Another good Thrush migration night over Cambridge last night! Overall flight call counts comparable with 17 October, but a nice species composition shift over the few weeks, with Song Thrush having peaked and now outnumbered by Blackbird.

#nocmig #BirdTrack #CambridgeshireBirding #UKBirding

An impressive influx of Thrushes on the night of 12 October! After nights of birds just slowly trickling in, it all kicked off with 442 Redwing and 283 Song Thrush calls over Cambridge, plus some Wigeon, Moorhen, and a Common Sandpiper.

#nocmig #BirdTrack #CambridgeshireBirding #UKBirding

My favourite figure from our new paper on lateral line development in Sterlet sturgeon (doi.org/10.7554/eLif...). In this one, we use targeted gene knockout and show that in (mosaic) absence of FoxG1, ectopic electroreceptors develop instead of mechanosensory hair cells!

#fishsci #evo-devo #CRISPR

The full version of our CRISPR paper on Sterlet lateral line just got published, showing the conserved role of Atoh1 in electroreceptor & hair cell development, and FoxG1 promoting mechanosensory but repressing electrosensory fate!

doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

#sturgeon #fishsci #ancientfish #evo-devo

Avoiding the important steps in processing my #nocmig data (IDing a vast backlog of nocturnal flight calls from 2020-2023, and organising data from 2023 onwards), I tried to plot a subset of the calls I had already processed. A nice glimpse of what's to follow though 😊

Another bit of insight into electroreceptor development in sturgeons by the Baker lab, the full version of Alex Campbell's paper is now available on eLife.

elifesciences.org/articles/99798

Recorded some migrating bird calls near Cambridge on Saturday night, and what a lovely surprise to hear a Stone-curlew amongst them! Same day RSPB posted a #SpringArrivalSpotlight about this rare bird on Bluesky 🙂 What a timing!

Common Frogs going at it during the sunny spell this weekend. Video sped up 5x, sound is in original speed to appreciate the impressive chorus of croaks. #frogspawn

Common Frogs taking the most of the UK's lovely spring weather this weekend.

Being used to Nothern Pintails staying so far out on open water that they usually occupy just a few dozen pixels on my desperate photo attempts, this one was quite a nice surprise on our brief stopover on Dernford reservoir near Stapleford, Cambs today 😊

Celebrating the #WorldWetlandsDay with a visit to WWT Welney today 😊

"at a distance of 100 cm in Cambridge tap water, signals of approximately 30 μV were observed."

🔌🐟 Time to pour myself a glass of the stuff, and gulp proudly on the medium in which the electric field of Gymnarchus was first characterised by H. W. Lissmann in 1951 😊

www.nature.com/articles/167...

Happy 2025 everyone! The attached New Year's card features some of my wildlife encounters from last year. My favourite amongst them is a lizard, Algerian Psammodromus, unusual amongst European species by its ability to produce audible distress calls 📣🦎 Also stunning to look at.

It's #GarWeek, apparently, so here's my contribution 😊 A short timelapse of Tropical Gar (Atractosteus tropicus) embryo development, as shot on a cheap digital microscope in Mexico 🇲🇽 during the final gar trip of my PhD.

I started using enzymatic metallography back in 2015 when studying head development in fish embryos in Brian Metscher's MicroCT lab in Vienna. The crisp black signal caused by silver precipitation by a HRP-conjugated antibody is almost as beautiful under a stereoscope as it is stunning under X-rays.