Rachel C Thayer

Annual Drosophila Research Conference 2026 Friday, March 6 8 to 10 PM Workshop - Superior, Level 2 Everything You Ever Wanted to Know ...

#Dros26 community — we’d love to see you at our workshop this Friday! [1/8]

Organizers: @ritamgraze.bsky.social @marbeitman.bsky.social @lydiagrmai.bsky.social @gavinrrice.bsky.social @brhopkins92.bsky.social Artyom Kopp

Join us this next Friday *the 13th* 👻 👻 to hear us talking about bones and cartilages in development and evolution 🐟 🐠 🦴

Sperm attraction by female reproductive fluid in a fish with an unconventional fertilisation strategy https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.27.708519v1

won't you celebrate with me by Lucille Clifton won't you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.

Missed a week with my 8th graders due to the storm, so one last Black History Month poem as a bridge into Women's History Month.

This one is by Lucille Clifton, which has a line I think about often:

"come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed."

A screenshot of the Map from the CBP's website showing where a border wall is planned to be built.

I thought "surely they wouldn't build a wall right through the National Park," so I went to their website (bit.ly/Big_Bend_Wall) to check for myself. The plan shows a border wall would be built, nearly continuously through the park's entire length, starting at Santa Elana Canyon. 🧵2/4

Heliconius erato demophoon sat on a pink, yellow and white lantana flower. The left side of the butterfly is white, while the right side is the usual black and red, but with some white clonal patches.

New preprint form me and the McMillan lab at STRI and Martin lab at GWU, digging into scale cell type specification and differentiation in Heliconius wings, with some insights on the lncRNA gene ivory.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Comments/suggestions welcome!

🦋✂️🧬 🧪 New preprint! Led by @donyaniyaz.bsky.social CRISPR‑Cas9 knockouts of ABCG transporters across butterflies & moths reveal how pigment pathways shape color during development. #CRISPR #Lepidoptera #pigmentation
Feedback welcome 👩‍🔬
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Every day Vought withholds $ from these agencies is a day where a grad student doesn’t get funding, a day where a postdoc has to look for work elsewhere, a day where early career scientists lose gap funding with a fundable grant sitting on this clowns desk. We’re losing a generation of scientists.

A macro photo of a slender, tiny wasp atop a batch of katydid eggs. The eggs, which look like brown lima beans, are tiled along a brown grass stem. Four have roundish holes chewed through their sides, where parasitoid wasps (like the one perched on top of them) chewed their way out. The wasp is metallic-copper colored with a yellow abdomen band and large eyes.

A macro photo of a group of katydid eggs, which look like brown lima beans, tiled along a brown grass stem against a pale green background. In the upper right, a tiny wasp's face is peeking out of an escape hole it is chewing from the inside of a katydid egg it has parasitized. A second egg, lower left, has a hole in it where a wasp has already hatched and flown off.

A macro photo of a tiny, green, newly-hatched katydid nymph perched atop a fingertip, against a green and blue-green background. The fingertip and katydid are lower right, and one of the katydid's extremely long antennae stretches all the way up to the upper left corner of the frame.

From a few years ago: katydid eggs mostly parasitized by tiny wasps. When a katydid hatches, the egg opens like a clam shell; but as you can see (pic 2), if there's a parasitoid wasp inside, they chew their way out. Btw, the baby katydid on my fingertip hatched from the same egg clutch. #BugSky 🐙🌿

Even though I went through a lot of personal emotions during that time, I persevered and renegotiated the grant while preparing for the funeral. It was resubmitted on January 14th, the day of my grandfather’s funeral. We have had no update on it since.

New paper from the Rosin lab in collaboration with the Hawley lab 🎉 Spearheaded by postdoc Leif Benner. We use imaging and RNA-seq to better understand apyrene meiosis.

Programmed meiotic errors facilitate dichotomous sperm production in the silkworm, Bombyx mori.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Evolution 2026 meeting logo. Clilp art of a globe and laptop showing a virtual presentation. Text: Society for the Study of Evolution Global Meeting Participation.

SSE is pleased to offer free virtual #Evol2026 registration to all SSE members residing in 152 countries and territories around the world including India, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. Request your free registration code today! www.evolutionsociety.org/index.php?mo...

my local park is full of hundreds of snow sculptures and someone has been adding museum labels

This is the most incredible footage of blue whales I’ve ever seen

Close-up shot of the aforementioned camel cricket, highlighting its exceptionally spindly legs and big round eyes

Pretty cute lil face if we’re being honest

Adaptive evolution of Topoisomerase II triggers reproductive isolation in Drosophila https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.20.707007v1

I've emerged from my faculty job app cocoon to open up the Etsy shop for a bit. Come grab some #Drosophila swag and support @flybase.bsky.social ! All proceeds are donated, here's the belated donation from December's sales.

Time-calibrated phylogeny of the family Drosophilidae showing major species groups, surrounded by representative adult flies that highlight the remarkable morphological diversity of this model insect group. The composite image was created using Microsoft PowerPoint. Fly photographs were taken by Darren J. Obbard and are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License with permission.

The #fly community aims to achieve a comprehensive genomic study of the Drosophilidae family. @pankajd.bsky.social @bernardkim.bsky.social @petrovadmitri.bsky.social @darrenobbard.bsky.social present a comparative gene annotation for 301 #Drosophilidae species @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4c3pyrI

What NIH Staff Can’t Tell You—And Why That Matters The people who understand most clearly what is being lost at the NIH are also the people least able to say so.

“Taken together, these two policies create a structure in which dissent becomes professionally costly, alignment becomes professionally necessary, and the space for honest scientific judgment quietly contracts.”

open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

Trump administration drops appeal of court order blocking $1.2-billion UCLA settlement The Trump administration dropped its appeal of a major higher education case in which a federal judge blocked its $1.2-billion settlement proposal to UCLA over alleged civil rights violations. It will...

This is a genuinely huge, sweeping victory today for the University of California—or rather, for us, its faculty, acting through our faculty associations, while the UC itself maintained a strict policy of deer-in-headlights silence.

The Trump admin has given up its appeal of a powerful injunction:

Society for the Study of Evolution Site description

Apply by Sunday for funds to attend the AIBS public policy training and meet with lawmakers! Curious what the event entails? Hear from last year’s participants here: www.evolutionsociety.org/society-awar...

Hello fly folks! If you are a postdoc or junior faculty attending the @genetics-gsa.bsky.social #Dros26 #flymeeting in Chicago, and interested in helping judge trainee posters, please comment or DM me!

Topic: Stem Cells/Regeneration/Tissue Injury

Please RT
@flybase.bsky.social @bdsc.bsky.social

The collapse of curiosity driven research has occurred in STEM too. Everything has to be outcomes focused - cure disease, grow better crops, etc. But so much of what humanity has discovered is from "basic" curiosity-driven science. I'm hugely in favor of funding curiosity in every discipline.

This elitist view that only rich/Ivy/private school kids should study/have access the liberal arts is so deeply ingrained in so many highly educated Democrats’ views (including tons who majored in the lib arts themselves) that they don’t even realize they hold it, let alone how ugly & elitist it is

Tamer Nahed 𓂆🇵🇸 @Tamer_Alnoaizy BlueSky is one of the worst platforms I have ever dealt with. Within seconds of creating a second account, after my first one was shut down just two days after it was created, my account was closed again. This happened despite the fact that I hadn’t posted anything or followed anyone. I was only in the process of adding a profile photo, yet I received an email claiming that my account was “spam” and that it was “causing harm.” What kind of logic is this? The painful truth is that the account was shut down the moment it became clear it was created from inside Gaza. It seems we are no longer allowed to write or speak about what is happening to us here. They are not afraid of content itself, but of our voices and the reality we carry with us. Millions are spent to silence these voices and to erase the truth. I am exhausted by this platform and by how our photos and videos, which document real suffering, are treated as “violations of community standards,” as if pain itself has become a crime. What is happening is not simple moderation or policy enforcement. It is an attempt to erase our existence and bury the truth. And honestly, this is shameful and unbearably painful. [the original poster has included two screenshots showing the email from bluesky admin informing him that his account has been taken down for being 'spammy, inauthentic or disruptive to users'. it's the standard boilerplate you get when they take moderation action.] 2:45 PM · Feb 10, 2026 https://twitter.com/Tamer_Alnoaizy/status/2021234178461704409

palestinian journalist posting on twitter that his bluesky account was immediately taken down purely because he was in gaza. all palestinian accounts are assumed to be spam.

Today we’re launching Open Climate Risk, a fully open option for U.S. building-level climate risk data. It’s unique because it allows you to see not only risk scores, starting with wildfire, but also the complete underlying dataset, methods, and codebase. carbonplan.org/research/cli...

A Litany for Survival by Audre Lorde For those of us who live at the shoreline standing upon the constant edges of decision crucial and alone for those of us who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice who love in doorways coming and going in the hours between dawns looking inward and outward at once before and after seeking a now that can breed futures like bread in our children's mouths so their dreams will not reflect the death of ours: For those of us who were imprinted with fear like a faint line in the center of our foreheads learning to be afraid with our mother's milk for by this weapon this illusion of some safety to be found the heavy-footed hoped to silence us For all of us this instant and this triumph We were never meant to survive. And when the sun rises we are afraid it might not remain when the sun sets we are afraid it might not rise in the morning when our stomachs are full we are afraid of indigestion when our stomachs are empty we are afraid we may never eat again when we are loved we are afraid love will vanish when we are alone we are afraid love will never return and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.

As a literature educator, for me, poetry begins and ends with Audre Lorde. Every student I have has read “Poetry is not a Luxury.” “Litany for Survival” is the poem that reminds us Who and Whose we are, because we were never meant to survive.

28 poems for #blackhistorymonth day 9

🐜 4-year #postdoc position in the @socialfluids.bsky.social lab @camzoology.bsky.social investigating metabolic cooperation between bodies in a BBSRC-funded project.

www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/postdoc...

#ants #socialtransfers #sociallytransferredmaterials #autophagy #socialinsects #aging #job (🧵1/n)

Balrog roaring while being on fire. He's a big ol fire guy.

Uh oh, you scrolled too far, too greedily, too deep: you have encountered a balrog.