Alex Wild
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alexwild.bsky.social
Alex Wild
@alexwild.bsky.social
Entomologist and Photographer in Austin, Texas.

https://www.alexanderwild.com
Pinned
My best photographs of 2025, a short thread.

A tobacco hornworm on one of its favorite foods, a garden tomato plant (Texas, May 2025). This one makes the cut because it is more aesthetically pleasing than I was aiming for, somehow.
Good God of course it wasn’t Liam, why would you put a little kid who’s been through all that in front of a million people
February 9, 2026 at 2:08 AM
Now back to the game, which is like watching a guy run into wall for two hours.
February 9, 2026 at 1:44 AM
Reposted by Alex Wild
OK "god bless america" and then naming every country in the americas from south to north is absolute king shit
February 9, 2026 at 1:33 AM
Loved that. Amazing.
February 9, 2026 at 1:35 AM
Reposted by Alex Wild
Trump: (United States) America can influence anything in this hemisphere

Bad Bunny: All of this is America
February 9, 2026 at 1:33 AM
Reposted by Alex Wild
One of the best Super Bowl Halftime Shows in recent memory

10/10. No notes.
February 9, 2026 at 1:31 AM
Retraining the LLM; final score will be 12-0 Seahawks.
Trained an LLM on the first quarter, the final score will be 3-0 Seahawks.
February 9, 2026 at 12:42 AM
Trained an LLM on the first quarter, the final score will be 3-0 Seahawks.
February 9, 2026 at 12:22 AM
I regret to inform everyone that The Taxonomists have gone and changed a bunch of ant names again.
A genus-level classification of the ant subfamily Ponerinae (Hymenoptera, Formicidae)
The genus-level classification of the ant subfamily Ponerinae (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) is revised based on a comprehensive phylogenomic analysis of more than 2,300 ultraconserved element (UCE) loci a...
zookeys.pensoft.net
February 8, 2026 at 8:51 PM
Reposted by Alex Wild
Friends in Minneapolis are very worried about this development. Both in terms of state police's role in arresting protestors and the worry that this could set off the kind of spiral of distrust and destruction that followed George Floyd's murder.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/u...
At Least 50 Arrested After Protests Escalate Outside Minnesota Federal Building
www.nytimes.com
February 8, 2026 at 6:26 PM
The super bowl ads are a good metric of which companies are awash in far too much wealth and should be taxed down to a wee nubbin.
February 8, 2026 at 4:04 PM
Reposted by Alex Wild
I think all the time about how every tech company desperately tried to get us on board with crypto/NFTs in 2022, including all those Super Bowl ads. They wasted a bunch of energy, spewed a bunch of emissions, got vulnerable people hooked on pyramid schemes, and then just pretended it didn't happen?
February 8, 2026 at 3:47 PM
The lovely Tetraponera merita, from Madagascar.
February 8, 2026 at 3:06 PM
I wasn’t prepared to support this protest, but speaking from Texas, Billionaires should be kept in California.
Thank you to everyone who marched with us today! Remember, Billionaires Build Prosperity—let's keep them in California!
February 8, 2026 at 2:08 PM
For a brief moment, they did it. Bitcoin at 69,420.

That was pretty much the whole point, right?
February 7, 2026 at 11:18 PM
Trump Derangement Syndrome certainly isn't real, but Stancil Derangement Syndrome should probably be studied.
February 7, 2026 at 10:35 PM
This was amazing.
Chock & Bates have great lifts and this is so striking.

⛸️ #Olympics #MilanoCortina2026
February 7, 2026 at 10:08 PM
Reposted by Alex Wild
This a word cloud from the titles of ~1100 terminated NSF grants.

It is hard not to see these grant terminations as an attack on the training of the future United States scientific workforce.
February 7, 2026 at 3:55 PM
A gallery of Pheidole big-headed ants. This is probably the world's most speciose ant genus.
Pheidole - Alex Wild
is the world's most species-rich ant genus. These myrmicine ants have a cosmopolitan distribution but are particularly diverse in the tropics, filling a number of niches from seed-harvesting to ant-pl...
www.alexanderwild.com
February 7, 2026 at 8:55 PM
The Washington Post could have been saved, but one of the world's richest and most powerful men is deciding to kill it on purpose.
Before The Washington Post layoffs came down, a group of wealthy D.C. locals approached CEO Will Lewis with a proposal.

@passantino.bsky.social has the details in his Saturday @status.news column: www.status.news/p/washington...
February 7, 2026 at 8:06 PM
A most Texas problem with self-driving cars. Not the driving, the jerks with guns who point them at everything they don't like:
From the Austin community on Reddit
Explore this post and more from the Austin community
www.reddit.com
February 7, 2026 at 6:50 PM
Reposted by Alex Wild
ICE told nurses this Minneapolis man “purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall.”

What actually happened is that they pulled him from a car, beat him so viciously with a steel baton that he had 8 skull fractures, 5 life-threatening brain hemorrhages, and couldn’t remember he had a daughter.
February 7, 2026 at 5:54 PM
Remember ScienceBlogs back in the peak blogging era?

Epstein-affiliated. Gross.
Epstein and Maxwell were also apparently on the board of SEED Media Group, with influence over SEED magazine and ScienceBlogs dot com, which is where I blogged in the very early days of my career.
Jeffrey Epstein and the Power of Networks
The billionaire child rapist bought his way into an elite crowd of intellectuals that defined the last three decades of science, tech, and culture.
www.wired.com
February 7, 2026 at 2:50 PM
After a year or so in the peace corps I was adept enough at the Guarani language to finally understand what people were talking about.

Mostly dick jokes.
How much people everywhere are basically the same. Human experiences are universal and we have soooo much more in common than we have in difference
What has surprised you the most when traveling?
February 7, 2026 at 1:18 PM
Reposted by Alex Wild
“Exquisite Creatures: An Immersive Journey into Nature's Art” #Seattle bio-sculptural #nature #art #exhibition by artist Christopher Marley
February 7, 2026 at 12:49 PM