Alec Downie

Hiring for 3 positions: Research Assistant, Field Research Coordinator, and Postdoc I am looking to hire 3 people into my lab this year. I am still doing the paperwork to get the jobs officially posted but I want to send the word out and screen potential applications right away. R…

I am hiring a research assistant (vampire bats), a Panama fieldwork coordinator (vampire bats), and also considering postdoc apps (social behavior, any species): socialbat.org/2026/02/19/h...

Just over a week left to apply for this PhD project (unfortunately UK students only). If you're interested then please get in touch!

When someone believes in you How the ARTEMIS mentoring programme connects African students and doctoral researchers with scientists of the Max Planck Society — and why mentoring means more than just offering professional advice

So happy to have been part of the ARTEMIS Programme last year! Check out this piece to see Imma Mungai and me, plus a brief overview of the programme.

The new call is open, if you’re a scientist at an MPI, it’s a lovely opportunity! 👇
tinyurl.com/2wcpvk7f

@maxplanck.de
tinyurl.com/4ampx26u

🧪Before the day begins, meerkats share a unique ritual. After emerging from their burrows, they spend up to an hour "sunning" to warm up for the day. During this quiet time, they produce soft, tonal "sunning calls". Just standing, sunbathing, and calling. But why❓ #bioacoustics #meerkats #kalahari

Postdoktor i parasiters populationsgenetik Zoologiska institutionen är en av de äldsta institutionerna vid Stockholms universitet och har en lång historia av grundläggande och tillämpad djurforskning, från leddjur till stora däggdjur. I

Looking for a postdoc to work with existing SNP data from parasites of guppies across Trinidad. How do river structure, host specialisation, and host behaviour structure parasite population genetic structure and evolutionary potential? Join me in Stockholm! Email me :D

su.varbi.com/what:job/job...

Systematic Literature Review figure of how genetic relatedness estimates are done in the wild.

(1/2) The preprint of our perspective on genetic estimates of relatedness in animal populations is out! Big Congratulations to Annika!
doi.org/10.32942/X28...

A systematic review of 2,861 articles shows that, even in 2025, 75% of such studies use microsatellites. And most use only a few!

#PopGen

This guy had no illusions of what America had been but believed in what it could be.

GBE | Genome Shows no Recent Inbreeding in Near-Extinction Woolly Rhinoceros Sample Found in Ancient Wolf's Stomach Autopsy of Tumat The autopsy of the Tumat-1 wolf puppy, when a fragment of a woolly rhinoceros tissue was found in the stomach. Coauthors Sergey Fedorov and Mikkel Sinding are shown. Location: Vienna, Austria. Date: 2018. Photo credit: Mietje Germonpré.

Guðjónsdóttir, @jcchacond.bsky.social et al. sequenced the genome of a >14kya old woolly rhino from muscle found inside a permafrost-preserved wolf's stomach. Demographic inference suggests a rapid extinction for the woolly rhino.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evaf239

#genome #evolution #aDNA

🚨🧪Listening to animals at scale is hard. animal2vec does the listening for you, automatically finding and classifying animal calls in huge datasets. Plus: MeerKAT, a massive new meerkat vocalization dataset, now public. #bioacoustics
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/99RWYS...

Embryo selection company Herasight goes all in on eugenics ...

I wrote about the bizarre case of Herasight, the embryo selection company going all in on eugenics.

Thank you so much @profjudiallen.bsky.social 🤩 Thanks also to #BSI2025 & session organizers including @kathelse.bsky.social 🤩 for a fabulous week of talks & lively discussions!! It was my first BSI but I’ll be back 🤓

Architecture of the neutrophil compartment - Nature Mapping of the neutrophil compartment using single-cell transcriptional data from multiple physiological and patological states reveals its organizational architecture and how cell state dynamics and trajectories vary during health, inflammation and cancer.

Nature research paper: Architecture of the neutrophil compartment

go.nature.com/3KzY1CV

***Super cool-project alert***⚠️ Come work with @dirkmetzler.bsky.social and me in trying to understand how transcriptional noise evolves in a phylogenetic context 🧬 Deadline 15th Dec 2025 (Project funded by @dfg.de @gevol.bsky.social)

Excited to introduce the Latent Layers Framework – now out in @behavecol.bsky.social – to help think through when and why network differences confound inference in (comparative) social network analysis! 🧵

tinyurl.com/3k3yahwy

Interested in how life history may shape the gut microbiome of a wild mammal? Keen on getting to work with an iconic long-term study system in Scotland?

Check out this PhD opportunity with me, Josephine Pemberton and @gfalbery.bsky.social

Reach out to chat more!

www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

The missing heritability question is now (mostly) answered Not with a bang but with a whimper

I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵

When different kinds of mobile genetic elements get together, they become even more powerful catalysts for microbial evolution! In this work we discovered a mechanism by which Insertion Sequences drive their spread across Plasmids, which helps explain this evolutionary potential!

Intracellular competition shapes plasmid population dynamics From populations of multicellular organisms to selfish genetic elements, conflicts between levels of biological organization are central to evolution. Plasmids are extrachromosomal, self-replicating g...

Hot off the press! Our latest paper led by @fernpizza.bsky.social, understanding how plasmids evolve inside cells. These small, self-replicating DNA circles live inside bacteria and carry antibiotic resistance genes, but also compete with one another to replicate. 1/
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Thanks very much! We took a lot of inspiration from the stickleback work you all have been doing, of course.

Lifetime fitness and annual survival are heritable and highly genetically correlated in a wild primate population https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.13.688343v1

If you have questions, comments, ideas, please get in touch! I love these topics and am always eager to chat about them with others, or evangelize, or learn!

Many thanks to @jennytung.bsky.social for writing this with me – the vague forms of these ideas have been rattling around in my head for a while, but she did a remarkable job using her own expertise and ideas to help me refine the concepts and express them in a clear format.

But we hope that our paper can help anyone working on immune system evolution, when thinking about their hypotheses, the methods they use to test them, and the implications of their results for the broader field of inquiry.

Evolutionary Immunology Immune systems pose fascinating puzzles for evolutionary biologists. They feature some of the most polymorphic genes and reflect the strongest natural selection known. Evolution of immune systems play...

There’s a wealth of great recent literature out there on evolutionary immunology (e.g., this review from @danielbolnick.bsky.social @laurenfuess.bsky.social @grahammunology.bsky.social @nataliesteinel.bsky.social
and others not here: doi.org/10.1146/annu...)

Figure 3 from manuscript with two curves, showing faster evolution of an immune trait with an oligogenic architecture than a polygenic architecture for a given change in optimal trait value.

We also take a brief detour into genetic architecture, on the heels of findings from both theoretical evolutionary genetics and ecological immunology suggesting that differing architectures (in polygenicity or pleiotropy) may have substantive implications for when and how immune defenses can evolve.

Portion of Figure 1 in paper with example immune properties, corresponding functional traits, and potential targets of selection underlying differences in that trait and that property.

We briefly discuss how the overarching aspects of immune strategy hypothesized in immune theory may be encoded in phenotypes and in the genome, an ongoing challenge for translating between these two approaches.

For each question, we highlight how hypotheses from ecological immunology might be effectively explored if methods and techniques from evolutionary genetics are applied. We also highlight some recent papers that exemplify such a fusion's value (e.g. www.science.org/doi/full/10....).

Screenshot of paper with text: Explaining the evolutionary origins of immune defense across species Finally, ecoimmunological approaches offer a window into the diversity of resistance mechanisms revealed by... (it cuts off quickly)

3. How do immune differences across species originate? Many taxa display unusual immunological phenotypes (e.g., bats and constitutive cytokine expression) hypothesized to spring from their particular biology. Can we see signatures of this with broad phylogenetic analyses?

Screenshot of paper with text: What constrains immune evolution? A basic expectation, if parasite infection limits host fitness, is that immune phenotypes should adapt to this selective pressure 10•, 30. However, host resistance is typically far from complete. In some cases, hosts may simply not have had enough time to adapt [31]. But when hosts and parasites have interacted on long timescales, other explanations are necessary. In evolutionary genetics, a major focus has been on host–parasite co-evolution and evolutionary arms races 5, 32, where parasites undergo selection to evade host defenses at the same time that hosts experience selection to restrict parasites. For example, protein kinase R shows evidence of repeated adaptive evolution in primates to evade sabotage by poxviruses, which themselves rapidly evolve [33]. Evolutionary arms races are clearly important in cases where host defense and parasite evasion can evolve through relatively simple genetic mechanisms.

2. What constrains immune evolution? For example, resource-based trade-offs between immunity and life history traits are a common prediction. But are there genetic correlations in these traits in nature, such that these relationships can actually respond to selection?