Alicja Witwicka

Sometimes a #wombat's eyes light up and they move with a sudden sense of purpose, to nowhere in particular.
#WombatWednesday #Tasmania #MammalWatching #WildOz #wombats

Happy to announce an open post-doctoral position (24 months) in the ThéMA lab (Besançon, CNRS-Univ.Marie et Louis Pasteur) to work on the coupled modelling of population genetic structure and metacommunity dynamics in habitat networks. Details here: shorturl.at/7muyx
For any questions, contact me!

Meat is a leading emissions source – but few outlets report on it, analysis finds Sentient Media reveals less than 4% of climate news stories mention animal agriculture as source of carbon emissions

"Today, we clear a soccer field’s worth of tropical forest every six seconds, a loss dramatically worsened by humanity’s growing hunger for meat"

Wean ourselves off meat now, or the switch to a Pliocene climate that's locked in will do it for us

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

ecoevojobs.net 2025-26

UPDATE: The 2025-2026 list of faculty and postdoc positions in ecology and evolutionary biology is out! Be sure to check out this active and helpful community run resources! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

I'm looking to recruit a PhD student to study patterns of local adaptation and introgression across the spruce hybrid zone in the Rockies near Calgary. Projects can include field work, bioinformatics, pop gen theory, or comparison to plant/ conifer species
yeamanlab.weebly.com/uploads/5/7/...

Pesticides found widely toxic to non-target organisms in low concentrations A 2025 meta-analysis of 1,705 studies confirms that pesticides are widely toxic to many non-target organisms. “Pesticides affect a diverse range of non-target species and may be linked to global biodi...

1/3 🧵🐞
A 2025 meta-analysis of 1,705 studies confirms that #pesticides are widely toxic to many non-target organisms. @davegoulson.bsky.social
www.pan-europe.info/blog/pestici...

Beneficial reversal of dominance maintains a large-effect resistance polymorphism under fluctuating insecticide selection - Nature Ecology & Evolution Measuring selection and dominance in fitness of the insecticide-resistant Ace alleles in Drosophila melanogaster, the authors show evidence for beneficial reversal of dominance, a mechanism that can s...

Measuring selection and dominance in fitness of the insecticide-resistant Ace alleles in Drosophila melanogaster, the authors show evidence for beneficial reversal of dominance, a mechanism that can stabilize large-effect polymorphisms in nature. 🧪

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We are delighted that our Winter Meeting 2025 in Leuven 🇧🇪 is approaching!

Abstract submissions now open: www.iussi-nweurope.org/meetings

Date: December 18-19
Abstract deadline: October 15
Host: Laboratory of Socioecology and Social Evolution at KU Leuven
Plenary: Ido Pen & @rmash.bsky.social

‘Almost unimaginable’: these ants are different species but share a mother Ant queens of one species clone ants of another to create hybrid workers that do their bidding.

A common type of ant in Europe breaks a fundamental rule in biology: its queens can produce male offspring that are a whole different species

go.nature.com/4mOb5T9

🌎👩‍🔬 For 15+ years biology has accumulated petabytes (million gigabytes) of🧬DNA sequencing data🧬 from the far reaches of our planet.🦠🍄🌵

Logan now democratizes efficient access to the world’s most comprehensive genetics dataset. Free and open.

doi.org/10.1101/2024...

We are 3 records short of 400!!
Please submit your picnic wasp food observations!
More info on how and why here: theconversation.com/what-to-do-w...

@theconversation.com

Dear Fly Community, In May 2025, the NIH terminated all grant funding to Harvard University, including the NHGRI grant that supported FlyBase. This grant also funded FlyBase teams at Indiana University (IU) and the University of Cambridge (UK), and as a result, their subawards were also canceled. The Cambridge team has secured support for one to two years through generous donations from the European fly community, emergency funding from the Wellcome Trust, and support from the University of Cambridge. At IU, funding has been secured for one year thanks to reserve funds from Thom Kaufman and a supplement from ORIP/NIH to the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center (BDSC). Unfortunately, the situation at Harvard is far more critical. Harvard University had supported FlyBase staff since May but recently denied a request for extended bridge funding. As a result, all eight employees (four full-time and four part-time) were abruptly laid off, with termination dates ranging from August to mid-October depending on their positions. In addition, our curator at the University of New Mexico will leave her position at the end of August. This decision came as a shock, and we are urgently pursuing all possible funding options. To put the need into perspective: although FlyBase is free to use, it is not free to make. It takes large teams of people and millions of dollars a year to create FlyBase to support fly research (the last NHGRI grant supported us with more than 2 million USD per annum). To help sustain FlyBase operations, we have been reaching out to you to ask for your support. We have set up a donation site in Cambridge, UK, to which European labs have and can continue to contribute, and a new donation site at IU to which labs in the US and the rest of the world can contribute. We urge researchers to work with their grant administrators to contribute to FlyBase via these sites if at all possible, as more of the money will go to FlyBase. However, we appreciate that some fu…

https://wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase:Contribute_to_FlyBase Our immediate goals are: 1. To maintain core curation activities and keep the FlyBase website online 2. To complete integration with the Alliance of Genome Resources (The Alliance). Integration with the Alliance is essential for FlyBase’s long-term sustainability. For nearly a decade, NHGRI/NIH has supported the unification of Model Organism Databases (MODs) into the Alliance, which we aim to achieve by 2028. Therefore, securing bridge funding to sustain FlyBase over the next three years is crucial for successful integration and the long-term access to FlyBase data. At present, our remaining funds will allow us to keep the FlyBase website online for approximately one more year. Beyond that, its future is uncertain unless new funding is secured. We will, of course, continue pursuing additional grant opportunities as they arise. Given the uncertainty of future NIH or alternative funding sources, we are relying on the Fly community for support. Your contributions will directly help us retain the staff needed to complete this transition and to secure ongoing fly data curation into the Alliance beyond 2028. We at FlyBase are incredibly grateful for the outpouring of support from the community during this challenging time. Your encouragement has strengthened our resolve and underscores how vital this resource remains to Drosophila research worldwide. Sincerely, The FlyBase Team

The community of Drosophila researchers is amazing, mutually supportive and collaborative. Right now a key resource for our community, @flybase.bsky.social , is threatened by the cancellation of its NIH grant and is seeking community help in raising short term funds 1/n 🧪 please share

Goodbye #eseb2025 @eseb2025.bsky.social see you next time!

Perhaps what stuck most was powerful talk on resilience and survival by Palestinian researcher, play director, and ESEB EUEA awardee May Shehady. Let's not forget, let's not look away. 🇵🇸

PhD student in Evolution of Indo-Pacific birds The Department of Bioinformatics and Genetics is offering a four-year PhD position focused on analyzing population-level genomic data from museum bird samples. The project will employ cutting-edge gen...

*PhD position* 🦉

Would you like to do a PhD with Indo-Pacific birds and evolutionary genomics? Join us in Stockholm:

<deadline>
05 September 2025, 23:59

PhD student in Evolution of Indo-Pacific birds
recruit.visma.com/spa/public/a...

Close up photo of a tuxedo cat licking the camera with a fish eye lens.

✨ A Sprinkle of JoyousJoyness ✨

MLEM!

Have a JoyousJoyfulJoyness day!

#happy #cat #mlem #cute #joyousjoyness #funny

New research from Pesticide Action Network reveals the extent of pesticide use by UK councils. These are poisons being sprayed in your street, your local park. Pls share.

For links to the full report & to find out what you can do, follow the link below
www.pan-uk.org/pesticide-fr...

Can I use this for presentations 😂

they are tired of being busy bees

If you have a BBQ visitor this wknd, don’t flap and shout.
Instead, give a wasp-offering: sausage..pie.. whatever she wants. She’s looking for protein not sugar atm as the colony is growing fast with many brood to feed.
Wasps are pest controllers, pollinators- Live with not against them. #WaspLove

Excited to advertise a shared PhD position at KU Leuven (Belgium) and Mondsee (Austria) with @markusmoest.bsky.social on the genetic basis, plasticity and evolution of melanization in Daphnia from alpine lakes. Apply here: www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...

drawing of a layer of cells, tiny pink peach ones with worried expressions, getting pushed to the side by giant fat blobby pink cancer cells with teeth and evil eyes. the text says: You know who else has UNLIMITED GROWTH? CANCER!

this is most certainly a #SciArt piece about CANCER and NOTHING ELSE*

*I'm drowning in sarcasm

Water Interaction Type Affects Environmental DNA Shedding Rates of Terrestrial Mammal eDNA Into Surface Water Bodies Although shedding rates for aquatic species are well studied, little is known about terrestrial mammal shedding rates in water. In this study, we quantify eDNA shedding rates from domestic dogs durin...

🐕🧬💧 New article is out! We tracked how terrestrial mammals like dogs shed DNA into water bodies . Results show that activities like "crossing through" and "defecating" had the highest shedding rates and how direct versus indirect interaction affect eDNA detection probabilities. #eDNA #biomonitoring

I will continue circulating the poster until SOMETHING improves 😑

Activate climate’s ‘silent majority’ to supercharge action, experts say Making concerned people aware their views are far from alone could unlock the change so urgently needed

89% of world’s people want stronger action on climate but mistakenly believe they're in a minority

69% willing to contribute 1% of their income to the climate fight, & more than 50% in all but a few countries, but believed only a minority would also be willing

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Restoration cannot be scaled up globally to save reefs from loss and degradation - Nature Ecology & Evolution An assessment of existing coral restoration projects finds that accessibility drives the choice of restoration sites more than environmental and ecological factors, and most restored reefs have been o...

An assessment of existing coral restoration projects finds that accessibility drives the choice of restoration sites more than environmental and ecological factors, and most restored reefs have been or will soon be impacted by severe bleaching www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Why ‘de-extinct’ dire wolves are a Trojan horse to hide humanity’s destruction of nature Extinction is, for the time being, forever – and a symptom of our global economic system.

'What’s the problem? Well, pretty much everything. These aren’t species returned from extinction.'

@oxfordgeography.bsky.social's Dr Richard Grenyer argues that extinction is, for the time being, a symptom of our global economic system ⬇️

What do pesticides do to bumble bee brains over time?

Current toxicity tests often use acute exposure, yet bees in the wild are far more likely to face prolonged, low-level exposure 🌸🌼 This mismatch means today’s testing methods are missing critical details.
www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/2...

We compared the effects of short high-concentration (acute) exposure and prolonged low-concentration (chronic) exposure of #acetamiprid, #clothianidin, and #sulfoxaflor
Chronic exposure affected energy production and immunity while acute exposure activated stress responses and caused neural issues.

Acute and chronic pesticide exposure trigger fundamentally different molecular responses in bumble bee brains - BMC Biology Background Beneficial insects, including pollinators, encounter various pesticide exposure conditions, from brief high-concentration acute exposure to continuous low-level chronic exposure. To effecti...

Another paper on #bumblebee #transcriptomics is out! We show that the effects of #pesticides in #bumblebees are determined predominantly by pesticide concentration and exposure time, rather than the pesticide type itself 🐝🧠🧬
doi.org/10.1186/s129...
@flopezos.bsky.social
@yannickwurm.bsky.social

Here’s how to create a more nature-literate society Nature literacy has inspired creativity and innovation for thousands of years.

How to create a #nature-literate society.
My latest article @theconversation.com

Revaluing naturalists' skills is essential for a future where we work with, not against, nature.
Notice
Name
Nurture
#GreenJobs

theconversation.com/heres-how-to...
@uclnews.bsky.social @curlewaction.bsky.social