Grant Haines

Ok, so now that baseball is over, can we do curling? 🥌

Cover and sample pages of a new book entitled "Handbook of Freshwater Fishes of West Asia" by Jörg Freyhof , Baran Yoğurtçuoğlu , Arash Jouladeh-Roudbar and Cüneyt Kaya.

Fellow fish nerds, I'm sharing a link to a free PDF of "The Handbook of Freshwater Fishes of West Asia". This new book provides a summary of the taxonomy, distribution, and biology of all freshwater fishes between the Bosphorus, Azerbaijan, Yemen, and Iran. 🐟

www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

Sorry I should have added the link voteview.com/parties/all

Polarization in Congress based on DW-Nominate scores from the founding to 2022. The parties have been diverging since the 70s

Isn’t the focus on electoral behavior misplaced when it lags behind legislative polarization? This is just voters more accurately recognizing the stakes of elections.

Any lawyers should be aware that these programs are probabilistic and can only test images against images already in a training set. Setting aside the workings of the models, any changes in appearance (e.g., aging, injuries, cosmetic surgery, facial hair, etc.) can reduce match certainty

A thing that would be good for PoliSci majors to have is a required statistics course. This would fix a lot of problems.

The democratic primaries were cancelled in Florida and Delaware, and delegates were only awarded retroactively in NH.

Half of Jeff Bezos’s wealth could fund all of SNAP for over a year without its loss having any appreciable effect on his lifestyle.

Literally one guy.

Postdoc in the Faroes setur.totalview.cloud/recruitment/...

scatter plot showing elected dems, with performance relative to expectations on the y axis and total social media following on the x axis. X axis is on a log scale. The fitted trendline shows a negative relationship that is nearly imperceptible until you get to ~800k followers, when it plunges due to the heavy leverage of the final four points with the most followers. THERE IS NO CONFIDENCE INTERVAL

this report contains some of the worst data interpretation I've ever seen.

Wow, could it be that there is a slight negative relationship between social media following and electoral performance because congressional districts contain a finite number of people???

some fun biogeography going on in this region, btw doi.org/10.1139/f78-...

We have lots of other cool stuff we are working on in this system, including ecological work and some more stuff on evolution of functional traits using the specimens from the 1983 Edge & Coad paper, which are in the collections at the Canadian Museum of Nature.

This means that in many jurisdictions, stocking of brook trout like this would still be permitted. Some authors have even recommended brook trout introductions to previously troutless habitats as a trout conservation measure.

The real kicker is that, although brook trout were not initially present in these lakes and the stickleback populations evolved in their absence, this is all within brook trout's native range, which extends from northern AL, up the Appalachian ridge through Labrador + west across the Great Lakes.

screenshot of header and abstract to "Reduction of the pelvic skeleton in the Threespine Stickleback, Gasterosteus aculeatus, in two lakes of Quebec"

Diagram from Edge & Coad 1983 showing different types of pelvic spine reduction in these populations. The diagrams show substantial asymmetry.

We can only show this change because of a short (basically 1 page of text) 1983 paper in the Canadian Field-Naturalist. As far as I can tell, this paper is only available online via @biodivlibrary.bsky.social www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/2800903...

In response, we showed that in Lac Rond and Lac Croche, the stickleback populations have adapted by re-acquiring pelvic spines, which are now more frequent than spineless fish in both lakes, and the Lac Croche fish also now have more robust lateral plates.

The introduction of brook trout was followed by the introduction of other species that were often used as bait-fish: creek chubs, northern redbelly dace, and possibly finescale dace. Dace and chubs are now very abundant, and creek chubs can also get big enough to eat the stickleback.

This is until the late 60s when the increased access to the lakes provided by logging roads led people to think it was a good idea to start stocking brook trout. Trout were stocked in at least 6 lakes or ponds in this basin until the 90s, particularly in the 2 biggest: Lac Rond and Lac Croche.

Armour reduction and pelvic girdle loss in a population of threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) from western Newfoundland, Canada - Environmental Biology of Fishes We describe the antipredator armour of a unique population of threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) from Narrows Pond in western Newfoundland and compare traits for this population to nearby...

In the absence of predatory fish, the stickleback lost their defensive pelvic spines. They are the only known stickleback populations on the east coast of the US or Canada to have lost pelvic spines, apart from a population in Narrows Pond, Newfoundland.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

These populations are in a few small-ish lakes in a basin at the top of the St John's River watershed, separated from downstream waterbodies by a waterfall. This means that for the past few thousand years, the only fish in these lakes have been threespine stickleback and fathead minnows.

Now that I have time to explain this a little more: since 2021, @sarahsanderson.bsky.social and I, and some other folks from @ecoevoevoeco.bsky.social's lab have been working in QC's Parc national du Lac-Témiscouata on some odd stickleback populations rapidly evolving in response to stocked trout.🧪🐟

Saying he’s not popular relative to partisanship in NY is meaningless because he is running against another Democrat who couldn’t hack it in the primary. It’s not an R vs D race.

The supremacy clause only applies if the federal officers are carrying out duties permitted by federal law. biotech.law.lsu.edu/map/Liabilit...

Should have stopped this conversation when he said he couldn’t figure out what’s going on in PA at 4:10.

If your theory about democratic collapse in the rust belt can’t explain why Bethlehem is a one-party democratic town, it’s not particularly useful.

Satellite image showing king cove airport northeast of the town of King Cove.

Could you please elaborate on this part of the story? King Cove already has an airport.

The justification in the article makes no sense. King Cove already has an airport. Why does it need a road to connect it to Cold Bay’s airport?

Speaker Series 2025 Events will be hosted January – December, 2025, on the last Wednesday of every month, 12:00 – 14:00 pm ET. Presented over Zoom. After each talk, we will continue the discussions in an i…

Wishing you could hear me talk instead of reading posts one by one? Here's your chance! I'll be giving a free, online talk next Wednesday from 12-1pm EST for the Microbes and Social Equity working group! I will discuss our microbiome work & my HEU* work

microbesandsocialequity.org/events/speak...

No idea where this is, but let me tell you this stream has soooo many stickleback in it.

Evolution of threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) defensive traits following the stocking of brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) | The American Naturalist: Vol 0, No ja

Got some new stuff out with @sarahsanderson.bsky.social @ecoevoevoeco.bsky.social and Rosalie Morin-Nadeau 🐟 www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

I saw that, and didn’t mean it as shade, sorry it came across that way. (Also didn’t recognize you as the author because of the Halloween name, haha). Thanks for your reporting