Tomos Potter
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tomospotter.bsky.social
Tomos Potter
@tomospotter.bsky.social
960 followers 610 following 200 posts
Evolutionary ecologist in the Kokko lab, JGU Mainz. Recovering guppy-botherer, interested in eco-evolutionary processes that generate and maintain diversity. Models, stats, long-term studies.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 in 🇩🇪

Also likes: food, landscapes, guitars
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tomospotter.bsky.social
Some nice timeline synchronicity for me today
Below Moose’s original picture, I see a post by the Journal of Animal Ecology which uses the same “overlapping ridges” style a.k.a a Joy Division plot to show how the date at which deer give birth varies across different parts of Europe
October 14, 2025 at 2:29 PM
tomospotter.bsky.social
New book arrived! Looking forward to learning more about the bonkers life of JBS Haldane. I also note that he sports the same hairstyle that is (sadly) traditional among men in my family. Seems like we will have that in common at least!
A photo of the book “A Dominant Character” by Samantha Subramanian, on the life of JBS Haldane. The cover shows a photo of JBS with a distinctly bald head.
September 18, 2025 at 7:57 PM
tomospotter.bsky.social
What if your family members turn out to be your worst enemies? Come see my talk at #eseb2025 on using pedigree and mark-recapture data to explore how relatedness structures competitive interactions, and whether this maintains variation! Thursday, 11am, S48.02, meeting room 122+123
The title slide of the talk I'll be giving. It reads: Are mitochondrial sisters their own worst enemies? Testing for negative frequency-dependent selection via resource competition in Trinidadian guppies. There is a depiction of a guppy family tree.
August 17, 2025 at 2:35 PM
tomospotter.bsky.social
I think they are rank ordered by value. I made a similar plot to illustrate the change in both frequency and abundance of 27 distinct male colour patterns in guppies, maintained by negative frequency dependence. Visually striking, but maybe not an ideal way to convey the message...
27 wiggly lines of different colours. Each line represents one of 27 distinct colour patterns of male guppies in a stream in Trinidad. The width of the lines is proportional to the abundance of that pattern type in a given month. The abundance of each pattern type changes as the males have sons (who inherit the same pattern) or die. The rank order of the lines (from top to bottom) goes from most abundant to least abundant. I picked the colours from a Hermann Scherer painting because it was the most colourful painting I could think of.
March 26, 2025 at 9:48 PM
tomospotter.bsky.social
have you asked your horse?
A photo of a horse, with the caption: "what is a martingale, and does your horse need one? - my new horse"
March 13, 2025 at 10:04 PM
tomospotter.bsky.social
Arguably the Most weasel
From the wikipedia page for "Least weasel" - photo of said beast
March 5, 2025 at 6:22 PM
tomospotter.bsky.social
Fun to give an introductory talk at JGU Mainz today - which is a good time to announce here that I am delighted to have joined the @kokkonut.bsky.social Theoretical Evolutionary Ecology lab as a post-doc! Looking forwards to developing my modelling skills with this excellent group!
Title slide from my talk today, which reads "Using pedigrees to understand eco-evolutionary processes in the wild", with a cartoon pedigree of two parent guppy fish and their four offspring.
March 4, 2025 at 1:11 PM
tomospotter.bsky.social
Presumably Michelangelo isn’t bothered about the blatant reproduction of his design
A photo and headline from the Observer. The headline reads “Clear creative abuse’: UK gravestone carvers condemn blatant reproduction of their designs”. Photo is of a man by a gravestone with a carving of two hands reaching to each other, in the exact same design as Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam.
January 4, 2025 at 7:32 PM
tomospotter.bsky.social
Hurlbert 1984 is a classic - especially for the recommendations of using exorcism and human sacrifice to avoid demonic intrusion in experiments:
A table of possible sources of confusion in an experiment (e.g. temporal change, experimenter bias etc), and means for minimising their effect (e.g. control treatments, randomization etc). One source of confusion is listed as "demonic intrusion"; potential means for minimising are listed as "Eternal vigilance, exorcism, human sacrifices, etc".
December 20, 2024 at 12:34 PM
tomospotter.bsky.social
Your post brought to mind the delightful old name for the kestrel:
Screen grab from Wikipedia that shows that the old name for a kestrel was a “windfucker”
December 19, 2024 at 5:29 PM
tomospotter.bsky.social
Post your frogs!
🐸
A pale looking rusty tree frog from Trinidad. It is sitting on a thin branch which runs from bottom left to top right of the image. Frog looks a bit hungry.
December 13, 2024 at 10:09 PM
tomospotter.bsky.social
Here’s a somewhat ghostly looking rusty tree frog, from the Guanapo valley in 🇹🇹. A great poser!
A branch, running from bottom left to top right, upon which is perched a ghostly pale frog with yellow eyes.
December 13, 2024 at 8:45 PM
tomospotter.bsky.social
Does bioRxiv deliberately use a low-res image of their logo as an oblique reference to the fact that they handle preprints? Cos that would never be accepted for publication.
bioRxiv's grainy grainy logo, which appears as a thumbnail on all their posts
November 28, 2024 at 5:05 PM
tomospotter.bsky.social
My nemesis. This fella has been lurking outside the kitchen door for weeks, and chases me to the shed or my car or wherever whenever he has the opportunity. Haven’t seen him since the snow… despite all his menacing, I miss his pretty face!
A close-up picture of a male pheasant, giving me the evil eye through my kitchen door
November 22, 2024 at 12:33 PM
tomospotter.bsky.social
A fisherman sitting on a chair on a rock just offshore, facing out to sea. Sailboats on the horizon, sun setting.
November 16, 2024 at 7:36 PM
tomospotter.bsky.social
Once again, I am raising my petition to replace R's unreasonably scary "Session Aborted" message with grumpy pingu. #RStats
Drake hotline bling meme with drake shying away from the scary "R session aborted" message featuring a bomb and the words "fatal error", but Drake okaying an image of grumpy pingu (a clay penguin) with folded arms saying "well now I am not doing it"
September 19, 2024 at 2:51 PM
tomospotter.bsky.social
Excited to see this fish for the 20th time in our killifish mark-recapture project! First caught in April 2022, and caught most months since. She was already a mature female when she got her tattoo, still doing her thing in a stream in the forest in Trinidad 🇹🇹. Go CA-6B9Y-2204!
June 20, 2024 at 5:57 PM
tomospotter.bsky.social
Gorgeous Siphlophis compressus 🐍in the Guanapo valley 🇹🇹 last night. Slightly boring common name is the tropical flat snake.
May 23, 2024 at 1:05 PM
tomospotter.bsky.social
This is a male Trinidadian Stream frog carrying his tadpoles on his back. I watched him take them out of a pool containing some big killifish - probably a wise move by this dad!
A small golden-brown frog (not much bigger than a thumbnail) carrying 6-7 tadpoles on his back, sitting on a leaf.
April 2, 2024 at 3:04 PM
tomospotter.bsky.social
Playing around with sankey plots: this shows the change in frequency of Y-xsome haplotypes in one of our populations of guppies over time. Each colour is one haplotype, width = N copies present, most abundant at the top, least abundant at the bottom.

Evolution in action! 🧪
A plot showing wiggly lines in 27 different colours, each representing the the abundance of a different Y-chromosome haplotype. The lines go from left (the founders) to right, tracking the number of copies of each haplotype present in the population at a time (the width of the line). They lines look wiggly because they often change in rank-order of abundance.
February 23, 2024 at 11:58 AM
tomospotter.bsky.social
We've been lucky enough to spot fer-de-lance on 3 consecutive field days in the last week! Here are two of them - a baby on the left (near the Quare river) and an adult on the right (Guanapo valley). Always nice when we spot them before getting too close...
November 22, 2023 at 2:39 PM
tomospotter.bsky.social
This little fella is a Mole's dwarf gecko, about an inch long. He shares our kitchen in Trinidad. I think these guys can change colour- another fell out of a tree the other day and was really dark, but lightened up after a few minutes on a pale background. Such cool little critters!
November 22, 2023 at 2:30 PM
tomospotter.bsky.social
Yesterday's bonus field station task - release this beautiful boa constrictor a bit further away from our landlord's chicken shed...

I ❤️ working in Trinidad 🇹🇹
#TheGuppyProject

Photo by Nacho Paulin
A decent-sized boa constrictor (maybe 5-6ft) in a large chicken feed bag, ready to be transported safely up the road a little and released into the forest.
October 15, 2023 at 6:15 PM
tomospotter.bsky.social
Intro time! I'm Tom, interested in eco-evo processes that maintain variation. I'll post about my thoughts on mine and others papers (life histories, sexual selection, quant gen, competition). And on adventures in the field!

Currently on a solo writing retreat in beautiful Tobago! Here is my office.
My current office: a veranda overlooking the town and bay of Speyside, Tobago.
October 6, 2023 at 2:14 PM