They can, and they do! There’s research to suggest that some flies drink alcohol (naturally-fermented fruits usually but also our hard stuff) to become more attractive to mates, and also to drown their sorrows when they can’t find a mate.

Thank you Andrea!

It is! Nice to finally have a starting point for folks to work on and compare their finds against, both for expanding records and for building towards population monitoring. Long, long ways to go, but we’re moving in the right direction.

There’s another series of papers (zookeys.pensoft.net/issue/1251/) that have looked at the overall diversity and number of BINs from Canadian localities, but there is no work reconciling them one-to-one beyond the BOLD database itself to my knowledge

The checklist also serves as a provincial checklist as every species’ known distribution is broken down, as well as an up-to-date catalog of species-level taxonomy and synonyms for all included species.

Rémi Hébert of Environment and Climate Change Canada was the major driving force behind this work as part of the WILD Species project in Canada assessing the status of our natural heritage. We still have lots of work to do building up baseline data for populations, but this is a huge first step!

In Canada, we can now say with confidence that we share our home with 9,777 species of flies. Other estimates suggest this is only about half of the true diversity however, so we have lots more work to document and study them all!

Hi! :) And thanks!

Thanks Donna!

Thanks Andrea!

Arboreal brittle stars! Get Nature on the line, quick lol

Last year, my fantastic co-author @bioinfocus.bsky.social and I published this note observing squirrels foraging insect galls in the Yukon: www.canadianfieldnaturalist.ca/index.php/cf... #SquirrelAppreciationDay

Coming out, transitioning, and being trans is HARD. Fortunately, there's a lot we can all do, whether cis or trans, to help our colleagues and strengthen our departments. In addition to all the actions we can take, we've also gathered a list of resources.

Collaborating with @rin-krichilsky.bsky.social and Kanako Shimizu, we put together what's basically a top-ten list of ways to help foster trans inclusivity and awareness within our scientific and academic communities and would love if you could help share the guide!

Holy cow, this is incredible! Congratulations on the big reveal and thank you for putting so much work into developing such a great resource!