Oonagh Barker

Austrospirachtha carrijoi, a species of rove beetle, with text that says: Beetle grows ‘termite’ on back to steal food.

In what may be one of Earth’s craziest forms of mimicry, researchers in 2023 reported a species of rove beetle that grows a termite puppet on its back to fool real termites into feeding it.

Learn more on #NationalWildlifeDay: https://scim.ag/4mM2aS9

Thanks @amandabretman.bsky.social !

First time I've dropped a tray, am I right in feeling like this is a milestone in a Drosophila-based PhD?

Incredible luck in that this is the best possible time this could have happened, and least important tray it could have happened to, in this 4-months-and-counting long experiment!

Human evolution: a one-million-year clusterf**k A new incredibly subtle and elegant analysis of our living genomes reveals yet another major piece in the jigsaw of human evolution, completely hidden until now.

New substack, on @trevorcousins.bsky.social and @aylwyn-scally.bsky.social's brilliant new paper on the origin of Homo sapiens.

arutherford.substack.com/p/human-evol...

Yep, it's a PIPS! My PhD is 4 years long for this reason, and the placement has to be completed before our final year to avoid chaos while writing up.

My PhD program (the NRP DTP) has a mandatory 3 month internship - we have to arrange it ourselves, in anything we like, and we continue to receive our usual funding throughout, so we can try out a post-PhD plan B (or A) outside academia. It's a great idea& should be more widely adopted.

Hurray! Some good news for bees at last. Our new government has followed the science, and refused the application by sugar beet farmers to use banned neonicotinoid pesticides.

Photo of a small crab from NOAA’s social media. It’s covered in spikes

Just making sure that everyone is aware of this crab that NOAA scientists found

Petition: Ban driven grouse shooting Chris Packham, Ruth Tingay and Mark Avery (Wild Justice) believe that driven grouse shooting is bad for people, the environment and wildlife. People; we think grouse shooting is economically insignifi...

The wholesale extermination of predators on grouse moors needs to stop. Please consider signing this petition in order to speed things up.

petition.parliament.uk/petitions/70...

'One of the most important species for science': How the humble fruit fly transformed four fields of research The common fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster), more correctly called the vinegar fly, is a frequent visitor to ripe fruit in households around the world, where it often deposits eggs on rotting flesh...

I love this article partly because it details how this little fly has been vital for all sorts of research, including for human health.

But I really love the part about where fruit flies originated and how they’ve conquered the world. 🍓🍒🍷🪰

🧪 🪲 🪳

phys.org/news/2025-01...

PhyloPic PhyloPic is an open database of free silhouette images of animals, plants, and other life forms, available for reuse under Creative Commons licenses. Download silhouettes for use in educational materi...

Ok people. I’m drawing silhouettes this afternoon. If you have a paper coming up and you are in need of a #silhouette please let me know and I will have it ready today. As always I upload all my silhouettes to phylopic.org

I also have tutorials on how to put a silhouette in a plot in R.

Hello Bluesky,
We're so excited to be launching our first post for EMPSEB30! 🎉🤩
We've got lots of news to share! We've found an amazing venue and some fantastic plenary speakers, and we're on the lookout for sponsors!
Visit empseb30.mpipz.mpg.de to dive in!

#EMPSEB30 #Students #Conference

Delighted to have had a small part in this very cool paper - my undergraduate final project contributed to the dataset. And big congrats to Rob and the others on the outcome! 🎉

Predictive text being helpful as ever as I tried to decide on some keywords for my bio...

I'm standing on a ledge in a cave, looking out of a 'window' through which you can see the sky and some wintery-looking trees. I'm wearing a blue and black caving suit with a muddy climbing style harness and a bright red helmet.

When not cooking weird little jelly squares to feed fruit flies, I might be found hiding in a hole somewhere under the Yorkshire Dales (Photo by my talented friend Ben Richards).

Hello Bluesky! I'm Oonagh, a penultimate year PhD student working on life history responses to nutrition in Drosophila. Interested in sexual selection, lifespan, ageing, evolutionary ecology - lots. Looking forward to making connections on a less unhinged platform.

Yes please! @obarker.bsky.social

My first 🦋 thread - a bit of science stuff for new followers. 👋
Friday night release by PLoS Biology. Not ideal but some weekend reading for fans of sexual selection journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... 1/9