Colautti Lab

Gradual pollen release in a buzz‐pollinated plant: Investigating pollen presentation theory under bee visitation Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

How do plants stave off greedy pollinators? Read our new paper on pollen dosing in buzz pollinated flowers just out in @funecology.bsky.social
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

New paper by former MSc student @christeinecke.bsky.social! ⭐ A behemoth effort to apply artificial selection on clonal reproduction in #Mimulus guttatus. We show that clonality evolves quickly, but not symmetrically in both directions, and multivariate life history traits are altered too! 🧪🌾

A corpse flower. The Corpse Flower is not a single flower, but a huge cluster of flowers on a central spike called a spadix. This one was 7 feet tall. The colorful "flower" consists of a large, vase-shaped, ruffled spathe (a modified leaf) that encloses the spadix.

A corpse flower. The Corpse Flower is not a single flower, but a huge cluster of flowers on a central spike called a spadix. This one was 7 feet tall. The colorful "flower" consists of a large, vase-shaped, ruffled spathe (a modified leaf) that encloses the spadix. This picture shows the flowers up close.

A corpse flower. The Corpse Flower is not a single flower, but a huge cluster of flowers on a central spike called a spadix. This one was 7 feet tall. The colorful "flower" consists of a large, vase-shaped, ruffled spathe (a modified leaf) that encloses the spadix.

Bucket list ✅

I got to see a corpse flower in full bloom! It smelled like cooked broccoli to me - not that bad, but my friends thought it was awful. 🤷🏻‍♀️ Totally worth the 2.5 hr wait with friends and really fun to see so many people excited about plants!

🙋‍♀️ that's me!!

So happy with this one!

A room full of people working on laptops

Great two days of BES data/code hack-a-thon. 111 people (in person + online) collating data and chatting about open science. Big take homes so far: people ❤️ open science; data/code archiving means different things to different people; we can make some simple improvements with big impacts!

Dear everyone, More science and natural history posts please 🙏🏼 🧪 🌍

Equation showing that the sum of all integers raised as a power of 10 is equal to -1/9, which can be proven mathematically

I love math! It’s so weird and fun and relevant, but we rarely teach it that way! Here’s a fun example I show to bio students that exposes a glitch in this shared delusion/simulation we are all living in:

This study of intelligence in the UK Biobank is typical of a lot of current social science genomics. Impressive technically, and not over-interpreted. But still, a main result gets lost in the sauce. Within-families, the direct-effect polygenic score explains no more that 1-3% of the variance. /1

Dryad partnership brings easier data sharing to bioRxiv bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

bioRxiv partners with Dryad to enable easier, better linking to curated datasets connect.biorxiv.org/news/2025/09...

Experimental approaches and key outcomes supporting the Allelopathy Postulates relevant to competitive interactions and the novel weapons hypothesis (NWH). Numbers in red correspond to the 11 postulates summarized in Table 1. The full experimental framework comprises five sequential steps: (a) assess the natural concentrations of a potential allelopathic compound; (b) demonstrate its ability to suppress native vegetation; releasing resources that enhance growth and reproduction of the invader (e.g. light, nutrients, water); (c) confirm that the compound has limited autotoxicity to the invading species; (d) investigate the biogeographical basis of the allelopathic compound as a ‘novel weapon’ by demonstrating that native communities coevolving with the invader in its home range are significantly more resistant to the allelopathic compound compared to those in the introduced (away) range; (e) confirm that genotypes producing higher concentrations of the allelopathic compounds experience a fitness cost in the context of intraspecific competition but gain a fitness advantage under interspecific competition. Investigating the role of soil-mediated interactions (11) is transversal across different components of the framework

Now published in @newphyt.bsky.social, @1pantunes.bsky.social and I review evidence for the "Novel Weapons Hypothesis" and the role of allelopathy during invasion. Bottom line: there is very good reason to be skeptical.
dx.doi.org/10.1111/nph....

A pensive Minerva contemplating the precarious state of science in the world.

Very excited to see this work in press! I think there is a reason to believe that this is a common means of stabilizing large-effect polymorphisms in general and might be an important reason for why diploidy is so common. news.stanford.edu/stories/2025...

Screenshot of an email inbox full of automated messages from NSERC

Ahh, that most wonderful time of year when the hot weather starts to cool down, leaves start to change colour, and grant application spam starts to nestle into your inbox

This is an essay by David Wardle on my book (a pocket guide to scientific wriing and publishing). Can you make one or two tweets with some of the highlights of this text, so i advertise my book? Ecologist Here are ten points that continue to guide my own scientific writing. These are of course what works for me and are loaded with my opinions – others might have very different ways of doing things, and as always there are multiple equally effective alternative routes to the end goal. 1. Every manuscript needs a really simple take home message – what it is that you have discovered and why it is important ideally something that can be stated in a single sentence. Everything in the manuscript, from your hypotheses to your figures and tables, should then somehow connect to it.

One of the most enjoyable parts of my book was inviting researchers I admire to contribute essays

This what David Wardle said:
Every manuscript needs a simple take-home message. Every sentence must earn its place. Keep it clear, keep it simple.

I miss the old brand #CDC

Gene Expression Divergence Between Locally Adapted Inland Annual and Coastal Perennial Ecotypes of Mimulus guttatus Across Developmental Stages The action of natural selection across heterogeneous natural landscapes drives local adaptation and the formation of plant ecotypes, the precursors to new species. Plant ecotypes typically differ sig...

New paper out of the lab today: “Gene Expression Divergence Between Locally Adapted Inland Annual and Coastal Perennial Ecotypes of Mimulus guttatus Across Developmental Stages” onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The goal of a PhD is not to learn some facts or read a few papers or learn a bunch of techniques. The goal of a PhD is to learn independence, problem solving, how to finish things you start, resilience, & gain the ability to adapt & think creatively. Learning these things is hard.

"Everyone should think carefully about using generative AI simply because the technology is built on environmental destruction, labor exploitation, and IP theft"

A screenshot of the first page of the scientific paper linked in the post.

Delighted to share the lab’s first independent publication, a Tansley Insight in @newphyt.bsky.social where we analyse new crop genomics studies to show how we can engineer plants that can grow at different latitudes (key for climate-smart Ag) nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

On the role of mutualisms in plant biogeography: consequences for ecology, evolution, and invasion Most plant species world-wide depend on one or more mutualisms – beneficial associations with other species. Evidence is emerging that these biotic mutualisms shape plant biogeography (i.e. distribut....

So excited that my Tansley Insight "On the role of mutualisms in plant biogeography: consequences for ecology, evolution, and invasion" is out today!! @newphyt.bsky.social

Bittersweet to be leaving @docedge.bsky.social after a wonderful postdoc, but excited to share that I'm joining @uoregon.bsky.social next month as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Data Science.

book cover of the book "A Pocket Guide to Scientific Writing and Publishing" by Martin A. Nunez

Just got the final proofs of my book💓

Available on Amazon worldwide next week
Very exciting!

I’ve packed into it everything I’ve learned about writing and publishing over the past 20 years

I really hope it helps many jump over the writing and publishing barriers💪

Post promotion, I quit tracking conference presentations, titles of seminars, run of the mill service, etc.

OOPS! You'll eventually run into someone who cares what year you were on Grad Admissions or gave an SSE talk.

Asking people to track their years on the seminar committee is really stupid.

A critical reassessment of the novel weapons hypothesis and allelopathy as an adaptive strategy that facilitates plant invasion Plants have evolved an assortment of chemical adaptations that integrate environmental cues with developmental processes to regulate growth and reproduction. A subset of these phytochemicals may be c....

A THREAD: Our new paper, with @colauttilab.bsky.social, critically assesses whether allelopathy truly gives invaders their edge. Key takeaways 👇🧵

doi.org/10.1111/nph....

Our latest work with @colauttilab.bsky.social is out today!
Always great to work with Rob, one of the best evolutionary biologists out there. We hope this work sparks some important conversations on allelopathy and reproducibility in ecological research.
nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Friends don't let friends collect data without adding data validation.

From Rebekah Jacob 😉

M O I L A B - Join us! Join us! Our lab is based at the University of California, Berkeley, embedded in the vibrant and multicultural San Francisco Bay Area, surrounded by astonishing nature!

Network, we are looking for PhD students and Postdocs on evolutionary and ecological genomics in 2025/2026

Join our diverse and welcoming lab at UC Berkeley & HHMINEWS!

Check job ads-> www.moilab.science/team/join-us

1) kids pbs is completely free, everyone with a kid should get that because regular kids shows suck- loud and obnoxious with really rapid scene changes that suck my kids in and make them hyper.
2) being able to watch any nova/ nature/ secrets of the dead/ walk with dinosaurs anytime is awesome

A data matrix summarizing eleven Allelopathy Postulates across 41 studies testing the Novel Weapons Hypothesis (NWH). Of the 451 total cells, 351 are shaded grey, indicating that most postulates were untested in most studies. Of the remaining 100, 78 are shaded green, indicating support for the NWH while the remaining 22 indicate evidence contrary to the NWH or mixed support.

Coming soon (with @1pantunes.bsky.social)...