Tim Linksvayer

Cross-species cloning in ants 🐜
These two males belong to different species—but share the same mother. How? Why?
To celebrate the print release of our last paper in this week’s @nature.com (issue 8084), here’s a thread summarizing the results. Why? Let’s dive in🧵👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Kavli and NSF Announce New Grant Awards to Advance Neurobiology in… An initiative to explore how nervous systems function and evolve in dynamic natural environments

A POSTDOCTORAL POSITION ON THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF REPRODUCTION IN A CHANGING ENVIRONMENT: We are recruiting a postdoctoral fellow to work on a Neurobiology in Changing Ecosystems (NiCE) award from NSF and the Kavli Foundation (www.kavlifoundation.org/news/kavli-a...).

The Dept. of BioSciences at #RiceUniversity, in Houston, Texas, invites applications for a tenure-track assistant professor position in Evolutionary Biology, with a preferred focus on organismal responses to environmental change. Please RT!

Apply: apply.interfolio.com/173889

Constraints on chromosome evolution revealed by the 229 chromosome pairs of the Atlas blue butterfly The genome of the Atlas blue butterfly contains ten times more chromosomes than most butterflies, and more than any other known diploid animal. Wright et al. show that this extraordinary karyotype is ...

How many chromosomes can an animal have?

In our paper out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social we show that the Atlas blue butterfly has 229 chromosome pairs- the highest in diploid Metazoa! These arose by rapid autosome fragmentation while sex chromosomes stayed intact.
www.cell.com/current-biol...

Superefficient teamwork in weaver ants Nesting weaver ants combine into chains to pull leaves together. Stewardson, Carlesso, et al. show that, unlike humans, weaver ant teams are superefficient: individual force output grows alongside tea...

And of course, don't miss our paper out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social:
www.cell.com/current-biol...

Cooperative behavior: Superefficient weaver ants Teamwork has long faced a dilemma: as team members are added, the effectiveness of each individual decreases — a phenomenon known as ‘Ringelmann’s effect’. A new study shows that weaver ants in pullin...

Excited to share an awesome piece by @drdavidhu.bsky.social in @currentbiology.bsky.social @cellpress.bsky.social about our latest paper!

Curious to know how weaver #ants achieve superefficiency when working together? Check it out! 🐜🐜🐜

www.cell.com/current-biol...

I am recruiting PhD students to join my lab at Wake Forest University Fall 2026. Current projects focus on the neurobiology, behavior, and development of identity processing in paper wasps. Contact me if interested. Deadline to apply is Dec. 15th 2025. Please share!
#PhDposition #PhD #wasplove

‘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

Curatorial Associate - New York, NY 10024 - Indeed.com American Museum of Natural History

The American Museum of Natural History's Invertebrate Zoology Division is seeking a full-time Curatorial Associate to manage the day-to-day care, organization and accessibility of the Invertebrate Zoology collections.

www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=d...

I am very thankful for the support from the Department of Biological Sciences and Dartmouth @dartmouthartsci.bsky.social for supporting my interdisciplinary research vision! We are recruiting Post Docs and Grad Students to join this exciting endeavor!

Know an Evolutionary Genomicist looking for a faculty position? Join us in EEB @utknoxville.bsky.social Position is open for studying any organism, but personally I have some botany bias. 🌱 Apply before Sept 19 for full consideration. apply.interfolio.com/170735 Please share widely. Thanks!

My research area is hiring! Very excited for new colleagues.

Our EEB department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is hiring an assistant professor in evo-devo. See go.illinois.edu/EEBAsstProf for details. Please share!

A professional job announcement flyer from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln advertising the position of Assistant Professor in Insect Systematics. The flyer is divided into sections detailing the job description, required qualifications, and responsibilities, including research, teaching, service, and collaboration. The layout uses red and grey colors, includes a university logo, and prominently features a vibrant photo of an orange and black butterfly resting on a plant. A QR code is present for easy access to application details.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln is hiring an Assistant Professor specializing in insect systematics. Opportunities like this are rare and valuable! (Not many jobs like this out there!) Spread the word to anyone who might be interested or benefit.
#entomology #science #sciencejobs #bugsky 🧪

Why mechanistically would collective behaviors evolve more rapidly? We hypothesize that it's all about social interactions: traits governing social interactions (e.g., among workers, queens, and brood) can contribute to rapid group-level change. 7/7

Does collective behavior generally evolve more rapidly than individual-level behavior (and do emergent traits generally evolve more rapidly than lower-level traits)? We’d love to study this in other systems! 6/

Species vary more in behavioral space for activity cycles at the collective level (pink area) than at the individual level (blue area) 5/

We estimated rates of behavioral evolution across our phylogeny and infer that collective behavior evolved more rapidly than individual behavior.
4/

Colonies of ants show regular bursts of activity over time. Individual ants also have these activity cycles, and ant species differ for these individual- and colony-level activity cycles. 3/

We studied how rapidly collective behavior evolved compared to individual behavior by quantifying activity cycles of colonies and isolated individuals across 22 ant species www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 2/

starling murmurations as an example of collective

Collective behaviors are striking, widespread, and can emerge when individuals follow simple interaction rules. How does collective behavior evolve? New paper @pnas.org led by postdoc Grant Doering www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 1/

definition of "hot take": "...strong opinions that have not been carefully thought about..."

my "hot take": carefully thought out and carefully written perspectives that "create new discussions, inspire future research, and maybe stir things up a bit" ...that's all great and I'm definitely looking forward to these new articles. But actual hot takes don't belong in a leading journal.

Disruption of collective behaviour correlates with reduced interaction efficiency | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Group-living organisms commonly engage in collective behaviour to respond to an ever-changing environment. As animals face environmental change, establishing the mechanisms of information used to collectively behave is critical. Western honeybees (Apis ...

🎉🎉I am SO excited to share our lab's first data paper published in ProcB @royalsociety.org! This research is part of @jlotusnguyen.bsky.social 's PhD dissertation and explores how social #behavior is organized in honey bees. 🐝 Let me share the story...!
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

Also check out this Instagram cool reel featuring SIRG social-insect research.
www.instagram.com/reel/DI4D-le...

For Earth Month, ASU News did a piece on the Social Insect Research Group at Arizona State University.

Features research from School of Life Science & School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence (@scai-asu.bsky.social).

The mighty, mighty insects of #ASU #SIRG.
news.asu.edu/20250424-env...

I'm a bit surprised by how uncritically these papers strongly stated claims (e.g., about haplodiploidy and eusociality), when Hamilton was much more careful, and T&H76, which they are commenting on, showed that Hamilton's original formulation of the haplodiploid hypothesis was fundamentally flawed.

very interesting, I hadn't seen these. That exchange also amusingly says "This point is important because a
number of authors, particularly American ones.." -- and I still see this attitude popping up in the writing of some researchers 50 years later.

and also this:

interesting that they make this assertion: