Kayce Bell

April 1 deadline for @nhm.org Student Collections Study Award. Get $$ to spend time collecting data in our collections, including @tarpits.org
Open to:
- current undergraduate and grad students
- *not* local to Los Angeles (international applicants welcome)
More: nhm.org/student-coll...

The Evolution Meetings logo, stating that the meeting will be online May 20-22, 2026 and in-person June 20-24 2026

The 2026 Ernst Mayr Award Competition is open! This is SSB's student talk award. Students selected to compete will deliver their talk during the virtual Evolution meetings May 20-22, 2026.

Applications close April 15, 2026.

For information on registration, see: www.systbio.org/ernst-mayr-a...

Last call for applications!

An historic black and white illustration of a paper nautilus floating on the ocean. There are boats, a city and hills in the background.

🎉 Huge news for BHL: The Field Museum is taking over the hosting of BHL’s website, servers & infrastructure, ensuring long-term stability and access for its 63+ million pages of open biodiversity literature. Learn more:
blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2026/02/tran...
#BHLTransition #ILoveBHL 🌍 📚 🧪

Yes. Thank you, @theoatmeal.bsky.social. It's about time someone created something new, worthy of the naked mole rat. It's been a minute since The Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed, and this take is both scientifically accurate and appropriately deranged.

theoatmeal.com/comics/naked...

Stanford researchers help trace ancestry for African Americans A group of Stanford researchers is offering a mathematical model to help link family connections up to 410 years ago.

Excited that our work was featured on the local (Bay Area) news for their Black History month series. Interview with Noah and clips from my interview with @dornsife.usc.edu and CGSI talk in the article below

www.nbcbayarea.com/discover-bla...

Evolution 2026 meeting logo. Clilp art of a globe and laptop showing a virtual presentation. Text: Society for the Study of Evolution Global Meeting Participation.

SSE is pleased to offer free virtual #Evol2026 registration to all SSE members residing in 152 countries and territories around the world including India, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. Request your free registration code today! www.evolutionsociety.org/index.php?mo...

Screenshot of the COI Pond webpage: Upload your academic CV and generate a draft NSF Collaborators and Other Affiliations (COA) Form to submit with your NSF grant proposals. COI Pond parses your CV to extract: Coauthors of articles published, in the last 48 months Collaborators on funded projects, in last 48 months Past PhD advisees & your own PhD advisor(s) Editorial roles, in last 24 months After extraction, you can edit the draft COA form before downloading a final version (in xslx format) that you can submit to NSF. COI Pond is a free tool* from Cevian Labs.

Today we’re excited to announce a new product: COI Pond is a tool for faculty and grant staff that converts an academic CV into a draft NSF Collaborators and Other Affiliations (COA) Form. COA forms are tedious work, and COI Pond makes it a snap. Try it for free, here cevianlabs.io/coipond/start/ /1

Come join me and other great colleagues at @ib_unam !! We’re searching for a new orno 🦅 🦢 🦉 systematics researcher/prof. for the largest bird collection in Mexico. See details herein www.ib.unam.mx/ibunam/Convo... Amigxs ornitólogxs! Habemus búsqueda de nuevx investigadorx! Apliquen!

My department at CSU Northridge is hiring a vertebrate functional morphologist! We've got a great EEB group, and we're looking for someone to carry forward a tradition of enriching organismal courses and community-engaged research. App review starts March 15

csucareers.calstate.edu/mob/cw/en-us...

I also love that fact!

I keep my phone and computer on silent pretty much all the time, so I forget that videos on here can have sound!

Well, the octopus was popular, here is another video of a mollusk from that adventure, this time an adorable sea hare that appears to be grazing on coralline algae

Limpets are basically flat snails with a shell on one side and the soft bits on the other side clinging to a rock!

I forgot about the sound! There was actually a very small, baby octopus in another tide pool nearby, but I sadly didn't get any pictures of it.

A limpet with a greenish-yellow mantle covering most of the shell, except for a small white portion visible around the keyhole. The limpet is surrounded by sea grass and different types of algae.

Also saw a giant keyhole limpet, it was bigger than my hand!

Went tidepooling today. Saw the best octopus.

In case anyone wants a little break, here are a few of my favorite facts that I learned in 2025, in no particular order.

Some trees benefit from, and may even encourage, getting struck by lightning because it kills their nearby competitors nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Leafcutter ant holds up a large piece of leaf that says "Call for Scientists."

Seeking scientist volunteers for the 2026 spring semester! Want to practice science communication and help author a 🌟comic🌟 about your research? Apply by 1/25. Please share widely. bit.ly/comicscollabspring2026

Postdoctoral Researcher All Job Postings will close at 12:01a.m. CST (1:01a.m. EST) on the specified Closing Date (if designated). If you close the browser or exit your application prior to submitting, the application progre...

LSU Museum of Natural Sciences is hiring a postdoc! Come join our very active and supportive museum community. Applicants can work with any of the major divisions: 🐀🦜🦎🐸🐠

Review begins February 15th, please share!

lsu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/LSU/job/0119...

If you are a resident of California, the state now has a portal where you can demand deletion of your personal data from 500+ registered data brokers with a single request form, for free.

consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov

Very excited for this incredible lineup of talks at #SSB2026!

ssb2026.github.io/talks.html

For those giving talks, more instructions will be sent shortly.

@systbiol.bsky.social

We have 526 scientists signed up for spring semester. We try to get that to about 1000 scientists before unleashing the teachers on the database. Wanna connect a class of kids with science this spring? Sign up!

We're editing a special issue of Ibis and are after the best in collections-based research and commentary! All the usual Ibis paper formats are welcome (reviews, viewpoints, research articles, short communications).

#ornithology #museums #birds

Weird wet weather has Joshua trees flowering early — or late? Help the Yoder Lab map this “bonus bloom” to understand why A flowering tree in Yucca Valley, CA, observed by iNaturalist contributor wanderingmojave on December 9. A tree with lots of flowers in Tehachapi, CA, observed by iNaturalist contributor tina9294 o…

I started getting reports of an unseasonal Joshua tree bloom in the last few weeks, and looking over records on @inaturalist.bsky.social it's pretty widespread! So we're putting out the call for folks to record this "bonus bloom" and help us study it 🌿

lab.jbyoder.org/2025/12/10/w...

Looking for an *L.A. based* artist who (against all odds) has time for a poster gig before the end of the year.

It's for a science + art event.

We can offer $500 for the gig.

Dreadfully sorry about the timeline. Link a portfolio if you're interested, I'll delete this post when we found someone.

Image of Cephalotes varians workers and a soldier nestled in their twig nest. Image via https://stevenwang.smugmug.com/Ants/List-of-Genera/Cephalotes/i-CjXZ3b9

Thrilled to share that @corriemoreau.bsky.social and I have a new paper out in Evolution, digging into the varied ways that extreme worker plasticity impacts genome evolution in turtle ants!

Paper 📃: doi.org/10.1093/evol...

Image 📸: Steven Wang, tinyurl.com/2rbjbyjh

The Surprisingly Tender Art of Rat Taxidermy I joined a taxidermy class and discovered a craft that’s far more thoughtful than I expected

For this month’s @outsidemag.bsky.social column, I took a rat taxidermy class, and it was… surprisingly sweet? As the teacher said, “We’re reclaiming what’s beautiful and interesting about the things we’ve been told are bad or gross.”

I love my rat. His name is Meatball.

Check out our review/perspective piece on phylogenetic diversification analysis, intended for the 75th anniversary of
@systbiol.bsky.social. I had the privilege of working with great coauthors, @fhenaodiaz.bsky.social, @tvasconcelos.bsky.social and @roszenil.bsky.social!
doi.org/10.1093/sysb...

This is such a neat story!