Tootfinder

Beavertail prickly pear, Opuntia basilaris, in bloom this spring at Vasquez Rocks County Park
#naturalist

Every book I checked (>6) that I used in computer networking classes I taught going back 25 years, except for one was found in this list.
https://ecoevo.social/@hydropsyche/115322277085213039

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
#naturalist

"Specialist" and "generalist" are surprisingly slippery categories— biology abhors a binary— but quantifying the shared evolutionary history of plants eaten by insects introduced to North America let these authors predict their plant-damaging impacts https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.70083

Joshua trees make the cover of New Phytologist, for the issue with our paper, led by Karolina Heyduk, showing that they use water-saving CAM photosynthesis — but only sometimes #science

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 #science

A bright-eyed spotted towhee, Pipio maculatus, in Stanley Park, Vancouver
#naturalist #bird

Cones and leaves of red alder, Alnus rubra, along the trail to Granite Lake back in the warmer days of August
#naturalist

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!
https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.17195

The slow drip of science discovery & health, #microplastic version:
1) oh, look what we found: lots of small plastic particles are showing up.
(Collective yawning)
2) oh, this is interesting - they cover the full range of sizes from the visible to sub-micron scale.
(Collective yawning, continued)
3)Oh look, they are everywhere, and the really small ones show up ev…

The ridgeline of Mount Roosevelt overlooking Snow Lake, in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, Washington State
#naturalist #photography #mountain

An American crow, Corvus brachyrynchos, keeping watch at the water taxi landing by Sunset Beach, Vancouver
#naturalist

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
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-025-02618-w

Huckleberries (Vaccinium membranaceum) and wild blueberries (V. deliciosum) along the trail to Snow Lake last week.
https://flic.kr/p/2roeRnH
Taxonomy is tricky: Both of these species have "blueberry" and "huckleberry" among their recognized common names.

An American dipper, Cinclus mexicanus, living up to its name at Snow Lake earlier this week. These guys are aquatic songbirds, basically thrushes who saw what ducks do and decided it looked fun
#naturalist #wildlife #bird

Nifty Natural History Note in @…: these frogs can change color from green to brown to hide against different-colored backgrounds (Image: Hugo Claessen, Wikimedia)
Physiological Color Change in the Neotropical Tree Frog (Pithecopus hypochondrialis) as a Potential Mechanism of Nocturnal Camouflage

This collared pika, Ochotona collaris, popped up on a boulder by the path to the Snow Lake overlook and sure seemed like it had something to say
#naturalist #wildlife #photography

Wrote up some thoughts about LLM chatbots that I haven't, I think, quite seen expressed in these terms: as they exist right now, they're really just another attempt to corral internet users inside one tech company's walled garden
https://denimandtweed.jbyoder.org/2025

So this came online over the weekend: My dive into the "definition" of coevolution is online ahead of publication in @…
Don’t ask "when is it coevolution?" — ask "how?"
https://

Adaptations that let Culex pipiens mosquitoes thrive in the London Underground turn out to have a much more ancient origin, in Egypt
Ancient origin of an urban underground mosquito https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ady4515

Great RadioLab interview with Ella al-Shamahi, about her journey from religious anti-evolutionism into evolutionary biology. New perspective but also familiar if you (like me) grew up among Christian creationists; really moving on what faith, even "denialist" faith, means to people
#science #evolution