Jeremy B. Yoder 🧬📊🌿🏳️‍🌈🖖🏻
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jbyoder.org
Jeremy B. Yoder 🧬📊🌿🏳️‍🌈🖖🏻
@jbyoder.org
7.8K followers 1.9K following 3.7K posts
Evolutionary biologist, runner, writer, gay. Not necessarily in that order. LAX and SEA


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Also ecoevo.social/@jby, jbyoder.org
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Beavertail prickly pear, Opuntia basilaris, in bloom this spring at Vasquez Rocks County Park 🌿

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A close view of three just-opening flowers with many bright pink petals, at the tip of a green cactus pad that looks sort of like a flat beaver tail
November 12, 2025 at 2:15 PM
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The balcony's right behind the dining room table that has been my work-from-home desk, so maybe not so much neighbors as officemates?
The balcony, with three crows perched along the railing Selfie with a view over my shoulder and out the balcony doors to a crow on the balcony railing A crow strutting along the balcony railing, peanuts visible on the table below
November 11, 2025 at 6:20 PM
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Took a level in #Seattle about a week ago, when I brought home a bag of unsalted shell-on peanuts for the neighbors
November 11, 2025 at 6:17 PM
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Crater Lake this June, as seen from the parking lot of the Crater Lake National Park visitor center, which was still half-buried in snow 🌿

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A deep blue arc of quiet lake, ringed by snow-streaked crater walls and a handful of green conifers, with a conical island rising from the water
November 10, 2025 at 3:19 PM
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I'm sorry I'm sorr
ZOHRAN for NEW YORK but it's THERE ARE for LIGHTS
November 8, 2025 at 8:54 PM
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CROWS /for/ SEATTLE
November 8, 2025 at 8:38 PM
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Joshua trees make the cover of @newphyt.bsky.social for the issue with our paper, led by @kheyduk.bsky.social, showing that they use water-saving CAM photosynthesis — but only sometimes 🌿 buff.ly/WnPoRXa
The cover of the December 2025 issue of New Phytologist, with an image of a small western Joshua tree in the soft light of a desert morning
November 7, 2025 at 3:12 PM
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Cuckoo eggs match the eggs of their adoptive hosts thanks to (mostly) loci inherited from their mothers, who put them there — impressive multifaceted genomic study buff.ly/r8xpxaR
Fig 2 from the linked paper, captioned: Fig. 2. Matrilineal variation is associated with egg diversification in C. canorus. (A) Matrilineal W chromosome phylogeny (n = 60 canorus, 27 optatus), with corresponding autosomal groups (A), geographic groups (G), and egg morphs indicated below each tip, each representing an unrelated female with known egg morph. Diamonds indicate node support exceeding 95% (SHaLRT). (B) Phenotypic variation within canorus (ECC) and optatus (ECO) egg morphs. (C) Variation explained (pseudo-­ R2) by continuous pairwise distance matrices of matrilineal, geographic, or autosomal variation estimated with a distance-­ based redundancy analysis (compare figs. S13 and S14 for replicated analyses with mtDNA variation). (D) Egg phenotype matching among varying degrees of related canorus. (E) Egg morph predicted with machine learning using either autosomal ancestry cluster (A) and geographic group (G) alone (left) or with the addition of haplogroup (M) (right). Confusion matrix of predictive modeling shows the proportion of correct classifications across 100 bootstrapped replicates. The area under the curve (AUC) 95% confidence interval across replicates is indicated below each label. (F) Confusion matrix for optatus.
November 6, 2025 at 2:54 PM
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A bright-eyed spotted towhee, Pipio maculatus, in Stanley Park, Vancouver 🪶🌿

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A songbird with a black head, breast, back, and tail, black wings with white spots, a white belly, and bright orange-red flanks, perched alertly on the crossbeam of a fence
November 5, 2025 at 2:15 PM
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Ooh it's under Settings > Moderation > Interaction Settings to set defaults. There's some really neat flexibility possible if you take advantage of the lists feature, which I haven't.

You can also set restrictions on a per-post basis in the post writing popup
Screenshot of my Interaction Settings, which allows quote posts, but only allows replies from Mentioned users, Users you (I) follow, and Your (my) followers
November 4, 2025 at 8:28 PM
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Species invasions often create a "founder effect" that makes it hard to see effects of adaptation to the invaded habitat— genomic signals of a rapid post-bottleneck expansion look a lot like signals of adaptation. This study of European starlings teases those signals apart! 🌿🪶

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A flock of starlings, brown-black passerines, in flight over a body of water. Photo by Julio Mulero on Flickr.
November 4, 2025 at 3:54 PM
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Cones and leaves of red alder, Alnus rubra, along the trail to Granite Lake back in the warmer days of August 🌿

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November 3, 2025 at 3:19 PM
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Experimentally co-evolved E. coli and yeast achieve stable coexistence — and the coevolved E. coli, but not the yeast, is able to resist invasion by other bacterial strains

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Fig 3C from the linked article, showing three rows of 12 panels, each with a graph of cell density over time for 7-day competition experiments with coevolved E coli and yeast plus competitor bacteria. Different competitor strains are in each column of the 3x12 grid, and each row gives results for experiments with ancestral, 1000-generation coevolved, or 4000-generation coevolved E coli. The ancestral E coli fails to resist invasion of many competitors, but the coevolved strains resist most of the competitors.
October 31, 2025 at 2:12 PM
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Just took a level in Overleaf www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/...
Screenshot of text from a manuscript with edits highlighted, either red with strikethrough for removed text or blue with a wavy underline for added text. The text is: variables (O’Donnell and Ignizio, 2012) from PRISM monthly data, averaging them over 1991–2020 (for the recent period) and 1901–1930 (for the early 20th century) As training data for the SDM, we downloaded toyon occurrence records from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) database (gbif.org; GBIF 2025) using utilities in the rgbif package, which we filtered to remove records with higher location uncertainty and high-probability captive or cultivated status using utilities in the CoordinateCleaner package. We removed records from prior to 1991, the start of the period covered by our “re-
October 30, 2025 at 10:58 PM
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An American crow, Corvus brachyrynchos, keeping watch at the water taxi landing by Sunset Beach, Vancouver 🌿🪶

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October 30, 2025 at 1:54 PM
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Nifty Natural History Note in @asn-amnat.bsky.social: these frogs can change color from green to brown to hide against different-colored backgrounds (Image: Hugo Claessen, Wikimedia) 🌿

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A waxy-looking frog with a green back and upper surfaces and a yellow belly, photographed on a green leaf
October 29, 2025 at 1:15 PM
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The ridgeline of Mount Roosevelt overlooking Snow Lake, in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, Washington State 🌿

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A rocky ridgeline with multiple sharp peaks, the lower slopes forested with green conifers, under white clouds with a little blue sky peeking through
October 28, 2025 at 2:54 PM
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In ant colonies infested by a tapeworm parasite, uninfected workers show stress-related gene activity—because they're caring for infected nestmates (photo: Matt Hamer, AntWiki)

Parasite prevalence in a social host has colony-wide impacts on transcriptional activity and survival buff.ly/ZCJTAVk
Photo of workers, alates, and pupae of Temnothorax nylanderi, the ant species featured in the study: A mass of white ant pupae with larger, darker workers tending them, and a few very large winged alates apparently getting in the way Figure 3 from the paper, showing survival curves for queens, infected workers, healthy nurse-workers, and healthy foragers in colonies with no, low, or high infection prevalence; all categories of ants have reduced survival in more-infected colonies but infected workers have higher survival than queens in infected colonies!
October 24, 2025 at 2:12 PM
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Sunlight through steam rising off a fallen snag in Stanley Park, Vancouver 🌿
The twisted roots of a fallen tree with reddish-brown wood, lying in the midst of a green forest, its trunk pointing away from the camera. Plumes of steam rise from the roots, illuminated by beams of sunlight from above.
October 23, 2025 at 1:54 PM
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Very cool population genomic look into local adaptation against gene flow at a relatively small spatial scale, urban/rural gradients across metro Toronto, in this month's @journal-evo.bsky.social

Signatures of selective sweeps in urban and rural white clover populations

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A multi-line graph with each line tracing the minor allele frequency for a locus in the white clover genome (y-axis) varying with distance from the Toronto city center (x-axis), with many light gray lines that don't indicate significant urban-rural allele frequency change, and highlighted green lines or blue lines that have steep slopes indicating local adaptation against gene flow
October 22, 2025 at 1:15 PM
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Today in unexpectedly informative German vocabulary: haha “consultant” is “Berater”

Oh but: “Ratschlag” is “piece of advice” and legislatures are like the Bundesrat

“Rat” is “advice” and “to berate” someone is “to advise” them oh dang
Screenshot from a Babbel lesson on German plural noun forms: der Berater (the consultant) - die Berater (the consultants)
October 21, 2025 at 8:01 PM
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A softly dapper dark-eyed junco, Junco hyemalis oregonus, in Stanley Park, Vancouver 🪶🌿

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A sparrow-like bird with brown wings, buffy flanks, a white breast, and a sooty dark head, perched on a twig
October 21, 2025 at 2:54 PM
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"Some authors yield to reviewer pressure knowingly introducing changes that are clearly wrong" in the paper's abstract is presumably from Q13 in the survey instrument posted to Zenodo, which is not "clearly wrong" but "you thought were incorrect" — very different things!

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Screenshot text: Q13 During the peer-review process of your own papers, have you ever made changes to your manuscript that you thought were incorrect (i.e., introducing an error), but you did them in response to pressure from reviewers? Options for Yes, I have; No, never
October 20, 2025 at 5:26 PM
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Facing down a new week of too many deadlines like this chestnut-backed chickadee (Poecile rufescens) in Stanley Park, Vancouver 🌿🪶

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A small round passerine perched on a twig, the crown of its head pointed at the camera as it eyeballs the photographer. It has chestnut-brown shoulders and flanks, a buff breast, a darker brown stripe across its throat, white cheeks, and a deep brown cap
October 20, 2025 at 2:17 PM
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🤔🤔🤔
A watermark on the image with all of these fairly obvious indicators of genAI slop, a sort of diamond with concave sides Screenshot of the Quick Facts box from the Wikipedia page for Google's Gemini genAI thing, featuring the Gemini logo, which is ... a sort of diamond with concave sides
October 19, 2025 at 7:22 PM