Anuj Shinde

A close up of a toad in water. Its head is above the surface. You can see the fly's larvae in its nostrils; they look like little white gelatinous balls.

Did you know? The toad fly lays its eggs in an unusual place: a toad’s nostrils. When its eggs hatch, the larvae feed on the toad’s face and body. Unfortunately, this leads to the toad’s demise.
Jona263d, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

New on global conservation science:

Empowerment is central to people-centered conservation but rarely defined or grounded in theory. A review finds rhetoric often outweighs practice & research often focuses on communities in the Global South.

Petriello et al. in Cons. Biol. doi.org/10.1111/cobi...

Metabolically driven flows enable exponential growth in macroscopic multicellular yeast Metabolically generated flow is an emergent mechanism that alleviates diffusion limits in macroscopic multicellular yeast.

#LatestPublicationAlert!
Nishant Narayanasamy & team from Dr @stpalli.bsky.social's lab investigated how early multicellular clusters may have overcome this diffusion barrier to facilitate nutrient transport and exponential growth.
Congratulations to the team!🎉
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Screenshot of the title and author list from the Correspondence article "Six actions for ecologists in times of planetary crisis" from the Nature Ecology & Evolution homepage

Six actions for ecologists in times of planetary crisis: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

✅Explicitly recognize and address the #biodiversity crisis
✅Explore positive futures
✅Defend academic freedom
✅Go political
✅Inspire society
✅Address the colonial legacy of ecology

Free to read: rdcu.be/eqjlk

Two straight sets! What an incredible game ✨

Beautiful turquoise water near Exmouth, WA last month. We were sharing the beach with this bizarre-looking Lerista skink (second photo: L. planiventralis) that had left trails all over the sand.

Data are everywhere…

“Here, we examine an unusual source of information: classic Chinese poetry. From 724 ancient poems containing references to the Yangtze finless porpoise (N. asiaeorientalis), we infer that the range of this subspecies has contracted by at least 65% over the past 1400 years.”

Dive into our latest issue!🌊
www.cell.com/issue/S0960-...

On the cover:Yangtze porpoises in troubled waters🐬 by Yaoyao Zhang and colleagues www.cell.com/current-biol...

New species alert!
🦎🧪

We (myself, Glenn Shea, Stephen Richards and Paul Oliver) just published a description of a fantastic new species of Prasinohaema from New Guinea. A short thread:

(A) Island connectivity with sea level change. Present-day emergent land is coloured for cluster membership inferred with DAPC (see B), and islands unsampled in this study are shown in white. Sampling localities are shown by green dots. Elevation (above sea level) is shown by contour lines (200 m spacing). Smaller islands (Ste. Anne and Curieuse) are circled for clarity. The grey shaded area represents exposed land, with the shade of grey in the key indicating metres below current sea level. Bathymetry data from the GEBCO 2024 repository. Inset map shows position of the Seychelles (indicated with a green loop) relative to Africa. Latitude and longitude given in decimal degrees. (B) DAPC of K = 4, with eight PCs and two eigenvalues. (C) Hypogeophis rostratus, photographed by STM.

Structure plot with 10 runs permuted in CLUMPAK and plotted in distruct for K = 2 and K = 3. Vertical bars represent individuals (n = 77). Labels above the plots correspond to the major genetic clusters. Colour codes as in (1B).

New paper led by Miranda Sherlock on "Submerged Corridors of Ancient Gene Flow in an Island Amphibian". In this paper we found that populations of the Seychelles #caecilian Hypogeophis rostratus would have been connected by palaeo-islands across Seychelles
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....
🧪🐸🐍

Very happy and humbled to have received this award. A huge thanks to all my wonderful colleagues @scienceanu.bsky.social and abroad who made this possible!

Check out our big new meta-analysis looking at plasticity and changes in physiological rate variance under climate change. Huge effort with a great team of fantastic thinkers! @itchyshin.bsky.social @fontikar.bsky.social Frank Seebacher and Alex Bush

Blue azurite and green malachite from the Singing Stone!

Painting looking up at two trees with pink blosdom against a blue sky with white clouds

'Cherry Blossom' painting by contemporary U.S impressionist style painter Erin Hanson #WomensArt #Spring

Photo credit: Peter soltys. Image created by Nicholas Wu.

How vulnerable are #amphibians to extreme heat? 🐸🌡️

Our paper in @nature.com shows that many amphibians are already overheating, and many more species will be impacted by climate warming globally.

See the thread below for a digest 🧵

Link to the paper: doi.org/10.1038/s415...

#Nature

If any frog were ever butterscotch flavoured, it would be this one. It literally looks just like a butterscotch from the bottom of your gran’s purse; slightly squashed and replete with a little black stain of undetermined origin that won’t stop you eating it. Yum.

I don’t feel like I have anything to contribute to the conversation right now except possibly distraction by means of pretty frogs. So, here is Platypelis tuberifera. A personal favourite. 🐸💚🧪

Does seasonal variation in the corticosterone response affect the nutritional ecology of a free‐ranging lizard? Corticosterone responsiveness to metabolic challenges in the wild can vary between sexes and across seasons depending on the life-history stage. Given its role in mobilizing energy, corticosterone le...

New paper out in @animalecology.bsky.social! In this study, led by Avik Banerjee, we examined the link between stress and nutrition in wild lizards. Stress levels influence nutrient retention, not dietary composition, in these colourful agamids!
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Northern fungoid frogs (Hydrophylax bahuvistara) getting it on in the Western Ghats

Mackinnon's Wolf Snake (Lycodon bicolor)

Chir Pine (Pinus roxburghii) Forests

Flipping rocks in the chir pine forests of Western Himalaya led us to a Mackinnon's Wolf Snake.

It's still cold here- perhaps we were its first visitors since winter began.

hello, my name is sam altman with an important transmission.

you may be familiar with my product, mega-plagiarizer 9000.

i have compelling evidence that the chinese have plagiarized the mega-plagiarizer 9000 in creating their rival mega-plagiarizer.

this is unacceptable and will teach me nothing

One thing Bluesky has reminded me of is how social media can be really useful *before it goes evil*. Facebook was like this ~10-15 years ago. Like, I remember back when I used to watch my stat counters, you could post to Facebook and immediately get a lot of traffic.