Brian O'Meara

I’m so excited for this! Who’s going?

My talk will be about time, as ecology’s final frontier: dynamics, timescales, resolution and extent, historical contingencies, and the denominator of all ecological processes.

Publisher demands $500 from impersonated author to retract paper Last year, we wrote about a Walsh Medical Media journal that refused to withdraw an author’s paper unless he paid a fee — even though he didn’t write or submit the article. For one reader, some det…

Lol. This is academic publishing taken to its logical end.

Happy birthday!!!

Graph of award probability of R35 and R01 from NIH factbook as a function of review rank percentile. As is apparent, 2025 is a significant departure, with lower award probabilities at all scores <40 and significant departures from norm, where even being in the top 10% is no longer a nearly certain indicator of success. Data source: https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/302

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted.

What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards.

Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

Having set up a symposium at the last ASN meeting I can HIGHLY recommend the experience— you get to put together a list of people you want to see talking about science in a single location and ... it actually happens?

Call_Long Island 2027[16].docx The American Society of Naturalists Proposals for Symposia at the ASN stand-alone meeting in Long Island 2027 Due April 30, 2026 The American Society of Naturalists will be holding an East Coast m...

The American Society of Naturalists @asn-amnat.bsky.social
will be holding our next meeting in Glen Cove, New York on 8-12 January 2027!

Have an idea for a special symposium? We want to hear it!
#ecology #evolution #behavior 🧪 #popgen 🧬
Applications due Apr 30: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

I think this is a great argument, beautifully constructed

Grant Witness is hiring! We're seeking a full-time data scientist to join our team building data resources to support journalism, litigation, and activism protecting science, public health, and the rule of law. grant-witness.us/apply.html #rstats

The spot near the door on the right.

(Kidding)

I’m going to patent the idea of elaiosomes for consumer goods. “Ants will aggregate all your consumer waste: drills, bicycles, …”

Pls re-post: My department @oxfordbiochemistry.bsky.social are recruiting for several new faculty positions (links below). Broad search in molecular biology/biochemistry, across prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Interested in understanding life at the molecular level, this job might be for you!
1/n

Beloved lepidopterist Kevin dissects some noctuid genitalia in the Visible Lab, which he has decorated to look like the penalty box at a hockey game. He is wearing a Pens jersey and a hockey helmet while he looks thru the microscope.

I thought our new “visible lab” space felt like a petting zoo but @mothpotato.bsky.social had a much better idea

kill the imposter syndrome in you head because not only is there someone out there doing it worse than you, they're also using chat gpt to do it

Anyways.

Birds That Don't Exist: Niche Pre‐Emption as a Constraint on Morphological Evolution in the Passeroidea We use topological data analysis to reveal a persistent morphological gap in a major group of songbirds (superfamily Passeroidea). The gap remained unoccupied for millions of years, even though nearb...

Well damn, this is cool.

Birds That Don't Exist: Niche Pre-Emption as a Constraint on Morphological Evolution in the Passeroidea | Chia et al., 2026 | Ecology Letters

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

I’d be happy to go over the economics with you (been on the core organizing committee for 4 years, chief organizer for 2), but this is far and away the most cost effective way to offer a virtual meeting and has been great for global engagement

Evolution has been the two separate modalities for a few years now. The SSB-only satellite meetings are only in person

🎓We are advertising three 2-year research+teaching positions in applied maths or stats.

These have a reduced teaching load (50 lectures a yr) compared to a standard academic position so applicants can gain teaching experience while having time for research

jobs.canterbury.ac.nz/jobdetails/a...

If there were ever a species that would be the right one to do conservation on, it’d be this.

🐳 Large, charismatic
🐳 Easy to track
🐳 Of interest to tourists
🐳 Near many universities, aquariums
🐳 Clear risks

and yet down to <400 individuals, and we’re seeking to deregulate

Enabling Fieldwork for All (EFFA) Framework: Supporting physical, social, financial, and psychological safety in the field Comprehensive review of fieldwork safety literature across disciplines yields synthesized recommendations.

Excited to share a new paper written by a AAAS Policy Fellow I mentor, Dr. Lisa Walsh.

“This review synthesizes literature on fieldwork safety across scientific disciplines, highlighting four facets of safety for leaders and researchers to address: physical, social, financial, and psychological.”

0th International Barcode of Life Conference in Bangkok, 2-6 November 2026

Registration and abstract submission is open for the 10th International Barcode of Life Conference in Bangkok, 2-6 November 2026 dnabarcodingconference.com #dnabarcoding @boldsystems.bsky.social @iboleurope.bsky.social

🚨 We're hiring!
Postdoctoral positions in modeling of development and evolution at @stockholm-uni.bsky.social & @scilifelab.se

Focus: dynamical systems, time-series, phylogenetics, dimensionality reduction

📍 Stockholm
🕒 2+1 years
🔍 Details: su.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

Please share!

I could see it maybe being useful for history. But the reality is it’d probably just train future LLMs that (human, orangutan) is a viable hypothesis…

Huh. I suspect I have years of archives in my inbox. Would this be of interest to put online somewhere?

Tatsuya seminar

Social insect themed snacks

Social insect themed spread

Grape termites with almond sliver legs and edible eyes!

Great day for the #MoreauLab! Postdoc Tatsuya Inagaki @tatsuyainagaki.bsky.social gave the EEB seminar and we hosted a pre-seminar social insect themed coffee!

David Marques was an amazing speciation genomics researcher, a passionate birder, and a wonderful friend, husband, and father. May he rest in peace. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We already have more than 💯 participants for #ExE2026, but there are still places available.

Once you have registered, you have until April 1 to submit an abstract, so don’t miss out and register now at sites.exeter.ac.uk/exe/registra...

Everything you need to know is 👇 and at evoxeco.uk!

Symbols This is some text with a footnote.* Here is another footnote.† And a third.‡ A fourth footnote here.§ And a fifth.¶ Sixth,‖ seventh,** eighth,†† ninth,‡‡ and tenth.§§

Continuing from a Previous Document This document is part of a series. The previous part had three footnotes, so this one begins at iv.iv The numbering continues naturally.v And so on.vi A fourth footnote here.vii And a fifth.viii Footnotes First footnote in this document — marker is iv. ↩︎ Second footnote — marker is v. ↩︎ Third footnote — marker is vi. ↩︎ Fourth footnote — marker is vii. ↩︎ Fifth footnote — marker is viii. ↩︎

Format support Every Quarto format handles footnotes differently, and not every format supports every possible extension option. | Feature | HTML | LaTeX | Typst | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | All `style` options | Yes | Yes | Yes | | `custom` symbols | Yes | Yes | Yes | | `cycle` modes | Yes | Yes | Yes | | `start-at` | Yes | Yes | Yes | | `marker-prefix`/`marker-suffix` | Yes | Yes | Yes | | `text-prefix`/`text-suffix` | Yes | No | No | | CSS customization | Yes | — | — |

Three screenshots from InDesign showing the `style` option, `start-at` option, and `marker/text prefix/suffix` options

New #QuartoPub extension! Footnote Styles: github.com/andrewheiss/...

You can use one of nine InDesign-style footnote numbering systems (like *, †, ‡, §, ¶ symbols!) or define your own. You can also start numbers at arbitrary values and do a bunch of other neat things.

This is making the rounds uncredited once again, so... 🤷‍♀️

A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025 for the Directorate of Biological Sciences.

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