Dr. Steven Whitfield

Hell yeah, Halloween Season! 🎃👻🧛🏻🕷️

🚨Important herpetology information ⬇️🐸🐸

Why you shouldn't take box turtles home to become your pets Karen Deville usually looks forward to rainy days — but not just because it waters her plants.

Karen Deville usually looks forward to rainy days — but not just because it waters her plants.

Restaurants should have physical menus, not just QR codes with links to menus!!

I “left academia” before I landed my first NSF grants or first Science paper. By academic metrics, leaving academia seemed like the key to my “academic success.” I publish more now and get more grants now than I did in academia. Lots of room in this space, but it has its own challenges.

Also, there’s lots of academic-adjacent jobs that may not be on folks’ radars that include teaching, mentoring, research, and service. And you may have more flexibility to decide what % of your time goes where. In particular right now this may be a good path for folks!

Oh yeah, and also we did it pretty well the first time.

The United States was founded to overthrow a king. What a good point to reflect on today.

I was feeling pretty solid about my accomplishments for the week until these little 4-week old birds started showing off and now I need to talk to my therapist.

A whole bunch of young birds in my neighborhood fledged this week. What did you accomplish, and is it better than learning to literally f***ing fly?!?!?!

The Blue Jay is a pretty awesome reptile.

A large black bee pollinated Lemon Bee Ball flowers.

A large black bee is so tired from pollinating that she takes a nap.

This Southern Carpenter Bee (?) just pollinated so hard she had to take a nap. Plenty more where that came from.

Any pollinators here on BlueSky? I’ve got some sweet Lemon Bee Balm in the Irish Channel, New Orleans for you. Bring your friends.

Audubon Zoo is one step closer to releasing two tortoises back into the wild The Audubon Zoo recently made significant progress towards releasing two of their tortoises back home into the wild

Super proud of Audubon Zoo’s Herpetology, Hospital, and Communications teams for this work with Gopher Tortoise Conservation. These tortoises are really special to me, and great to see this work moving forward!

I don’t know, but obviously is what the ideal carpet looks like.

Selfie of man in front of a large Red-Eyed Treefrog sculpture in an airport

Carpet printed with palm leaves and Strawberry Dart Poison Frogs

Headed home from a productive field conservation research trip in Costa Rica. One of the things that I love about this place is country is that it is wildlife- (and heavily frog-) themed. Here’s a giant frog sculpture in the airport, and even the airport carpet is printed with dart poison frogs.

something that stands out about this is just how cheap it is for us to have world-leading scientific capacity

we spent ~6.75 trillion last year, and the combined budgets for NIH, NSF and NASA are barely more than 1% of that

what an incredible waste to lose it all for a drop in the bucket

Graphs showing 25 years of budgets for the National Institute of Health, NASA, and the NSF. In all cases, the proposed budget for next year is far, far below any year of the previous quarter century.

There are 2 previous historical cases of countries destroying their science and universities, crippling them for decades: Lysenkoism in the USSR and Nazi Germany. The Trump administration will be the 3rd.
It's not just budgets but research, institutions, expertise, and training the next generation.

"The ‘silent’ half: diversity, function and the critical knowledge gap on female frog vocalizations" –Such cool work! Super proud of these three #HERpers latinas🇨🇴🇧🇷! 🎵🐸🎶
doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

If only people could replace their brains…

I’d love to know more about Monarch-milkweed-OE interactions across the range native to Tropical Milkweed.

tropical milkweed (Asclepias curassavica) tropical milkweed from Calle San Rafael Sur, San Carlos, Alajuela, CR on May 24, 2025 at 09:09 AM by Steven Whitfield

Saw this Tropical Milkweed in a pasture in Costa Rica. It’s so strange for me to see this species (a common ornamental in the US) in its native range. In the US, this species causes major problems for Monarch Butterflies.

No Mow Millenium!!

Bored with manicured lawns, some homeowners adopt No Mow May all year long Homeowners are finding more ways to adopt a low mow lifestyle instead of keeping up with short, manicured lawns.

Bored with manicured lawns, some homeowners adopt No Mow May all year long

Social science integration at state and federal fish and wildlife organizations in the United States Increasingly, conservation professionals and scholars recognize the need for more holistic integration of social science in fish and wildlife management. This call is often framed around the complexi...

New pub: now open access!

More and more we are recognizing the importance of social science in conservation. As we work to incorporate social science at our fish & wildlife agencies, we wanted to ask: how's it going? Check out our survey findings!

conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Seems like I’ve spent a lot my adult life looking for frog eggs and most humans just don’t know what they’re missing out on.

Subject:  Deferred Implementation of Indirect Cost Policy for Institutes of Higher Education (IHEs)   Issuance Date: May 20, 2025   Effective Date:  May 20, 2025   Applies to: All new awards and associated subawards to IHEs.   This notice is being issued to all NSF proposers and recipient organizations, Principal Investigators, and Authorized Officials for awareness.  The National Science Foundation (NSF) is temporarily pausing implementation of NSF Policy Notice: Implementation of Standard 15% Indirect Cost Rate (NSF 25-034) through June 13, when a hearing is scheduled to occur in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts in Association of American Universities, et al. v. National Science Foundation, et al., No. 25-cv-11231.  This policy applies to all new awards and associated subawards to IHEs. New NSF awards and associated subawards issued during this pause will not implement NSF 25-034 but will include a term applying NSF 25-034 for the entirety of the award if there is a court decision permitting application of the policy.    NSF reserves the right to modify, rescind, or fully implement NSF 25-034 to the entirety of awards and subawards issued to IHEs on or after May 5, 2025 in accordance with applicable legal rulings and administrative procedures.

📣🧪 #NSF is deferring implementation of the 15% indirect cap on all new awards and subawards to institutes of higher education through June 13, when a hearing is scheduled to occur in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts in Association of American Universities v. NSF

The research on this is super neat, linking bill morphology, foot stamping behavior, and fluid dynamics. Plus, its reaearch they did with living flamingo collections in zoos! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Scientists have figured out why flamingos are such weird eaters Flamingos look silly when they eat, but new research suggests they're actually being smart.

I had the pleasure of speaking with NPR this week about how weird flamingos are. Filter feeding isn’t that complicated but flamingos have to *completely overdo everything,* including their morphology and behavior.