And that's a wrap - Prof @tomerczaczkes.bsky.social give the final (and among the most fascinating) talk at the @dzg2025berlin.bsky.social. thank you to the organizers and to Berlin for the fantastic conference. Im grateful for the great community and motivated for the next year's research

Excited to be at the ECA 2025 in Croatia! Fantastic arachnology awaits us, exciting results and new collaborations. I love this society
@35theca2025.bsky.social

Our new paper is out @royalsociety.org! We discovered that crustaceans are, like many insects, chemically defended. The woodlouse Porcellio scaber secretes quinoline-derivates which deter predators. Three of the four identified metabolites were previously unknown.
doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2025.0260

Congratulations to our Carmen Noske, who defended her M.Sc. Thesis on the sexual signals of a cursorial spider. She brought us several steps closer to identifying the elusive sex pheromone and the role of physical signals in this multimodal communication system. Great show and great data!

I cherish most the fact that that my wife (trained artist) is the second author. She joined me on the black widow beach, month after month, for a whole year - while pregnant and then with newborn. Those days researching with her are memories I'll always hold dear.

When to invest in love?
We re-analyzed the sex pheromone of a black widow using multidimensional chromatographic mass spectrometry, then measured the newly identified sexual signals in the field for a year. Open Access @ Journal of Chemical Ecology.
doi.org/10.1007/s10886-025-01590-6

Male Anna's hummingbirds are highly territorial and display their prowess even against females during courtship, which is followed by a very brief copulation. I cherished the time when they did their business in front of my window. (filmed by phone behind my home in Vancouver BC)

Celebrating International Women's Day, i praise my wife Alexandra, the most hardworking and selfless person I know.
Pic captures her
dedication: joining a year-long
field research project on black widows
while pregnant and later with newborn. Paper now accepted for publication!
Congrats, my love!

At the @mfnberlin.bsky.social again. If it's up to the three year old we'd move to Berlin just to come here everyday. #steeeeeeegooosauruuus!

Challenging the textbook-idea of cheap pheromones, our study reveals pheromone production declines with starvation (purple). This supports honest and costly sex pheromones. Nonetheless, our starved spiders evolved ways to deceptively maintain attractiveness despite diminished fecundity (red).

Arthropod decline, particularly in cities, has devastating consequences for predators. Consequently, globally invasive urban spiders are well adapted to long-term starvation (>42 weeks), as demonstrated in my first paper since my PhD. @cp-iscience.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2024.110722

We are big fans of the @mfnberlin.bsky.social ! When in Berlin it's our mandatory stop. We thank all the curators for their fantastic display!

I'm passionate to innovate science:
A major challenge in metabolomics is the identification of the few behaviorally active ones among the vast quantity of detected components. We discovered that non-targeted metabolomics is a powerful solution to this bottleneck.
doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-44948-0

It's time to introduce myself here with some of my work:
Discovering new and behaviorally active pheromones is one of my main passions. Using a combination of LC/MSMS and GC/MS we could identify a widow spider pheromone that was elusive with traditional methods
doi.org/10.1038/s42003-022-04072-7