Gaurav Athreya

Pretty excited to share our new preprint!
Non-photosynthetic Plastid Replacement by a Primary Plastid in the Making
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

And this is a society journal - from the Society for Modeling and Theory in Biology @smtpb.bsky.social !

Looking forward to this! A non-Elsevier alternative to Theoretical Population Biology / Journal of Theoretical Biology

Luck can explain the positive link between fecundity and longevity: the Matthew effect in social insects and beyond Abstract. The universality of the trade-off between fecundity and longevity in life-history theory is sometimes contested. Social insects present the argua

Why is it so hard to detect fecundity-longevity #trade-offs in social insects? And what does this have to do with the Gospel of #Matthew??
Find out in our new paper with @kokkonut.bsky.social and Susanne Foitzik @mainzuniversity.bsky.social!

doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...

The multifaceted societies of vulturine guineafowl Vulturine guineafowl, Acryllium vulturinum, are highly social birds that form stable identity groups (SIGs), corresponding to the concept of society p…

Want to get the low-down on vulturine guineafowl societies? Here's a summary of our knowledge so far:

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

Shrinking to bird size with dinosaur-level cancer defences: Evolution of cancer suppression over macroevolutionary time Author summary Humans are not the only species suffering from cancer, yet cancer does not impact all life equally. Body size is relevant because maintaining a large number of cells in a tumour-free st...

New paper out! 🤩 "Shrinking to bird size with dinosaur-level cancer defences: Evolution of cancer suppression over macroevolutionary time" with @kokkonut.bsky.social and @marcanthonytollis.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1371/jour... A short thread:

Early germline sequestration in a basidiomycete fungus In sexual organisms, inheritance of new mutations is highly dependent on the timing of germline definition. Here, we used the fairy ring–forming fungus Marasmius oreades to challenge the general assum...

It started as a master thesis project by Markus Hiltunen, and ended up in this publication in Science. What a fun project to work on! Thanks Markus - and all other coauthors, too, for a great team work! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Here are all the talks I attended and sketched at #ESEB2025 ! Only a fraction of the 642 speakers at the conference 😮

I had an absolutely amazing week chatting about lots of fascinating science

#sciart #eseb #esebcongress @eseb2025.bsky.social

If you work on the internal conflicts, do consider proposing a paper for our upcoming special issue in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.

More info here: internalconflictsstn.wordpress.com/special-issue/

Some of the #Bengaluru representation at #ESEB2025 in Barcelona!

@shikharabhat.bsky.social @crazychipkali.bsky.social @vrindarvkm.bsky.social @gauravathreya.bsky.social @utharasrini.bsky.social

a bit unhappy that the talks about being trans & Palestinian in academia were concurrent with other science talks #ESEB2025. How will these inspiring people’s stories percolate / get everyone to reflect if the schedule selects for attendance only by those who are already sympathetic?

Great talk by @gauravathreya.bsky.social about his work on age-dependent facultative sex! It’s been a super fun and interesting project to work on 🤩 and a preprint will be coming soon! #ESEB2025

Is AI transforming science? Apparently not in evolutionary biology. Of nearly 1,700 abstracts at #ESEB2025, only four mention AI or artificial intelligence, another eight mention deep learning, and another two explicitly refer to AlphaFold.

with pleasure :)

thanks for asking, this work isn’t submitted yet but there will be a preprint in the not too distant future!

The title slide of the talk I'll be giving. It reads: Are mitochondrial sisters their own worst enemies? Testing for negative frequency-dependent selection via resource competition in Trinidadian guppies. There is a depiction of a guppy family tree.

What if your family members turn out to be your worst enemies? Come see my talk at #eseb2025 on using pedigree and mark-recapture data to explore how relatedness structures competitive interactions, and whether this maintains variation! Thursday, 11am, S48.02, meeting room 122+123

An illustration with populations on the left and mathematical representations of these populations in terms of birth-death processes on the right

Stochastic differential equations for trait frequencies, mean value of a trait, and the variance of a trait in the population

Hey #ESEB2025 folk! I'll be presenting my work on describing evolution in finite populations at 11:30 am on Tuesday in S-03. Drop by to learn how taking ecology and variable population size seriously changes classic pop gen descriptions like the Price eqn, revealing novel directional eco-evo forces.

hello to everyone going to #ESEB2025! want to hear about the consequences of age-dependent plasticity in reproducing via sex vs. asex? I will give a talk at 11:15am on Thursday in S15.02. come for the pretty Hydra illustrations, stay for the novel evolutionary insights on facultative sex!

Assistant Professor position in Traditional Ecological Knowledge at Stanford University. Applications due Sept 30, 2025

facultypositions.stanford.edu/en-us/job/49...

Folks going to #ESEB2025 : To help people connect on Bluesky, I've started making starter packs. Here is a first one with the names that were available when I started.

Ping me if you want to be included in the next one!

thanks for making this! i’d love to be added too :)

Is there a single PDF with a list of talks/times for #ESEB2025 ? I don't get on well with conference apps

I am excited to announce that the position of a senior postdoc (3 +3 years) in the field of theoretical biology is available in my group.

The position provides the opportunity to closely interact with experimentalists and develop own research projects.

Please RT.

Details 👇:
shorturl.at/iiiOv

The first author @tarunyumnam.bsky.social is here on bluesky!

Homeword Bound With apologies to Rhymin’ Simon

Homeward Bound! Yes, the #LTEE is homeward bound. After a few thousand generations in Texas, the lines are coming back to #MSU, along with Jeff Barrick, and his team. telliamedrevisited.wordpress.com/2025/07/28/h...

Thanks again to coauthors, @mpi-evolbio.bsky.social where I did most of this work, and I have to say also @asn-amnat.bsky.social for an incredibly thorough review process!

My own (I think uncontroversial) take is that we understand conceptually much less about between-species ETIs than within-species ones like multicellularity & eusociality. So I would love (i) to hear any thoughts / feedback, and (ii) for someone to test these ideas in a real endosymbiosis!

Lastly, we show that under our assumptions, H-S mutual dependence evolves faster than reproductive cohesion. This is to me the most interesting result, and could explain why we (anecdotally) see lots of mutual dependence between hosts and symbionts, but not a lot of H-S synchronised reproduction.

Another interesting question is why there are differences in H&S evolutionary outcomes (why is it always the endosymbiont with the small genome?). We show that many asymmetries can be produced purely by differences in population growth parameters, usually (not always!) favouring host sovereignty.

First, we find novel reasons why an evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI) might *not* take place (e.g. no dependence from both H & S, or one-sided obligate dependence). This could help explain why ETIs are so rare, & why there is a lot of diversity in dependence & cohesion traits.