Jack Hruska, Ph.D.

A mosaic of modular variation at a single gene underpins convergent plumage coloration The reshuffling of genomic variation from multiple origins is an important contributor to phenotypic diversification, yet insights into the evolutionary trajectories of this combinatorial process and ...

1/9 New in @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado8005
How does genetic architecture constrain evolutionary trajectories? To address this question, we inferred the genetic architecture of convergent plumage coloration and its evolutionary history in wheatears.

yeah, look .... not sure who needs to hear this (actually, everyone does), but turn off the stupid AI suggestions in your search results, and def. go and use @wikipedia.org a lot more.

I use it as my first-go-to knowledge base resource.

Follow the trail of citations to primary sources.

It's good.

OUT TODAY: SimHumanity, a SLiM 5 model of the human genome, replete with demography, autosomes, X/Y & mtDNA.

A shared starting point for reproducible evolutionary simulations.

Huge thanks to coauthors Ben Haller, @mufernando.bsky.social & Philipp Messer.
🔗 www.pivotscipub.com/hpgg/5/4/0006

Want to make publication-ready figures come straight from Python without having to do any manual editing? Are you fed up with axes labels being unreadable during your presentations? Follow this short tutorial including code examples! 👇🧵

I guess because software allows it, ppl keep trying to estimate diversification rates on phylogenies. This is not in principle possible, because infinite combinations of diversification and extinction rates can explain almost any tree. Short, clear recent-ish paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

redirect to a file: cmd > file.txt terminal emulator into program, program out to file.txt, error out to terminal emulator append to a file: cmd >> file.txt terminal emulator into program, program out to file.txt (append mode), error out to terminal emulator send a file to stdin: cmd < file.txt file.txt into program, program out and err to terminal emulator redirect stderr to a file: cmd 2 > file.txt terminal emulator into program, program out to nowhere, err out to file.txt redirect stdout AND stderr: cmd > file.txt 2>&1 terminal emulator into program, out and err to file.txt pipe stdout: cmd1 | cmd2 terminal emulator into program 1, 1 out to program 2 via pipe, 2 out to command line, program 2 out 1 and 2 to terminal emulator pipe stdout AND stderr: cmd1 2>&1 | cmd2 terminal emulator into program 1, 1 and 2 out to program 2 via pipe, program 2 out 1 and 2 to terminal emulator three gotchas cmd file.txt > file.txt will delete the contents of file.txt some people use set -o noclobber (in bash/zsh) to avoid this but I just have “never read from redirect to the same file” seared into my memory. sudo echo blah > /root/file.txt doesn’t write to /root/file.txt as root. Instead, do: echo blah | sudo tee /root/file.txt or sudo sh -c 'echo blah > /root/file.txt' cmd 2>&1 > file.txt doesn’t write both stdout and stderr to file.txt. Instead, do: cmd > file.txt 2>&1 cat vs < I almost always prefer to do: cat file.txt | cmd instead of cmd < file.txt it works fine & it feels better to me using cat can be slower if if’s a GIANT file though &> and &| some shells support &> and &| to redirect/pipe both stdout and stderr (also some shells use |& instead of &|)

redirects

wizardzines.com/comics/termi...

(from "The Secret Rules of the Terminal", out now! wizardzines.com/zines/termin...)

Looks like an Orange-crowned Warbler

💥BREAKING: Birds in a tropical pluvial rainforest of the Chocó have been quietly changing in morphology for 109 years. Some have shrunk, others grown. Tails grew longer, bills grew deeper. Even in forests with continuous cover, climate change may be rewriting evolution in real time.

Yes! A fantastic way for folks who don’t have access to a major university library to be able to read articles.

TEtrimmer: a tool to automate the manual curation of transposable elements. #TransposableElements #ManualCuration #Genomics #Bioinformatics @natcomms.nature.com 🧬 🖥️
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Museomics: An Introduction to Genomic Analyses of Natural History Collections 3-7 November To foster international participation, this course will be held online

My colleague @hernmoral.bsky.social is teaching what looks like a wonderful course online this November - Museomics: An Introduction to Genomic Analyses of Natural History Collections. Register: www.physalia-courses.org/courses-work... #consgen

Maybe social media was a bad idea.

Figure 1A from the paper shows the distribution of black-headed (western) and rose-breasted grosbeaks (eastern) throughout North America. Small illustrations of males of each species are shown. Black-headed has a rusty orange breast and black head, while rose-breasted has a small reddish bib with a bright white belly. There is an inset map of South Dakota showing the transect across the hybrid zone

The first Aguillon Lab paper is officially out in early view at Evolution!! Led by postdoc @devonderaad.bsky.social, we’ve explored the hybrid zone between black-headed and rose-breasted grosbeaks in the Great Plains. #ornithology #hybridization #speciation #evolution doi.org/10.1093/evol...

Morphological adaptations for migration in North American wood-warblers (Aves: Parulidae) - Journal of Ornithology Migration exerts a selective pressure for increased flight efficiency and reduced energy expenditure in long-distance migratory birds. In North America, eastern migratory flyways are longer and requir...

Excited to share our new paper on flight morphology and migration in North American wood warblers. Surprisingly, ground-dwelling warblers may be better adapted for migration than aerial ones!!!

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Line drawing of a two story institutional building with a sign in front, "Welcome to the BIOLOGY DEPARTMENT. It has been 3 days since we discovered something existentially horrifying about abugs that make you question your whole reality."

The new XKCD has to be a reference to the ant paper where ants just casually lay eggs of a different species, yes? Maybe? There are so many weird bugs its hard to know.

While journal publishing has always been deeply problematic, hurting both the pace and trajectory of science, something is happening in this moment that is finally causing the system to crumble under its own weight and cost.
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In the earliest stages of adaptive introgression, beneficial immigration can drive genome-wide changes. In a new preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... colleagues & I document exceptionally rapid genomic introgression in a lake population of stickleback.

Wei, @rstam.bsky.social et al. characterized CNVs in a wild tomato adapted to dry habitats, using WGS, finding more CNVs in diverging populations occupying stressful habitats, and environmental associations linked CNVs to climatic variables.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf191

#evobio #molbio

I've never verified it but I remember being told that male Rheas raised a 'clutch' comprising of individuals laid by several females.

#PopGen #PopulationGenomics #PopulationGenetics

Check out our new special feature: Monitoring and Restoring Gene Flow in the Increasingly Fragmented Ecosystems of the Anthropocene www.pnas.org/topic/574 #biodiversity #evolution #ecology #popgen #ClimateEmergency

Donate to your local PBS/NPR stations. It's up to us now.

I don’t care if “AI will soon be the norm”, I don’t care if “we all have to adapt or die”, you won’t convince me to use it in any of my creative roles.

Seeing writers use AI generated book and podcast covers, Artists using Chat GPT, creatives using AI voices. That’s an immediate blacklist from me

Convenient list of places where your donation would go the furthest

Congratulations to the 2025 AOS Kessel Fellowship & Latin American/Caribbean Conservation Research Grant winners! Read more about our winners & their research projects.
americanornithology.org/aos-announce...
#ornithology #researchgrant #birds #conservation #AOSgrants

🇺🇸

Whole-genome ancestry of an Old Kingdom Egyptian - Nature Whole-genome sequencing of an ancient male Egyptian revealed a mixture of North African Neolithic and eastern Fertile Crescent ancestry, suggesting human migration between Egypt and Mesopotamia by the...

Forty years after Svante Pääbo kicked off this extraordinary field of science, today sees report of the first whole-genome sequence of an ancient Egyptian (from 2855–2570BCE). Exciting work from @pontus-skoglund.bsky.social, @flinklinus.bsky.social, & co at @ljmuofficial.bsky.social, @crick.ac.uk.🧬🧪

I'm super excited to share our new paper on Norwegian lemming genomics just published in @pnas.org!! Read the paper here: www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10....
Summary ⬇️

If there was ever a time to call your Senator, this is it.

Voting has begun on the GOP plan to cut off health care for working-class Americans and slash taxes for the wealthiest.

The U.S. has seen a manufacturing boom since the Inflation Reduction Act, especially in the emerging Southeastern battery belt. But these projects and associated jobs are potentially at risk with proposed changes to tax credits.