Graham Coop

Pandemic-era sports league operations as a new paradigm for local epidemic resilience Strategic, coordinated, and rapid responses are essential when pathogens emerge, yet these responses are often mishandled during epidemics due to myriad factors, including entrenched socioeconomic and...

1/5: Interested in basketball? Disease ecology? Epidemics?

5 years ago, the NBA embarked on a great experiment in infection control: "The NBA Bubble." In a new preprint led by Dr. Yun Tao + Dr. Nita Bharti, we examine it's underlying disease ecology principles.

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Throwback treat: @ucdavis.bsky.social Professor Jay Stachowicz talking Halloween fashion… for decorator crabs! 🦀✨

Recent horizontal transfer of transposable elements in Drosophila Transposable elements (TEs) are genetic elements also known as "jumping genes" that increase their copy numbers within a host through various mechanisms of transposition. TEs can also move between spe...

My awesome grad student Shashank and I wrote this paper trying to look at broader patterns of HT in TEs. HT is happening everywhere! DNA transposons jump further than other classes! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Rigorous validation of ecological models against empirical time series - Nature Ecology & Evolution Validating theoretical models against empirical data presents challenges. Here the authors present an assumption-light method to validate ecological models against time series data, along with a dedic...

Ecology faces an accumulation of models but not an accumulation of confidence. Our new paper w/ Jonathan Levine www.nature.com/articles/s41... in @natecoevo.nature.com introduces a rigorous test rooted in queueing theory to falsify inadequate models and build confidence in useful ones.

YouTube video by Matthew Bracken ABC News Decorator Crabs

#ThrowbackThursday to the day 20 yrs ago when my postdoc advisor had to meet w/ me in the teaching lab downstairs b/c he was setting up his decorator crabs for an ABC News segment on Halloween costumes. #MarineLife #Invertebrate 🎃🦀 @ucdmarinescience.bsky.social youtu.be/IYxerHqVPpE?...

He Studied Why Some Female Birds Look Like Males

"The project that was terminated was on this hummingbird, the white-necked jacobin....I suspect that it has something to do with studying a species that doesn’t fit the binary." Researcher @jjinsing.bsky.social interviewed by @carlzimmer.com #birds #nature #science #fundscience #nonbinary 🧪

We're reading Charlie & the Chocolate Factory. Our son noted it was v. unlikely Charlie found a golden ticket with only 5 in world. I explained that there were many kids who didnt find a ticket & didnt have books written about them, so really it was about conditional prob.
He groaned & went to sleep

Amazon is helping fund a $300 million build of a ballroom for the White House.

Independent bookstores are donating to food banks and organizations that help with food insecurity.

They are not the same.

a particularly furry/fuzzy bee fly

reminds me of a little mammal. cool how you can see the actual dark thorax beneath the layer of thoracic hairs

An illustrated poster with numbers and an identification key, highlighting the diversity of Hoverfly species found in North America. 18 flies are drawn on the poster. These flies are generally striped/have patterns that make them resemble bees. They are illustrated on a light earthy yellow-green background.

North American Hoverflies! 🪰

Genomic architecture of egg mimicry and its consequences for speciation in parasitic cuckoos Host-parasite arms races facilitate rapid evolution and can fuel speciation. Cuculus cuckoos are deceptive egg mimics that exhibit a broad diversity of counterfeit egg phenotypes, representing host-ad...

Our new @science.org paper is out! Cuckoos and hosts are locked in a coevolutionary arms race over egg mimicry.

But how are these egg types inherited, and could this drive speciation? We sequenced hundreds of genomes to find out!

doi.org/10.1126/scie...

🧵1/6

Nature Communications will publish ~10K papers in 2025 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov?term=%22Natu...

That's ~$70M in revenue, while many of the non-profit journals that used to occupy that slot in the journal hierarchy have seen a precipitous decline in submissions in the 15 years it's existed.

Series of four pictures of a Foster's tern catching a small squid.

Was at Moss Landing for a project on sea otters. More on that later. I also took tons of pics of terns and I kept just missing them catching food. Or so I thought. I got back this afternoon and discovered this series. I never knew this was in their diet. #Birds

Deconstructing the morphological basis of ecogeographic variation in the hand-wing index, a widely used proxy for avian mobility, in the Yellow Warbler (Setophaga petechia)
@asn-amnat.bsky.social doi.org/10.1086/739176
#birds #collectionsareessential #museums #ornithology #evosky

A logo for the CAMBIUM NRT featuring stylized rings.

An organ pipe cactus in the moonlight with a starry sky above.

The CAMBIUM NSF NRT is recruiting PhD students @uarizona.bsky.social! Fellowships for interdisciplinary training in biodiversity big data to adapt to & mitigate climate change impacts. Great fit for evolutionary genomics, bioinformatics, plant adaptation, ecology & more. cambium.arizona.edu 🧬🌐🌎

Alrighty, ready to see something really cool? (and maybe a little nauseating)

The evolution of Hurricane Melissa's mesovortices at peak strength.

Right. To put it another way: there's tens millions of amino-acid changes on both lineages. To first approx. we don't know what any of them do. Against that background, Would you really expect to see an excess of changes on the human lineage? Or is it just that a tiny fraction of them are "key".

Sorry meaning: with 20k genes worth of protein evolution, there's no shortage of protein coding changes that could potentially underlie morphological change along the human lineage.

The paper has always seemed like an interesting discussion section that's a strange logical leap from the data they had in hand.

But it's not really clear that this argument is particularly solid. Even if all morph. evol was all protein evol. would they have expected to see a lot of protein evol. along human lineage? With >20k genes that's a lot of amino acid subs, is there a shortage of change?

IIRC King and Wilson also makes what in hindsight seems a strange argument. They find their estimate of human-chimp protein coding divergence surprisingly low (it's also nicely accurate). They then jump to humans are really different from human-chimp common anc, so must be "regulatory" differences.

I should’ve learned this by now but DO NOT use FedEx. The diseased monkeys I ordered haven’t arrived and I can’t get a straight answer on what happened to them

The Johri Lab has an open postdoc position. Please send me an email, if interested. Start date is flexible. Please do share! Thank you in advance.

Michigan Fall 2025 Phenology Watch Day 47.

POSITIONS default description

I am looking for a postdoc to work in our long-term system of food-caching mountain chickadees in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The expected start is April 2026. Please see details here: chickadeecognition.com/positions
If interested and qualified, please contact me directly (email on the website).

This series is wonderful every year.

Doing the same for second harvest of silicon valley: impact.shfb.org! More people rely on these resources in the Bay Area than the national average

bsky.app/profile/tlow...

Consider donating to a local food bank if you can.

Food stamps will be cut off on Nov 1 because Republicans cannot and will not lead.

Cash donations are better than food donations so they can buy bulk for the food people want. Sacramento:
support.sacramentofoodbank.org/give/126385/...

We left the US and moved to France Hello readers, I got big updates! Some of you already know this, but it’s getting more real and more official every month: my family and I have left the US and moved to France! A few months ago I q…

I started a new job in Montpellier, France!
Happy about new opportunities, sad about the state of things in the US.

abetterscientist.wordpress.com/2025/10/26/w...