, we found evidence for adaptation over a winter period and for putative trade-offs between resistance evolution and overwintering performance
doi.org/10.1093/evol...

Warm waters undermine cryptic female choice Matthew C. Kustra, Louise M. Alissa, Michaela M. Rogers, Megan M. Molinari, Kelly A. Stiver, Susan Marsh-Rollo, Jennifer K. Hellmann, Suzanne H. Alonzo This is a plain language summary of a Functio…

📰Published📰Warm waters undermine cryptic female choice🐟️

buff.ly/U6zrsZ4

🧪🌍

Angry and Alone: How Social Experience Shapes Female Aggression in Flies at Newcastle University on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - Angry and Alone: How Social Experience Shapes Female Aggression in Flies at Newcastle University, listed on FindAPhD.com

We're advertising a PhD project on how social isolation influences aggression in flies. Based at Durham, co-supervised by @clarahowcroft.bsky.social . Despite what the ad says, this is also open to international applicants! Any questions, shoot me a msg! www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Expression of heat shock proteins and thermal sensitivity of male fertility across six Drosophila species Abstract. Understanding the mechanisms that confer resilience to thermal stress is crucial in the context of climate change. Recently there has been increa

📢Out now in @jevbio.bsky.social, we tried to work out whether heat limits of survival or fertility are reflected in heat shock protein expression across Drosophila 🪰 species. The answer is, well, a bit. With the wonderful @chsmithson.bsky.social @ejduncan.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...

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

📣 PhD opportunity in my lab 📣

We're looking for a motivated student interested in the effects of thermal stress on animal survival and reproduction: www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Project is open-ended to allow student to define its direction depending on their interests

Please share widely!

Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition | Royal Society Celebrating the power of photography to communicate science.

Wow! Our long-term collaborator and friend Martín Ramírez is the winner of the @royalsocietypublishing.org photo competition, with a SEM image from our joint research on spider silk!!
royalsociety.org/journals/pub...

An integrative, peer‐reviewed and open‐source cooperative‐breeding database (Co‐BreeD) Co-BreeD is the first updatable and open-source database dedicated to cooperative breeding. It enables continuous, non-binary measurement of cooperative breeding, transforming how we study breeding s...

📢Out in the NEW issue of @animalecology.bsky.social is our hugely #collaborative paper:

An integrative, peer-reviewed and open-source cooperative-breeding database (Co-BreeD)

#mammals #birds #cooperation #openscience #datasets #alloparents

Led by @benmocha.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1111/1365...

Avian-origin influenza A viruses tolerate elevated pyrexic temperatures in mammals Host body temperature can define a virus’s replicative profile—influenza A viruses (IAVs) adapted to 40° to 42°C in birds are less temperature sensitive in vitro compared with human isolates adapted t...

Cool paper suggesting that naturally higher body T˚ in birds leads to flu viruses originating in birds being pre-adapted to resist mammalian fever as a defence mechanism...

Avian-origin influenza A viruses tolerate elevated pyrexic temperatures in mammals | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Since AI slop is again all over Scientific Reports, a thread on the economics of grey-zone publishing.

Why does slop keep getting published? What does it mean for science? How can we stop this?

Background readings:
Understand the strain: tinyurl.com/2b6wxx5r
Stop the drain: tinyurl.com/3jfscscy

We are happy to announce that registration for ISBE2026 is now open! We encourage you to register as soon as possible to take advantage of reduced fees and to plan your trip and accommodation in advance.

Please read the information on www.isbe2026.com before proceeding with your registration.

Behavioural ecology in the twenty-first century - Nature Ecology & Evolution This Perspective discusses how the field of behavioural ecology has contributed to fundamental science and tackling global challenges, ranging from understanding how natural selection leads to adaptat...

Behavioural ecology in the 21st century..... www.nature.com/articles/s41... @asgriffin.bsky.social

We had a new paper out yesterday in @royalsocietypublishing.org Biology Letters. About how the cranial feathers of male Golden and Lady Amherst’s Pheasants affect their visual fields. Nice to see it picked up The New York Times and Science. Paper link below.

The Thermal Ecology Alliance is growing rapidly and we are now at 51 countries! Join here: www.thermalecologyalliance.org/participation

New paper out in @behavecol.bsky.social!

Multiple studies show that sexually selected traits such as colours can reflect the presence of pathogens/parasites, but, can defensive coloration do the same? L. Schlippe Justicia, @carodittrich.bsky.social, O. Nokelainen & I tackled that question (1/3)

Join us! 🧬🪰🎉🔬

We are currently advertising two #PhD projects to study the #evolution, #development and #genomics of sexual traits in stalk-eyed flies.

Deadline for applying is Wednesday, January 7, 2026. Get in touch for more info!

ACCE+ DLA Programme: Harnessing the power of mate choice to improve conservation breeding outcomes at University of Liverpool on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - ACCE+ DLA Programme: Harnessing the power of mate choice to improve conservation breeding outcomes at University of Liverpool, listed on FindAPhD.com

Interested in pursuing a PhD in animal mating behaviour and zoo conservation? Want to help understand whether mate choice can improve conservation breeding outcomes? I'm advertising a project with colleagues at the amazing Chester Zoo, see: tinyurl.com/47zjtj8e

Please share!

🦋 How will #insects respond to #climatechange? A global review of 351 studies shows no consistent pattern. Some species expand, others shrink, partly due to varied #methodologies. Standardised approaches are crucial to predict future insect ranges. 🌐

🔗 doi.org/10.1111/ddi....

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.

Vacancy — Postdoc Position in Decision Making in Birds Are you an expert in animal behavior? Do you have experience working with birds? The Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED) is looking for a motivated researcher to investigate the ro...

I have a job opening in my lab. If you are interested in bird behaviour and predator prey interactions please take a look! werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

Global selection on insect antipredator coloration Natural selection has repeatedly led to the evolution of two alternative antipredator color strategies—camouflage to avoid detection and aposematism to advertise unprofitability—but we lack understand...

Wa hoo! Our paper in Science is out today, revealing why some prey use conspicuous warning colouration while others use camouflaging colours. A huge global collaboration under incredible leadership by Iliana Medina and @wlallen.bsky.social
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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 🧵)

Interested in evolutionary ecology and genetics? Check out this PhD position in Pau Carazo's lab in Valencia - we look forward to your application!

Perfectly timed to coincide with our Thermal Fertility Limit Special Topic Network meeting we’ve received a further 2 years of funding, thank you @eseb.bsky.social! And great work fellow leads @rhondasnook.bsky.social, @liamdougherty.bsky.social and Claudia Fricke.

Reduced male pheromone production and an increased female sex ratio promote same-sex sexual behaviour in male Indian meal moths Same-sex sexual behaviours (SSSBs) are often deemed detrimental to fitness because they carry the same costs as sexual interactions with the opposite …

Absolutely delighted to share that I have published my first first-author manuscript in #AnimalBehaviourJournal with
@zen-of-science.bsky.social, @liamdougherty.bsky.social and Tabitha Beesley, where we looked at why male moths attempt same-sex mating!

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

Anthropocentric bias may explain research disparities between animal tool use and nest building Scientists are not immune from bias. Studying nonhuman species objectively is inherently challenging, especially for ‘charismatic’ and ostensibly huma…

“the widespread appeal of animal tool use is partly due to anthropocentrism”

👍 for this new comparison of how animal tools and nests are talked about, from Sally Street et al.

The need to slap a human-like ‘intelligence’ label on animals is a symptom of this bias (writing a book on that now) 🧪🪹🔨

Is it hot right now? YES!! (In most of Europe anyway) 🥵🥵🥵

Loving these new web applications developed for the UK 🇬🇧 by @roostweather.bsky.social and @edhawkins.org and Spain 🇪🇸 by @dargueso.bsky.social and AUS 🇦🇺 (original) by @mlip.bsky.social
🌍🧪⚒️🌡️📈

Links:
istheukhotrightnow.com
hoyextremo.com