“Living organisms are assumed to produce same-species offspring. Here, we report a shift from this norm in Messor ibericus, an ant that lays individuals from two distinct species.” 🤯🤯🤯

Post ESEB, I was finally able to cross something off my bucket list: attending La Tomatina, the tomato throwing festival! (It’s all tomato, dw.)

This is how I imagine C. elegans feel in OP50 btw

In my defense, I DID read the instructions saying to go vertical… I just received them AFTER I printed the poster

Wanna talk mating system evolution? Come find me at #ESEB2025! I have a poster tonight (session 1, poster 169) on how dispersal can favor self-fertilization! Then on Thursday I’m giving a talk on how outcrossing is favored under a combination of mutation and antagonistic coevolution (S51.10 - Sex).

Variation in self-compatibility among genotypes and across ontogeny in a self-fertilizing vertebrate, Kryptolebias marmoratus

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

Comparative study reports that sex differences in dispersal predict sex differences in cooperation across cooperative birds and mammals. Dispersal likely impacts sex-specific direct benefits or costs of cooperation:

doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...

Fenner et al. @andyyoung.bsky.social

⭐Issue 6 of JEB is now online!⭐

This issue is headlined by a Target Review from @josselin-clo.bsky.social et al. on #matingsystems evolution, accompanied by several #invitedcommentaries expanding on this key discussion comparing concepts in plants and animals:

academic.oup.com/jeb/issue/38/6

“The kids went crazy... Kids were chanting, ‘Barbie!’ and they all got one, and they literally had tears.” www.science.org/content/arti... Nice story by @cohenjon.bsky.social for @science.org

Brb I have to go make a worm tower immediately

What does a hypothesis developed in plants have to do with C. elegans? Why are C. elegans so good at selfing? Come by my poster 419B at #worm25 and find out!

Fierst lab grad student and poster design wiz Tori Eggers (the famous TE) presenting on genome evolution and transposable elements (the less famous TE) at #worm25! Check her out at 473A! Go Tori!!

Incredibly happy with my fabric scientific poster from @spoonflower-social.bsky.social! High quality and wrinkle/crease resistant and folds up easily for travel! Only drawback is we had to trim it. 😉 (Thank you, Sandra and Kim💕)

I’ll be presenting at the International Worm Meeting in Davis! #Worm25

Evolution 2025: first time presenting this work and first talk as a postdoc! Can we experimentally show Red Queen dynamics underpin a coevolving host-parasite system as per theory? Time shift assays reveal a promising signal. 💃🏻👑

So proud of undergrads Jess and Pooja for presenting their work at Evolution 2025! They looked at how diet and genetic background affect nematode survival against a common bacterial parasite.

Nematode towers that you can get to grow in lab using C. elegans. Maybe a new, tractable model system for studying self-organization in the lab. 🧪

"Towering behavior and collective dispersal in Caenorhabditis nematodes"
by Perez et al. (2025, Current Biology)
www.cell.com/current-biol...