jim mallet

Also, I just noticed "Teosnite". What kind of AI is that?

Wow! AI sure helps us to understand evolution, maybe? First the silk, and then the tassel, eh? Parthenogenesis in between, presumably?

Two male Magpie-larks at the nest

Do you think John Gould knew these were both male magpie larks?

YouTube video by Heavy Petting - Animal Documentaries How Hercules the Bear Became a Global Icon - Animal Documentary

Sorry to provide a Google Search link. Here is a direct youtube link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu7G...

I apologise, but at least it's not a cat video. It's about a grizzly bear born in Scotland, Hercules. www.google.com/search?q=her...

Live bears and humans. Amazing. Especially Hercules, an 8 foot bear who went home with a Scottish Family, and became a celebrity (26:30 onwards in the recording). www.bbc.com/audio/play/w...

A butterfly named in honor of a Harvard biologist A previously-unknown butterfly species collected in the Amazon and forgotten in museum drawers for more than 150 years has been designated as a new species.

@heliconians A butterfly collected by Alfred Russel Wallace in the Amazon was just named after Harvard's Andrew Berry. Euptychia andrewberryi ! news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

Incidentally, talking of the IAPT (to make a long digression even longer) this same Sandra Knapp has actually a lot to do, more recently, with the modernisation of the ICBN "Botanical Code" to the current ICNafp -- the International Code of Nomenclature for Algae, Fungi, and Plants 4/2

It's a beautiful plant, and some specimens were grown at Kew, and others distributed elsewhere -- so I think all live plants in the UK are now clones of our original specimen! 3/2

... of H. telesiphe laying on a purple variegated Passiflora. The plant was sterile, but I carried rooted stems in my carry-on back to UK and my Dad's greenhouse. My Dad's first cousin Michael Shone also grew cuttings. On flowering, Sandy K pressed specimens which became types of a new species! 2/2

@chrisjiggins.bsky.social Yes, we found Passiflora telesiphe on my first trip to Ecuador with you, Chris, as a new grad student -- it was very dry to the West in Guayquichuma and no butterflies, so we went down the Eastern side on the slopes towards Zamora and made this observation... 1/2

Lepidoptera are honorary plants! With Sandra Knapp FRS I have named two plant species after the butterflies that ate them: Passiflora eueidipabulum after the butterfly Eueides lineata; and another one is Passiflora telesiphe after Heliconius telesiphe.

Chromosome number diversity found in animals and plants. (a) The bulldog ant, Myrmecia pilosula, 2n = 4 (from Crosland & Crozier, 1986) (b) The lycaenid butterfly, Lysandra atlantica, 2n = ca. 440 (from de Lesse, 1970) (c) Brachycome dichromosomatica, 2n = 4) (d) Adder's tongue fern Ophioglossum reticulatum 2n = ca. 1440 (from Ninan, 1958). Scale bar = 10 μm.

Ferns would like a word.

This tiny butterfly has the most chromosomes of any animal on Earth Scientists have confirmed that the Atlas blue butterfly carries the most chromosomes of any animal, with 229 pairs. Unlike duplication, its chromosomes split apart, reshaping its genome in surprising ...

Homie got 229 pairs of chromosomes

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/202...

It seems ancestral Polyommatini (“The Blues”) have similar with n~22-ish. And then suddenly, another freakout! Chop-chop-chop-chop-chop-chop…, and voila! n=229 with the Atlas Blue. — 2/2

Lepidoptera normally have highly conserved n=31 chromosomes. Then suddenly everything goes haywire! Most Heliconiinae have ancestral n=31, including Eueides, sister to Heliconius. Then suddenly there were 10 fusions, so most Heliconius have n= 21 ! — 1/2

And look at this graphic abstract….. 😱🤯

Rapid establishment of species barriers in plants compared with that in animals Speciation, the process by which new reproductively isolated species emerge from ancestral populations, results from the gradual accumulation of barriers to gene flow within genomes. To date, the noti...

I have such good memories of this early time in Berlin! Also, do you buy the argument of this paper? -Monnet, F., Postel, Z., Touzet, P., Fraïsse, C., Van de Peer, Y., Vekemans, X., & Roux, C. 2025. Rapid establishment of species barriers in plants ... Science 389:1147-1150. doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Make America Gormless Again!

Very understandable to me as a former H1B holder! If you have not booked travel, I would wait. If you did book, then follow the news, and hope for the best!

Here are graphs depicting actual Lotka-Volterra model of evolution by natural selection -- "the struggle for existence". 5/5

I've spent roughly half of my working life educating Americans, and suddenly, the open society that was USA is no longer tolerating the free flow of information that comes with education. 4/5

I returned to UK and taught there, before my current iteration in the USA, where my group, taking advantage of the latest genomic methods, has made profound discoveries in how species of insects form. And for the past 13 years, I have taught Americans population genetics. 3/5

I then taught in Mississippi, and researched cotton bollworms and tobacco budworms on cotton, as well as sibling speciation in the "Common Malaria Mosquito", which turns out to be a complex of around 6 species. 2/5 (sorry, it's longer chain than I thought at first!).

I know it's possible to argue that I "benefited" from US training at the nation's expense. However, what I benefited from in my PhD (on an F1 visa) was University of Texas' "in state tuition" costs, then $300/semester 1978-83! (seems amazing in retrospect). 1/2

Good grief! I've had an alphabetic list of US visas (F2, F1, J1, H1B and two green cards) over the years. If I had happened to have been out of the country on my H1B, I would have had 1 day to get back to the USA. Also, I or my university would have to have paid $100K/yr. From immigration lawyers:

Unfortunately, these people have no sense of humor. I suggest you don't comment like that if sarcasm might be taken for real by some AI bot seeking out radical left professors.

Are We Witnessing a Speciation Continuum? Evidence From Current and Past Gene Flow in the Genus Oritrophium s.s. (Asteraceae) From the Tropical High Andes Determining species boundaries is key for appropriately assessing biodiversity. However, the continuity of the speciation process makes delimiting species a difficult task, especially for recently di....

Molecular Ecology | Molecular Genetics Journal | Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Wow!