Christopher Witt

(1/4) New paper in which we identify sex-linked candidate genes for egg coloration in a brood parasite and detail the cascading genomic consequences of selection on those genes. Link at the end of thread (yes, trying the teaser method)! I

“I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy.... Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.” — Dr. Gustave Gilbert, U.S. Military Chief Psychologist in the Nuremberg Trials, Nuremberg Diary

It’s official—Colors in the Crown: Chasing Warblers Through the Evolutionary Tree, coming from Johns Hopkins University Press in 2028! A touch of science. A dash of memoir. And 100% wood warblers. By yours truly and illustrated by @rushstudio.bsky.social 🦉🧪

CSUN Biology seeks a "Bird or Mammal Biologist" studying extant, non-model birds or mammals, and having experience in collections management, to teach Avian Ecology and/or Mammalogy and help steward our natural history collections (showy examples pictured) careers.pageuppeople.com/873/nr/en-us...

New Mexico friends - Come to our free event, a panel discussion about EVOLUTION and the new NOVA series on PBS. Next Tuesday evening at the Kimo Theater. Register here: www.newmexicopbs.org/event/a-spec...

🧬 Can we predict whether a population will go extinct or recover from its genome? In our new paper, led by Johanna Winder, we combine forward simulations and machine learning to ask how genomics could inform extinction and recovery potential doi.org/10.1111/eva.... #consgen #PopGen #evolution

Ever see a snake do a barrel roll? Scientists disentangle the locomotor kinematics of this behavior in rolling snakes. Learn more in Current Biology: spkl.io/633287ntaA Yosuke Kojima & colleagues @currentbiology.bsky.social

As best I can tell, Mateo Clement is not a real climate scientist, and appears to be (one of?) the preferred name used in a ResearchGate publication farming scheme.

How to mentor

Fossil History 🦣 Exploring north Florida rivers for ice age tusks [video] Look back to the Aucilla River in northwest Florida where researchers like David Webb, Andy Hemmings and Joe Latvis searched underwater for mammoth and mastodon fossils. www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/discover/sto... 🦣🦣🦣

Ten years ago today. In just the last few days: Trump made a deal for the U.S. to buy Russian diesel, an economic lifeline for Putin; he and Elon Musk blamed each other for an order that slowed down Starlink satellite connectivity over Ukraine...

Nothing quite sums up the abhorrent violence inherent in the state (anywhere, everywhere in the world) than a video of the cops tear gassing an orchestra playing music at the Place de la Republique in France yesterday

“A plausible paper can now be produced in a day, and the process of producing it does not necessarily enhance knowledge, build a resource, train a student, or advance any other goal of biology research.”

the damage Musk has already done to South Texas, to Padre, and Boca Chica in general almost doesn't bear comprehension the people, the turtles, the dolphins, the ocelots, the wildlife and the everything about this essential and gorgeous geography — they should not be for sale to this nazi fuck

It's been 30 years (!!!) since the conceptualization of GWAS. GWAS has driven tons of discoveries, but with recent experimental developments (CRISPR, single-cell omics), we thought it was time to think about how to drive the next 30 years of human genetics. doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Very excited to share our new paper, out now in Science. 17 years of biologging and radar data on 50 species of free-flying birds and bats revise the classic ranking of locomotion costs 🧵 doi.org/10.1126/scie... @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social @swanseauni.bsky.social @science.org 🎥 ©Bruno Osorio

NEW: ICE is trying to deport a mother of 4 while her husband is at Fort Benning in Army basic training. When she went to pick up the family's military IDs, Navy personnel turned her over to ICE. She's been in the US since age six. With @nancyayoussef.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

Absolutely the fuck not

Happy to announce the publication of our @natcomms.nature.com article on the evolution of Darwin's finches! A big thanks to @artkokay.bsky.social who made gorgeous illustrations! You can find the full article here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

LSU is hiring an Assistant Professor in Behavioral Ecology! Please see the job posting here and share. Application review begins November 15th. lsu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/LSU/jo...

Large dog breeds die younger. 'Jumping genes' may explain shorter lifespans. www.popsci.com/science/why-... Epigenetic aging & transposon dysregulation reflect size-related lifespan compression in dogs www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... (And the 1st author is 'Mariner'!!!)

I’m ok. Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement. For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation. I will not be silenced.

I am really proud of this paper, led by @sevans.bsky.social and funded by #NERC @ukri.org, which allowed me to go back to where it all began 20 😮 years ago!

"250,000 respondents can produce an estimate of the population mean that is no more accurate than an estimate from a simple random sample of size 10" reminds of recent Nature journal paper with N=billions but lacking the studied variable so the study is actually nonsensical doi.org/10.1525/coll...

There are many ways to destroy a university. Texas Tech, Texas A&M + the University of Texas have each taken a different approach…But the result will be the same: substandard education, substandard research + graduates who are less prepared for their future… + more prepared to obey without question.

The nice thing about a Sunday morning run in Albuquerque is you can cruise alongside the #1 cross-country team in the country while they warm up @unm.edu #GoLobos 🐺

Barron Canyon, Algonquin Park, Ontario. 100 m deep canyon through Canadian Shield gneisses ("gneiss canyon you've got there") carved when this river was a raging outlet for post-glacial Lake Algonquin.

Tree rings from long-lived bristlecone pines show that heat and drought don’t always go together in the Rocky Mountains. Thousands of years of data show that droughts have occurred under cool conditions almost as often as under warm conditions. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/8nrV50ZWmfL

“Austerity creates corporate universities,” @tressiemcphd.bsky.social said. “Corporate universities are not healthy educational organizations, and unhealthy educational organizations cannot inculcate or defend academic freedom.” Whew. That’s it right there. dailytarheel.com/484871/unive...

This is a pretty bad argument when you’re setting up a two-tiered racist police state and have gotten a Supreme Court justice to argue that racial profiling for this purpose is fine. The man isn’t “doing” anything besides not being part of your racially denoted uberclass

New Mexico Wildlife Federation v. Department of Interior: a new lawsuit asserts that DoD's "national defense area" at the border is an illegal and unjustified theft of >100,000 acres of NM public land www.nmwildlife.org/news/nmwf-an...

A recent analysis in Science of more than 116,000 bird songs has revealed that the astonishing variety of passerine birdsong is built from just eight basic acoustic motifs, like trills, whistles, and harmonic notes. Learn more on #WorldAnimalDay: https://scim.ag/3SziyeL

A thoughtful, excellent write up by @richardconniff.bsky.social on the very sad situation @sternbergpaleo.bsky.social museum #paleontology #palaeontology #naturalhistory richardconniff.substack.com/p/another-na...

Thread for bangers from The Dialectical Biologist

Just a quick reminder that the Vietnamese Crested Argus exists. Critically endangered and restricted to humid forests of Laos and Vietnam, it is widely considered to have a huge-ass tail. 📷 Robin Arnold, eBird

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

Ignore for a moment the question about whether Anthropic trains on user sessions. I am I right in reading this as saying that Anthropic's "never-before-discovered" reverse transcriptase was *patented* three years ago?

Literary icon Margaret Atwood has gifted $1M to #WesternU, honouring her longtime partner Graeme Gibson, BA'58, to establish the Graeme Gibson Chair in Avian Biology - advancing research on how birds move, behave and adapt in a changing world. #AllinWesternU news.westernu.ca/2026/09/grae...

Island species 🏝️ frequently experience founder events and population bottlenecks 🧬 and are often subject to disturbances that further reduce population sizes. Despite these challenges, some island lineages persist for millennia 🕰️ —the paradox of persistence. Here’s what we learned about it:

Two positions in my department at Virginia Tech in Molecular Microbiology. Come be my colleague! jobs.apply.vt.edu/jobs/assista...

What's behind this tidal wave of epidemics? In the largest study ever conducted on emerging infectious diseases, we show that the popular explanation - "our relationship with nature is out of balance" - doesn't hold up. Out now in Nature, after half a decade of work: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Out now in Science: Two papers from our lab reveal VIPR, an RNA-guided DNA-targeting system in bacteriophages, providing clues to the origins of CRISPR www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Congrats to Peter Yoon, @kenjmloi.bsky.social @terryzzy.bsky.social, T.Docter & team

Bear cub does everything Fred Astaire did, backwards, and in claws