Anya Auerbach

Macroevolution senior seminar should be fun next week

(I love AmNat)

I'm thrilled to share my first foray into nature writing. I describe my travels through Aotearoa New Zealand to see the country's rarest birds—and use this as a vehicle to tell the stories of the islands' evolutionary history and the bold conservation efforts that saved these creatures. Gift link

Application is open for for the Molecular Evolution Workshop at the MBL in Woods Hole (May 22- June 1) www.mbl.edu/education/ad...

My heart breaks for mathematicians whose lives and careers are being destroyed by AI — and especially this PhD student, who doesn’t even know he is a poet

Version 1.3.2 of PearTree released: github.com/artic-networ... Fixes many of the remaining niggling bugs. WebApp updated at peartree.live

In our new perspective paper @pnas.org, we show how the comments you put in eBird/iNaturalist can help ecologist with collecting much-needed data on species interactions: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

We're looking for a lecturer in the Biology and Marine Biology Department at UNCW! I very much love my new department - if you are passionate about teaching and have expertise in anatomy and physiology, biodiversity, genetics, or microbiology, please consider applying! jobs.uncw.edu/postings/40986

listen i love a new species as much as the next person (probably more than the next person if we're being honest) but that doesn't mean i can't critique the way we talk about it. new post about penguins and tiger cats and monkeys on the newsletter :) ryanmandelbirder.substack.com/p/what-does-...

Happy to share that the last chapter of my dissertation is finally out in Evolution! 🦎⛰️ I'll share a longer thread soon about what we did and found. Huge thanks to all my coauthors: @jblosos.bsky.social, @juvelas.bsky.social, Steven Poe and Adam Algar doi.org/10.1093/evol...

I'm hiring a postdoc to help build tools for inferring complex speciation histories with genomic data. strong computational skills are a must, but this is a training opportunity. 60K$+ salary, 2 years, details flexible. please reach out! (and repost) ad here: jobs.montana.edu/postings/53150

New preprint led by grad student Caleb Charpentier that I'm very excited about! This is a hefty review & perspective on how we can close the gap in trust between new "Deep comparative methods", and the biological meaning & inferences that systematists want. ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

This (superb) reporting reveals ASU has basically attempted a full cover-up and the only reason they aren’t going to get away with it is the genuine courage and solidarity of his teammates. Very rare in college sport.

"I believe that science derives its authority from something more than mastering the pipeline from data generation to publication. Rather, it comes from interactions within a community of people trained to interrogate evidence and answer for the conclusions they draw from it."

A Northern Waterthrush tagged in Cape May, NJ left after sunset on Sep 11. Two weeks later it was over Colombia! Jamaica -> Colombia included ~800 km of open Caribbean. 3,082 km so far! @birdscanada.bsky.social @originalstu.bsky.social #MotusWTS #BirdMigration #ornithology @nature.org

Early-diverging lineages provide little information about ancestors academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan... From @phylieu.bsky.social @sinkingdiatom.bsky.social @omearabrian.bsky.social

Thanks to my enterprising first years I learned today about some depths of junk journal hell I had never previously witnessed. They mostly did well on their outlines and annotated bibliographies and this should make for a great learning opportunity! But wooow is it bad out there.

I remember seeing Margaret Attwood at the IOC in Vancouver in 2018 - the closest thing to Canadian royalty?! Excellent to see a chair in Ornithology being endowed - see quoted tweet for direct details & more background in this @theguardian.com article www.theguardian.com/books/ng-int...

Super excited to share this study by @gamaevo.bsky.social in collaboration with Steve Nowicki and Susan Peters!! Response to geographic song variation predicts differential gene expression in the blood of a songbird: iScience www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

Quite an updated and deep outlook on the main problems (and potential solutions!) in avian phylogenetics, past and present, stem and crown! Also very well written & nice to read, congrats you both (J. Benito is not in bluesky yet)!

There it is 😡

Newly accepted work I contributed to: Challenges for reproducibility in species delimitation academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

I'm hiring a bioinformatician! Review of applications starts October 1 with a start date as soon as possible. 🧪 #Genomics #popGen #CompBio northeastern.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/careers/job/...

Really excited to share our latest paper with you! We examine patterns of skull shape evolution in an awesome group of fishes and show that they rapidly innovated following the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs. urldefense.com/v3/__https:/...

You might have seen the paper @science.org last week on the solar panels decreasing bird biodiversity. Our reanalysis, led by the talented Yangkang Chen, found fundamental, retraction-worthy flaws in their results, especially from the citizen science data and their models… (1/6)

Also worth re-upping: Mathematicians standing up against how their field is being used as marketing for OpenAI and the like: leidendeclaration.ai >>

New paper in Systematic Biology! We show how micro-synteny can help resolve a tricky fish #phylogenetic problem where traditional sequence-based analyses fall short. Genomes archive evolutionary history in more than just their basepairs. doi.org/10.1093/sysb... #fish #genomics #evolution

Hi ecologists! I’m looking for papers on the outcome of nest predation in birds When a predator attacks a nest, how often does this result in complete loss of the clutch/brood versus partial predation, where some eggs or nestlings survive? complete vs. partial #Ornithology #Ecology #Predation

When two clades evolve together, can the trees alone tell you how often they cospeciated, and how often the symbiont switched hosts? We think so! Our paper, led by @yichaozeng.bsky.social, shows that branch length differences in the cophylogeny are informative enough to estimate six rates at once

Deep breath. Screams from the top of my lungs: "Producing species-dense sampling at biodiversity scale requires the material and expertise already held in natural history collections" 🧪

Hey paleo friends, looking for paper recs (for my macroevolution senior seminar)! Topic is currently labeled as “deep time, fossils, taphonomy”. I’d ideally like a research paper that will expose my students to some “typical” paleobio research, but include discussion of biases in the fossil record.

Look, y'all— this is not the worst outcome, but it's also not great. Framing this as gaining a notably large herbarium is spin; the reality is a historic, important herbarium has lost its identity. The specimens were never going to be trashed; Duke still voluntarily truncated their botanical legacy.

Defending in July and starting a visiting professor job in August does not leave a lot of time for putting together job applications due in early September :/ Not that this is anyone’s fault but my own of course, it just sucks! (Venting over thank you)

My new book, Phylogenetic Biology, is now published. Available online for free at dunnlab.org/phylogenetic... . Physical copies can be purchased at shop.lightningsource.com/b/085?params... or your favorite bookstore.

Why make the page, I asked @ce7an.bsky.social. Nobody will read it, I said. And here we are, with Cheeto being the most widely read page in the UC Davis High Performance Computing website. hpc.ucdavis.edu/people/cheet...

Nature honors Dolly Parton's scientific legacy. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The IDF does this all the time. They lie until they can't, then they say they'll do an investigation, then the investigation leads nowhere. It took 2.5 years for them to even admit they opened fire on the car, something we all knew happened hours after they did.

[JOB!] I'm hiring for a really exciting postdoc position. A combination of breeding experiments, conservation genomics, and student mentorship. Room/board at the @amnh.org Southwestern Research Station each summer, 40 months of support, new science building at BSU. Share broadly! ad: bit.ly/4hKaUIL

1. Recently I’ve received lots of emails from people I don’t know personally, asking for my feedback on their books or papers. They explain the connection between my work and theirs and ask me to take a look. The catch, of course, is that the emails are transparently, obviously, written by AI.

Big evolutionary events can fool phylogenetic analyses. A new approach combines phylogenetic regression with eigenvectors to reduce false positives and better account for the history written in genomes. doi.org/10.1093/evle...

Surgeonfishes are cool! Our Evolution paper now out in final form, the amazing patterns of change in fish shape and covariance (new method!) elegantly revealed by @linnealungstrom.bsky.social 🐟🐠🦑🌿 academic.oup.com/evolut/artic...