Will Rogers

COMMENTING GUIDE: Opposing Two Trump Regime Rules Banning Gender-Affirming Care, Deadline 2/17/26 Creator profile picture Shouldn't Need to Be a Lawyer by Matthew Cortland January 26 Edit I. Bottom Line Up Front The Trump Regime's Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has published two companion proposed rules designed to eliminate access to gender-affirming care for minors nationwide. Together, these rules would: Ban hospitals from providing this care (CMS-3481-P) — regardless of how the care is paid for Prohibit Medicaid and CHIP from covering this care (CMS-2451-P) — cutting off funding for lower-income families You have the opportunity to help defend trans kids by submitting comments against these vile proposed rules. Because even if a state wanted to continue covering gender-affirming care through Medicaid, the hospital rule would prevent hospitals from providing it. The two rules use different regulatory mechanisms to accomplish the same policy goal: eliminating access to gender-affirming care for anyone under 18 (or under 19 for CHIP). You should submit your comment to both dockets. The deadline is 5PM ET on February 17, 2026.

Public comment on Dr Oz's proposed rules to ban gender-affirming care for youth closes 2/17

One rule bans hospital-based care, the other eliminates Medicaid/CHIP coverage

Together they'd make care virtually unavailable nationwide, including in shield law states

www.patreon.com/posts/149210...

One nice result in the new great tit analysis by @davididiaquez.bsky.social et al. is a lovely illustration of Simpson's paradox: within cohorts of great tits, mass increases as birds get older, but across cohorts the population trend is in the other direction
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Exciting announcement! My new department is launching a postdoc fellowship in quantitative biology. Fellows will be co-advised by two Bio faculty, one that is quant focused (not me) and one that is not (me???). I would love to co-sponsor a postdoc and build a collaboration so please reach out!

Interested in eco-evolutionary feedbacks? Microbial experimental evolution? Pleiotropy? Filamentous phages??

Check out our latest preprint, now up on BioRxiv!

biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

For a quick summary, peep the thread below...🧵 (1/10)

When studying animal physiology we carefully control temperature, oxygen…but often ignore who animals live with.

Social context such as parents (1), social environment (2), litter mates (3) can shape physiology and later plasticity (4). We discuss it in this commentary 👉 doi.org/10.1242/jeb....

New (competition funded) PhD opportunity with me,
@iaciac.bsky.social and @dralgernon.bsky.social
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
Higher-order networks and animal communication. Suited to someone keen on network science theory/computational modeling and keen to adapt this to ecology & evolution.

Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Disease Conference (EEID)

Abstracts due Feb 3rd for EEID 2026! @eeid2026.bsky.social

Up next on the EEIDforum is Sarah Olson with the Wildlife Conservation Society (Feb 5th at 1pm US eastern time) presenting:

One Health in Action: Wildlife Conservation and Disease Prevention in a Changing World

You can register here:
www.eeidforum.org?page_id=261

The torso and head of a black flying fox hanging upside down, looking directly at the camera, above the words "PhD positions available in bat viral ecology and evolution".

🦇 Two PhD positions available on our new ARC Discovery Grant: "From Diversity to Disease: Viral Ecology, Evolution and Persistence in Bats"

The project will investigate how viral diversity evolves and persists, with a particular focus on recently discovered henipaviruses in Australian flying foxes.

With @eebdennis.bsky.social and many great partners already involved, we believe we can do more to link movement tracking data and wildlife diseases. The Move Disease Archive (MDA) is one step in this direction. Have a look and don't hesitate to get in touch if you're interested!

We are hiring – postdoc position exploring how kinship shapes social ageing in killer whales. Collaboration with @samellisq.bsky.social @drwhale.bsky.social and Prof Rufus Johnstone (Cambridge) starts 1st April 2026 and ends 31st March 2029. Apps close 2nd Feb. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPZ788/p...

🌍 Excited to share the Move Disease Archive (MDA)—co-led by me and @kmorelle.bsky.social with support from Movebank, Move BON, Euromammals, and many partners!

A global collection of wildlife movement + disease data to understand behavior, spread & spillover!
🔗 kimx3725.github.io/move-disease...

Pre-holiday preprint! We experimentally manipulated resource availability in a wild rodent population and found pervasive effects on host biology and diverse effects across the parasite community in a naturally co-infected host. Check it out!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

EEID seminar Jan 8th 1PM EST

The role of climate change, dust-generating events, and rodents in the emergence of Valley fever in California

Jennifer Head, University of Michigan

Register here:
www.eeidforum.org?page_id=261

Would love to connect/chat if you are interested or have any questions! #movementecology #spatialmodeling #habitatselection #stepselection #MoveBon #conservation #distributionmodeling #yaleEEB

If you have a movement model, a spatial domain, and want to visualize what that movement model means for space use, give it a try! The code is all here: github.com/will-rogers/...

It's my hope that work like this contributes to the rich literature seeking to translate mechanistic behavioral inferences into implications for spatial distributions and broader ecological processes.

Across 4 different species, we find that our method of predicting space use tends to outperform other prediction frameworks.

Moreover, we were able to predict independent population-level density from single-individual GPS tracks, and our ergodic approach was more effective than other.

Approaches such as those that use simulated movements from models (agent-based models) and our newly introduced ergodic approach are far better at representing space use than occurrence-based frameworks or naïve predictions that ignore movement.

Models that jointly estimate habitat selection and movement constraints are great tools to understand animal movement. But translating these mechanistic models into space use estimates is incredibly challenging.

As a result, true space use often diverges from the spatial distribution of desirable habitats. With greater movement constraints, emergent space use becomes heavily concentrated. As a result, naïve predictions may ultimately overestimate the available habitat to animals.

Accurately predicting animal space use is challenging because animal habitat selection and movement constraints operate in heterogeneous landscapes.

Choices to Landscapes: Mechanisms of Animal Movement Scale to Landscape Patterns of Space Use | Request PDF Request PDF | Choices to Landscapes: Mechanisms of Animal Movement Scale to Landscape Patterns of Space Use | Understanding animal space use is central to ecology and conservation, and movement‐based ...

Happy to share that our work on projecting animal space use from movement models was published in Ecology Letters.

Big effort by the team - huge thanks to Scott Yanco for all the support!

Paper: doi.org/10.1111/ele.... and text (or dm!): www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Origin stories: how does learned migratory behaviour arise in populations? Although decades of research have deepened our understanding of the proximate triggers and ultimate drivers of migrations for a range of taxa, how populations establish migrations remains a mystery. ....

doi.org/10.1111/brv....

would love to be added!

would love to be added!

i would love to be added if possible!

thanks!!

* NEW #PhD * #Evolution #Ecology of Immune #Senesence in Wild Badgers - exciting project with me, @btschirren.bsky.social & our awesome collaborators @ APHA. Based at @exetercec.bsky.social in Cornwall, UK.
!PLEASE SHARE!

See www.animalsocieties.org and apply: www.exeter.ac.uk/study/fundin...
🌏 🧪 🦑

Identifying signals of memory from observations of animal movements - Movement Ecology Incorporating memory (i.e., some notion of familiarity or experience with the landscape) into models of animal movement is a rising challenge in the field of movement ecology. The recent proliferation...

Such a long journey! My second PhD chapter is out! - We review approaches for incorporating memory into step-selection analyses (SSAs), a frequently used movement modeling framework.

Thanks to all of my collaborators and my advisor, John Fieberg!

doi.org/10.1186/s404...