Christina Baer, Ph.D.
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bugbaer.bsky.social
Christina Baer, Ph.D.
@bugbaer.bsky.social
2.3K followers 680 following 360 posts
Ecological Genetics Research Asst Prof in the First-year Research Immersion (FRI) Program at Binghamton University. Temperate & tropical #insects 🐛🐜🦗 #plants 🌱🌴🌳#ClimateChange | she/her
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bugbaer.bsky.social
If you see this, quote post with a beach photo from your gallery.

Or not. But I'd like to see what you have.

When I searched "beach" in my phone, all I got was a bad video of a storm blowing in on Cayuga Lake this July. So instead, have a sunset photo from Cabo Blanco, Costa Rica back in 2012.
A very shadowy rocky beach looks out across low rocky outcrops and low water towards a pastel pink sunset and stratus clouds. The upper part of the sky is a very pale blue with a lot of swooping cirrus(?) clouds. At the upper left, the scene is framed by a couple of tree branches with big leaves.
February 13, 2025 at 2:05 AM
bugbaer.bsky.social
Yup. (Screenshot brought to you by whatever urge makes someone run to fiddle with something as soon as someone announces that it's broken.) Hopefully they fix it before Friday--I've got letters for 2 students to submit
Screenshot of the NSF ETAP (National Science Foundation Education and Training Programs) application portal with options on the top menu and the NSF logo but a sad spinning blue circle where the recommendation submission portal is supposed to be)
January 28, 2025 at 9:27 PM
bugbaer.bsky.social
Nice! I thought the style looked familiar. This was given to my grandma by a friend and now I have it
A wide and short book open to the title page. It says: FLOWER GUIDE revised and with new illustrations Wild Flowers East of the Rockies by Chester A. Reed author of North American Birds’ Eggs, Bird Guides, etc. … blah blah publisher information blah blah… 1915
December 28, 2024 at 12:48 AM
bugbaer.bsky.social
I just did my first little freehand embroidery of a maple leaf to cover up mending a hole at the base of the leaf! The thing that turned out to be the most helpful was doing the midvein first so I could estimate relative distances and positions
Burgundy sweater with a set of horizontal white, light pink, dark pink, and dark yellow stripes across the chest. Just above the tunic-style hem a pink and orange maple leaf and two small orange "leaves" (really just ovals) have been hand-embroidered
November 20, 2024 at 3:07 PM
bugbaer.bsky.social
Using @skypeascientist.bsky.social's Crab Facts calendar to count down to the FRI program's poster session! 18 more days to go!
A piece of cardstock with pink crab illustrations on a light green background patterned with star-like coral polyps and other sea-life textures. At the top of the page, two crab claws are holding a letter banner that says "CRAB FACTS". Below that is a piece of green lab tape that says "POSTER SESSION COUNTDOWN!!" and below that are 24 holographic silver scratch-off boxes. The first 6 have been scratched and say things like "Crabs can be left handed or right handed" and "The biggest crab is the Japanese crab. They can reach 14 feet in wingspan!"
November 18, 2024 at 2:43 PM
bugbaer.bsky.social
I use this video in my classes too! Also this cartoon for genetic drift, which always gets some giggles. I think it also helps counter the idea that evolution is organisms deliberately working towards a goal as opposed to wandering around. 1/2
Black and white cartoon of a drunk partier walking on a slippery sidewalk to the left of a railroad track. His footprints are wandering back and forth across the sidewalk and the sidewalk appears to be getting narrower. In the top right corner is a box saying "Fixation 1" with an arrow pointing left to safety and "Loss 0" with an arrow pointing right towards the railroad track
November 11, 2024 at 3:34 PM
bugbaer.bsky.social
#ThrowbackThursday to last Thursday, which still feels like a very long time ago. About a third of my class dressed up for Halloween and I wore my praying mantis costume! See alt text for costume explanations.
A group of people wearing biology-inspired costumes in a classroom. Descriptions are followed by what the costume *is* in parentheses. From left to right, someone wearing a rose-patterned shirt and jeans (a rose bush), someone wearing a Batman mask (a bat), someone wearing a black KN95 mask and a green t-shirt with a strange mashup of a black, yellow, and white caterpillar and a cat skeleton (me). Someone wearing a lab coat and safety goggles (generic scientist), someone wearing a lab coat and safety goggles and holding a toy spider (an arachnologist and/or possibly Peter Parker), someone wearing a fake beard and holding a toy bird (Charles Darwin), someone wearing a lab coat, pipe-cleaner rodent ears, and drawn-on whiskers (lab rat). Me, wearing a complicated green costume with "compound eyes" on my head, green gloves with ridged forearms, and an insect abdomen with an extra pair of legs. Someone wearing brown pants, a tree-patterned shirt and sunglasses (camouflage) and holding a trick-or-treating pumpkin bucket that has been decorated to look like a green insect head. Someone wearing a green hoodie and brown pants, with raised arms (tree), someone wearing white overalls with a green hoodie that has small yellow leaves coming out of the hood (powdery mildew), and someone wearing a light brown field/fishing/birding vest, a long-sleeved shirt and shorts and holding a net and container (entomologist)
November 7, 2024 at 9:02 PM
bugbaer.bsky.social
Today is absurdly warm and sunny, so after I got home I planted some bulbs! I want my yard to be mostly native plants, so I’m multitasking and planting them in my kitchen garden. The fall crocuses I planted about a month ago have already come up nicely!

I still have strawberries-odd but delicious
Messy garden bed with some awkward tomatoes and basil that is mostly dead or gone to seed, but with poos of yellow from a marigold plant and purple from fall crocuses Close-up photo. In the top right, a light purple crocus flower with a bunch of orange-yellow stigmas. At the bottom, a pale hand holding a small, light red, mostly ripe strawberry. Most of the background is strawberry leaves
November 5, 2024 at 9:56 PM
bugbaer.bsky.social
Two cute animals! My cat Adele (enforcing work-life balance by sitting on my work laptop) and a baby snapping turtle from this spring
Very fluffy blackish cat with green eyes and big pupils sitting on a closed laptop with her tail curled in front of her A hand-sized baby snapping turtle with a dark brown serrated shell and lighter brown forelegs and head standing on grass and dead leaves. The eyes look almost wooden and the shell has tiny little green leaves (duckweed) and a bit of a brown leaf stuck on it.
November 5, 2024 at 3:55 PM
bugbaer.bsky.social
One year in Costa Rica, there was one(?) laughing falcon near the Palo Verde field station that would let you get right under the tree branches they were perching on!

(These photos are cropped) #birds
A falcon with a white head, chest and legs, a black eye mask, and dark brown wings is perched on a branch. The falcon is looking to the left so only one side of the head is visible. There are blurry green leaves and light sky in the background The same falcon but their head is now full frontal to the camera and you can see both eyes with the dark patches surrounding them, the point of the dark beak and light gray streaks on the white forehead. Maybe I'm imagining it, but the bird kind of seems to have a "what are YOU looking at" expression
November 5, 2024 at 1:23 AM
bugbaer.bsky.social
Perfect black hole #caturday
Fluffy black cat curled up in a perfect circle on the back of a blue couch
November 2, 2024 at 9:24 PM
bugbaer.bsky.social
And even where the color is consistent, there can be differences. For example, different Danaus caterpillars (monarchs & friends) are helpful for recognition at both the genus & species level. So I did literally sketchy coloring to indicate I was showing general color patterns, not species ones
Close-up of a pencil sketch of 2 white, black, and yellow caterpillars seen from above with their heads at the top of the page. The one on the left has a pair of black tendrils at each end. The one on the right has 2 pairs of black tendrils at the top (head) end and one pair at the bottom end. Underneath is the name "Danaus"
November 1, 2024 at 5:57 PM
bugbaer.bsky.social
If you see this, post a photo taken in the mountains.

The photo on the right was taken 2 minutes later, when the mountaintop was inside the thunderstorm
A mountain top seen from a window as very dark clouds approach. The clouds and the land in the foreground are so dark that the reflections of the overhead lights and the restaurant table can be seen in the window. The window also has a few raindrops on it. In the distance, mountain slopes and ridges are still visible in bright sunlight Very blurry photo of a wet window from the inside. The outside is a cloud, so all that really shows up is a blurry reflection of a white woman in a green shirt and a hat holding a phone up to take the photo and the inside of a restaurant with several other people
October 30, 2024 at 1:51 AM
bugbaer.bsky.social
Nice! I think this was the same window that caused the light in this picture I took when I visited in 2023!
The stone high-arched nave of a cathedral. There are chunks of reddish-orange and purplish-blue light from a stained glass window glowing on the nearby pillars, pews, and two tourists at the lower left who are admiring the window behind the camera. In the distance are two stories of stained glass windows shaped like pointed arches
October 28, 2024 at 11:43 PM
bugbaer.bsky.social
Hi, everyone who just followed me! There is a fair amount of overlap between my response to this prompt and what I post on Bsky, so I figure reposting this is a good explanation of what you've signed up for 😀
Text saying "You've been kidnapped." with a blank space and then "2 hours later you are returned because you can't stop talking about _____?"
October 17, 2024 at 8:54 PM
bugbaer.bsky.social
#BlockParty @franzanth.bsky.social @crawlieswithcri.bsky.social
This account would be cool...if it was posting credited photos of organisms instead of incorrect AI-generated images
Screenshot of an account called "Nature is Amazing". The banner photo is of a group of lions, but the image in the first photo (and all the rest on the account) is a AI-generated image of an organism...in this case, a not-quite-right magnolia next to flower buds that look more like rose buds than magnolia buds
October 9, 2024 at 2:11 AM
bugbaer.bsky.social
Unfortunately, I think all these images are AI...some of the specific ones do not look like the species the text claims they are. Compare this post to a photo taken by Andrew Newmark and posted on #iNaturalist
A computer-generated image of a blue and white bird with a medium long tail. Despite being identified as a black-throated magpie-jay, there is no black on its throat or elsewhere Photo of a blue, black, and white bird sitting on a branch. Compared to the bird in the previous image, the throat is black and the tail is longer and black and white.
October 9, 2024 at 2:07 AM
bugbaer.bsky.social
Happy #WorldAnimalDay!
QRT with your animal art. And remember, it doesn't have to be amazing art 😁 #birds #bugs #plants
Simple color pencil drawings of a raptor, showing a mostly dark brown dorsal side with white patch on the rump, a ventral side with rusty red wings and body. There are eraser smears where I had trouble drawing the bird's head correctly. There is also a diagram of the bird's flight pattern as a series of dark brown and rusty red V shapes (showing which side of the bird was visible). Text reads "Northern Harrier, October 3, 2024, 1:51 PM, Tschache Pool, Montezuma NWR, Seneca Falls, NY" Color pencil drawing of an orange and black monarch butterfly perched on a purple-pink thistle flower. It's better than the last drawing, but still pretty simple. Writing in the upper-right reads "2:03 PM, July 24, 2024, Near Lot C, Binghamton Univ., Binghamton, NY" Mostly black and white handwritten and hand-drawn guide to caterpillars on a landscape-oriented piece of paper. The left side shows several types of bristly caterpillars, including one at the bottom that looks like a bunch of pipe cleaners stuck together. The right side shows a bunch of different spiny caterpillars, including several that have horn-like structures emerging from behind their heads. There's also one caterpillar that kind of looks like a trilobite.
October 4, 2024 at 8:58 PM
bugbaer.bsky.social
Okay, #BirdsAndBugs Monday. These are both #StickHappens and one serious #BirdBlur, but they were my attempt to document a collared aracari beating the $*!@ out of a giant katydid or similar when I was in Costa Rica in 2019.

Phone camera, so I'm glad they turned out as well as they did
A red, black, and olive-green toucan-type bird is sitting on a branch with its big beak going behind the branch. Just visible between the branch and the beak are a pair of black insect wings that are a couple of inches long. The bird has just whacked the insect against the branch and its yellow eye is staring directly at the camera. An extremely blurry photo of the black, red, and olive-green bird having drawn its head back so it can whack the insect against the branch again. The insect is a black-brown blur, but it's nearly as long as the bird's big toucan-like beak.
October 1, 2024 at 12:19 AM
bugbaer.bsky.social
This AI "slug" was on a The Conversation article for a bit before I pointed it out 😭
AI-generated image of a slug facing the viewer. The body looks pretty sluglike, but the head has a pair of eyes directly on it and a "face" that looks like a grumpy old man who left out his dentures. The "eyestalks" don't actually have eyes on them
September 27, 2024 at 4:55 PM
bugbaer.bsky.social
Newt umbrella from earlier this summer! (Eastern newts, no idea what the mushroom is)
Close-up photo of three orange newts gathered around a yellow-white mushroom next to a tree root, surrounded by moss and small plants
September 12, 2024 at 12:39 AM
bugbaer.bsky.social
Adele is basically Distinguished Baby, esp if I can substitute “yowls a hairball warning so I can get a paper towel in front of her” instead of “asks to drink from the tap”
Photo of a very fluffy dark brown cat lying on a gray blanket with her green eyes barely open Very fluffy dark brown cat curled up on the top of a blue couch. Her head is up and she is looking just to the left of the camera with light green eyes. Her tongue is sticking out because she is licking the end of her very fluffy tail
September 9, 2024 at 12:51 PM
bugbaer.bsky.social
Very cool! I found a midge on a katydid once!
A light green katydid with leaf-like wings and an elongated pointy head. Right on top of one of the big wing veins is a midge with a light gray head and thorax and a very round yellow abdomen full of katydid hemolymph
September 2, 2024 at 8:56 PM
bugbaer.bsky.social
If you see this, quote post with a beach photo from your gallery.
A shadowed rocky beach framed by plants the foreground and the ocean silvery-gray in the dusk. The setting sun is just above the horizon on the left and the sky has crisscrossing bands of clouds. There is a little pale blue sky at the upper right corner
August 31, 2024 at 10:12 PM
bugbaer.bsky.social
I don’t have anything earthshattering, but these index cards were in a secondhand sci-fi book. I assume they were for some sort of game. I use them as bookmarks for this particular book. I guess it would have been even better if they’d been “space armor”, “blaster”, etc., but luck of the draw
A paperback of Lois McMaster Bujold’s “Diplomatic Immunity” with spaceships on the front and a $1 price sticker. Next to it are 4 index cards, all with a printed anchor and handwritten “Alex 9/25” in one corner. From the top, they read “$96,750”, “heavy pistol”, “armored vest”, and “cutlass”
July 28, 2024 at 3:23 PM