Joachim Mergeay

1. The European Parliament’s attempt to ban plant-based foods from being sold as “sausages”, “burgers” etc is a direct response to livestock industry lobbying. This is a short thread on how utterly bleeding ridiculous it is. 🧵1/6

Sound up!
I don't think I've shared this on bluesky.. a phone memory!

A #Jay imitating a few things including a tawny owl.
This is still my phone ringtone,I love it!

Evaluating the demographic impacts of the highly pathogenic avian influenza panzootic Our findings demonstrate that the HPAIV panzootic can cause rapid and long-lasting impacts on the dynamics of long-lived species. This raises major concerns for the conservation and long-term viabili....

Since 2021, HPAI outbreaks have affected unprecedented amounts of bird and mammal species throughout the world.

In a new study @jappliedecology.bsky.social we show how to quantify these demographic impacts—and reveal severe effects on an atypical host: the peregrine falcon.

doi.org/10.1111/1365...

Ancient dog and wolf genomes were less inbred than present day relatives. And more of this below! #consgen #mammals 🦊

Majority of local insect biomass decline linked to species loss A new study shows that over 90% of insect biomass declines are driven by shrinking species numbers, posing a risk to ecosystem function.

📢 Over 90% of local insect biomass decline in German grasslands is explained by species loss.

“By the end of the study period, species loss, regardless of rarity or size, had become the main driver of decline”, says @bmwildermuth.bsky.social of #iDiv and @uni-jena.de

www.idiv.de/majority-of-...

Inbreeding and the history of it is most reliably assessed from runs of homozygosity. How reliably this works depends on reference genome quality and on resequencing quality and depth. 👇#consgen

Native megafauna (Bison bison) act as a surprising inhibitor of cedar tree expansion in a Great Plains grassland In the Central Great Plains of North America, fire suppression is causing transitions from grasslands to shrublands and woodlands. This woody encroachment alters plant community composition, decrease...

2025. Native megafauna (Bison bison) act as a surprising inhibitor of cedar tree expansion in a Great Plains grassland esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

An issue we're seeing at all levels of university is that many students are simply refusing to do *anything*. They aren't reading the syllabus, aren't following assignment guidelines, aren't engaging with material, ignoring deadlines. And this might seem like old news, but it truly has ramped up.

We will continue reiterating this. Until European leaders and their intelligence service folks wake up and start fighting Putin's imperialism instead of facilitating or ignoring it.

Island biota often coevolved in complete isolation of any traits expressed by large herbivore mammals, so obviously there is a large probability of having negative impacts. This strongly drives the results in this paper, but this is hardly surprising. 5/5

Evaluating the impact of the invasion then depends on your value system and your focus, but the impact may not be caused by the intrinsic fact that the introduced species is non-native. 4/

Suppose you introduce sika deer, or reintroduce red deer. In both there's a large impact, which is positive for some and negative for other species. The impact may not be caused by the invasiveness in case A, but by reintroduction of the function of a large grazer, not distinguishable from B. 3/

We often cannot disentangle the effect of invasion of species A from the effect a native similar sp. B would have. Imagine an European ecosystem in which red deer have been absent for 200 years. We now have an ecological equilibrium with a community shaped by the absence of red deer. 2/

This tastes a lot like a nothingburger. Native and non-native are less binary than typically portrayed (is fallow deer native in W-Europe? Should we consider breeding barnacle geese outside Spitsbergen as native or invasive?), and impact depends on your value system. 1/

Surprise! The “peace plan” is really just a plan for Trump, Witkoff, Don Junior and their friends to get rich.

Everything is a grift. (And the Hunter hunters are silent)

www.wsj.com/world/russia...

Footage of Israeli Soldiers Executing 2 Palestinians in West Bank Sparks Outrage The incident is part of a pattern of extrajudicial killings as Israel escalates its military assault on the West Bank.

The incident is part of a pattern of extrajudicial killings as Israel escalates its military assault on the West Bank.

although Annex V of the Habitats Directive continues to require that populations achieve and maintain favourable conservation status, there has been very little enforcement of this obligation at the EU level.
There is IMO a genuine risk of collapse of certain wolf populations because of this. /

The authors also note risks of downlisting species: people don't really want fewer large carnivores, but less protection means some countries view this as a licence to dramatically cull populations, such as Finland, Sweden, and now also Germany.
This conflicts with the legal EU obligations but /

Understanding habitat selection of range‐expanding populations of large carnivores: 20 years of grey wolves (Canis lupus) recolonizing Germany Aim The non-stationarity in habitat selection of expanding populations poses a significant challenge for spatial forecasting. Focusing on the grey wolf (Canis lupus) natural recolonization of German...

People support stable populations (no growth), but also oppose hunting / culling. There is, however, still a huge margin of growth for large carnivores, especially wolves. Germany currently has circa 210 wolf packs, but models suggest capacity for 700-1400 packs. doi.org/10.1111/ddi....

Europeans support large carnivore recovery while opposing both further population growth and hunting Nature Ecology & Evolution - A survey of 10,000 members of the public across European Union countries in which there are large carnivores finds strong support for carnivore recovery but...

A new study by @clawsandlaws.bsky.social indicates broad support for large carnivore conservation across Europe: in every country surveyed, they find support for large carnivore recovery outweighs opposition—often by a substantial margin.

However, it's more complicated than that 🦊
rdcu.be/eSmW5

‘Dit is dolgedraaide juristocratie’: Mark Elchardus over migratiebeleid en het Europees Hof voor de Rechten van de Mens

Mark Elchardus is emeritus professor sociologie aan de VUB en de auteur van Reset, Vrijheid/Veiligheid en Over grenzen. Zijn column verschijnt tweewekelijks. Hij buigt zich over het migratiebeleid en vraagt zich af of de EU van het asielrecht weer een recht op asiel kan maken.

🍔 A ban on the word ‘veggie burger’?! Tell EU leaders to vote against it!

The EU could soon censor words like ‘veggie burger’ and ‘plant-based steak’, a gift to the meat industry that raises costs & red tape for sustainable food producers -- unless we stop it! Join the call to EU Heads of State to reject the 'veggie burger' ban secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/... #Veggie

Er IS geen black friday want er is geen thanksgiving in Europa en dus geen overschot van de thanksgiving stock die niet verkocht werd. Het is zever in pakskes.

Striking animation showing the magnitude of glacier collapse since ca 1900 in the Alps! 🧊🔥

All the retreat you see here is caused by human activity, and it will only stop when the last cubic metre of ice has melted! 📈💧

📷 Photos: @glacionaut
🎥 AI Animation: @flashologo

The BBC removed a line about Trump being the most openly corrupt president in American history...from a lecture about the cowardice of today's elites.
I wonder if the BBC has heard of the Streisand Effect

Schandalig dit: Franse rechter van het Internationaal Gerechtshof getroffen door Amerikaanse sancties. Hij heeft niet alleen toegang tot zijn Microsoft-account verloren, maar ook die tot Google, Amazon en Apple en kan zijn Amerikaanse creditcards niet gebruiken:

Democracies don’t collapse overnight, they gradually erode in acts of fear. #BBC

Half the breeding population of Elephant Seals on South Georgia lost to H5N1 (bird flu). The impact this will have on the species, the local food web, and even ocean fertilization is hard to comprehend.