Daniel Villar
@daniel-a-villar.bsky.social
Conservation biologist and behavioural ecologist. Treasurer of Scientists for Labour. Postdoc at @durhamanthropology.bsky.social, DPhil from @biology.ox.ac.uk
Pinned
Sexual dichromatism increases with altitude in birds with ultraviolet sensitive vision
Previous work has shown a significant relationship between sexual dichromatism and altitude in birds, however, this work was focused on either a small subset of avian diversity or used human scoring ...
zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/oidcS...
Paper born out of frustration trying to identify sex of Andean species by their plumage in fieldwork has finally been published, showing it isn’t the birds that aren’t dichromatic, but my eyesight that is poor
Paper born out of frustration trying to identify sex of Andean species by their plumage in fieldwork has finally been published, showing it isn’t the birds that aren’t dichromatic, but my eyesight that is poor
The anti-immigrant right won’t be satisfied until immigration is down to the point of being statistically insignificant (under 10,000 a year) and not one is a refugee
Asylum seekers now make up nearly half of net migration to the UK and the number housed in hotels has increased despite Sir Keir Starmer’s pledge to end their use ⬇️
Asylum seekers account for almost half of net migration
New statistics showed a fall in net migration as British citizens and non-EU migrants left the UK, but the number of asylum seekers in hotels has grown
www.thetimes.com
November 28, 2025 at 1:30 PM
The anti-immigrant right won’t be satisfied until immigration is down to the point of being statistically insignificant (under 10,000 a year) and not one is a refugee
Who doesn’t remember how a anarcho-syndicalist collective forcing Mary and Joseph to travel to Bethlehem for a census?
November 28, 2025 at 1:28 PM
Who doesn’t remember how a anarcho-syndicalist collective forcing Mary and Joseph to travel to Bethlehem for a census?
Sobering that the austerity budgets of the Osborne years, which are to blame for so many of our problems and detested by everyone in Labour from Akehurst to McDonnell, were considered fair by the public
By 48% to 21% Britons say the 2025 Budget was unfair, the second worst score since YouGov began tracking in 2010
2025 Budget (net -27)
Fair: 21%
Unfair: 48%
2022 mini-Budget (net -38)
Fair: 19%
Unfair: 57%
2012 'Omnishambles' Budget (net -16)
Fair: 32%
Unfair: 48%
yougov.co.uk/politics/art...
2025 Budget (net -27)
Fair: 21%
Unfair: 48%
2022 mini-Budget (net -38)
Fair: 19%
Unfair: 57%
2012 'Omnishambles' Budget (net -16)
Fair: 32%
Unfair: 48%
yougov.co.uk/politics/art...
November 27, 2025 at 11:56 PM
Sobering that the austerity budgets of the Osborne years, which are to blame for so many of our problems and detested by everyone in Labour from Akehurst to McDonnell, were considered fair by the public
Every month I hear of someone else I know from uni days leaving Britain. And it’s not due to the weather — wages are low, house prices are high, and many reckon they can make money in Australia or Canada before retiring back in our green and pleasant land
I see Farage now hates emigration as well as immigration. The trouble is, he’s a big part of why people are emigrating. Brexit has made the U.K. a less attractive place for everyone.
November 27, 2025 at 9:11 PM
Every month I hear of someone else I know from uni days leaving Britain. And it’s not due to the weather — wages are low, house prices are high, and many reckon they can make money in Australia or Canada before retiring back in our green and pleasant land
Reposted by Daniel Villar
Land-use change undermines the stability of avian functional diversity - new #OA @nature.com paper with @patrickawalkden.bsky.social @josephtobias.bsky.social, combining #PredictsProject with #Avonet doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Land-use change undermines the stability of avian functional diversity - Nature
Large-scale analyses of bird species traits reveal that land-use change reduces resilience of key ecological functions more than previously thought.
doi.org
November 27, 2025 at 8:29 AM
Land-use change undermines the stability of avian functional diversity - new #OA @nature.com paper with @patrickawalkden.bsky.social @josephtobias.bsky.social, combining #PredictsProject with #Avonet doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Reposted by Daniel Villar
A reminder that almost all of the "migration crisis" of the last 18 months is a manufactured one – and probably says more about how much X has poisoned our politics than anything about realities on the ground.
NEW: Net migration falls sharply to 204,000 in the year to June.
That’s a fall from 649,000 in the year to June 2024. It is a drop of nearly 80% from its 2023 peak.
That’s a fall from 649,000 in the year to June 2024. It is a drop of nearly 80% from its 2023 peak.
November 27, 2025 at 11:48 AM
A reminder that almost all of the "migration crisis" of the last 18 months is a manufactured one – and probably says more about how much X has poisoned our politics than anything about realities on the ground.
Hopefully the good people of Richmond (and of other parts of the country where normal looking houses are now worth over 2 million) will start to realise the benefits of more house building to the degree that it actually reducing house prices
November 27, 2025 at 12:52 PM
Hopefully the good people of Richmond (and of other parts of the country where normal looking houses are now worth over 2 million) will start to realise the benefits of more house building to the degree that it actually reducing house prices
Reposted by Daniel Villar
Our new paper is out today in Journal of the Royal Society Interface (link below). All about eggshell roughness: "Scratching beyond the surface: examining macroecological patterns in avian eggshell texture". Congrats first author Marie Attard, and thank you @leverhulme.ac.uk for the funding.
November 26, 2025 at 7:25 AM
Our new paper is out today in Journal of the Royal Society Interface (link below). All about eggshell roughness: "Scratching beyond the surface: examining macroecological patterns in avian eggshell texture". Congrats first author Marie Attard, and thank you @leverhulme.ac.uk for the funding.
The Twitter posting —> policy pipeline continuing to exist is rather worrying considering the current state of Twitter
Don’t want to be too moralistic about this, but it is an active disgrace what people are doing to a profoundly liberational scheme that costs relatively piddling amounts on the basis of a couple of right wing shitposters misrepresenting it on Twitter.
November 25, 2025 at 10:33 PM
The Twitter posting —> policy pipeline continuing to exist is rather worrying considering the current state of Twitter
Reposted by Daniel Villar
NEW! 🦠🦧 We revisited a perplexing paradox: do wildlife really pose less of a risk to human health as they become more endangered? Turns out, it's sampling bias all the way down: conservation risks correlate with disease surveillance blindspots. 🔓 esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Viral diversity and zoonotic risk in endangered species
A growing body of evidence links zoonotic disease risk, including pandemic threats, to biodiversity loss and other upstream anthropogenic impacts on ecosystem health. However, there is little current...
esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
November 25, 2025 at 1:25 PM
NEW! 🦠🦧 We revisited a perplexing paradox: do wildlife really pose less of a risk to human health as they become more endangered? Turns out, it's sampling bias all the way down: conservation risks correlate with disease surveillance blindspots. 🔓 esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Reposted by Daniel Villar
Public service broadcasting should be retooled specifically to correct for this market failure IMO
This chart (which applies even more to social media than it did to TV) lives in my head rent free.
Social media enveloping traditional media means everything and everyone is now competing in the entertainment market. Boring stuff like policy that affects millions of lives doesn’t stand a chance.
Social media enveloping traditional media means everything and everyone is now competing in the entertainment market. Boring stuff like policy that affects millions of lives doesn’t stand a chance.
November 23, 2025 at 8:41 PM
Public service broadcasting should be retooled specifically to correct for this market failure IMO
Reposted by Daniel Villar
Can high biodiversity and agricultural productivity be reconciled? A community model of the bird–arthropod food web in African cocoa agroforestry indicates that low-intensity farming practices favour certain bird species and enhance the abundance of potential pollinators. doi.org/10.1002/eap....
November 24, 2025 at 1:46 PM
Can high biodiversity and agricultural productivity be reconciled? A community model of the bird–arthropod food web in African cocoa agroforestry indicates that low-intensity farming practices favour certain bird species and enhance the abundance of potential pollinators. doi.org/10.1002/eap....
Reposted by Daniel Villar
Alongside mooted restrictions on salary sacrifice - which universities make a lot of use of to pay for pensions - this is not shaping up to be a great budget for a sector already mired in cutbacks and redundancies.
i: Reeves to unveil £600m raid on foreign student
university fees #TomorrowsPapersToday
university fees #TomorrowsPapersToday
November 23, 2025 at 10:57 PM
Alongside mooted restrictions on salary sacrifice - which universities make a lot of use of to pay for pensions - this is not shaping up to be a great budget for a sector already mired in cutbacks and redundancies.
It was nice having a mass higher education system for half a century
i: Reeves to unveil £600m raid on foreign student
university fees #TomorrowsPapersToday
university fees #TomorrowsPapersToday
November 23, 2025 at 11:45 PM
It was nice having a mass higher education system for half a century
Reposted by Daniel Villar
ratio
we are so fucked
we are so fucked
i: Reeves to unveil £600m raid on foreign student
university fees #TomorrowsPapersToday
university fees #TomorrowsPapersToday
November 23, 2025 at 10:58 PM
ratio
we are so fucked
we are so fucked
To the surprise of no academic, LLMs are useless as research tools
Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other.
Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq
Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq
November 21, 2025 at 1:48 PM
To the surprise of no academic, LLMs are useless as research tools
Reposted by Daniel Villar
A new Nature Climate Change study shows our understanding of species range shifts is biased: we detect northward shifts more easily than east–west movements driven by nitrogen pollution or land use. The new Latitudinal Bias Index helps reveal this blind spot: doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Global bias towards recording latitudinal range shifts - Nature Climate Change
The authors consider studies reporting species range shifts and demonstrate a geometric bias in sampling along latitudinal, rather than longitudinal, gradients. This bias may favour the corroboration ...
doi.org
November 21, 2025 at 12:30 PM
A new Nature Climate Change study shows our understanding of species range shifts is biased: we detect northward shifts more easily than east–west movements driven by nitrogen pollution or land use. The new Latitudinal Bias Index helps reveal this blind spot: doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Ah yes, disruptive research! Why didn’t we think of that!
November 20, 2025 at 1:25 PM
Ah yes, disruptive research! Why didn’t we think of that!
Reposted by Daniel Villar
'The UK should establish a network of “disruptive invention” labs outside of the university system to pursue frontier science and technology'. (Tony Blair Institute)
The UK should stabilise the disrupted university system before faffing about with shiny new disruptive networks. (actual researcher)
The UK should stabilise the disrupted university system before faffing about with shiny new disruptive networks. (actual researcher)
UK needs new ‘disruptive’ labs for frontier science, says think tank.
www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-p...
www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-p...
November 20, 2025 at 10:14 AM
'The UK should establish a network of “disruptive invention” labs outside of the university system to pursue frontier science and technology'. (Tony Blair Institute)
The UK should stabilise the disrupted university system before faffing about with shiny new disruptive networks. (actual researcher)
The UK should stabilise the disrupted university system before faffing about with shiny new disruptive networks. (actual researcher)
Reposted by Daniel Villar
Good news: Study shows France’s birds making tentative recovery after neonicotinoid pesticide ban
UK has only just closed loophole in neonics ban (‘derogations’) so may be too soon to see recovery here?
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
UK has only just closed loophole in neonics ban (‘derogations’) so may be too soon to see recovery here?
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
With neonicotinoid pesticide ban, France’s birds make a tentative recovery - study
Analysis shows small hike in populations of insect-eating species after 2018 ruling, but full recovery may take decades
www.theguardian.com
November 17, 2025 at 8:38 AM
Good news: Study shows France’s birds making tentative recovery after neonicotinoid pesticide ban
UK has only just closed loophole in neonics ban (‘derogations’) so may be too soon to see recovery here?
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
UK has only just closed loophole in neonics ban (‘derogations’) so may be too soon to see recovery here?
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Asking this in Bluesky, where half the users are academics and thus were technically “students” until their late 20s/early 30s, seems like a bad idea
How old were you when you got your first job?
The data shows that the age at which people are entering the labour market is going up, and up.
Read 'False starts' now to learn more ⤵️ buff.ly/kIei4lG
The data shows that the age at which people are entering the labour market is going up, and up.
Read 'False starts' now to learn more ⤵️ buff.ly/kIei4lG
November 17, 2025 at 4:40 PM
Asking this in Bluesky, where half the users are academics and thus were technically “students” until their late 20s/early 30s, seems like a bad idea
Reposted by Daniel Villar
Prime example of why the contract between the public and the police is breaking down, regardless of long term crime trends. Thames Valley Police don’t even think it’s their job to investigate this. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Kidlington fly-tipping: Criminals dump mountain of waste in field
The enormous pile of rubbish is called an
www.bbc.co.uk
November 14, 2025 at 6:43 PM
Prime example of why the contract between the public and the police is breaking down, regardless of long term crime trends. Thames Valley Police don’t even think it’s their job to investigate this. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
As usual, the best strategy Labour could’ve done is to copy our cousins in the ALP
Fwiw, I believe Labour might have been able to successfully execute a 'mixed' strategy on immigration that reduced the threat from Reform without alienating liberal/left voters it needs. Avoiding rhetoric of the right while letting the numbers fall as they were already doing would have been a start.
November 17, 2025 at 1:38 PM
As usual, the best strategy Labour could’ve done is to copy our cousins in the ALP
A poorer Britain doing lower value work further down the production chain.
it's fascinating to think what Blue Labour's ideal Britain looks like
November 16, 2025 at 2:36 PM
A poorer Britain doing lower value work further down the production chain.
In the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, British and French scientists would cross the channel to present findings in Paris and London, respectively. This doesn’t appear to have hampered Wellington, Nelson, or Collingwood in thrashing Bonny
This has gotten surprisingly little attention — it's not even on the front page of @science.org right now — but it's really hard to describe what the SAFE Research Act would do to US science and scientists without sounding insane
www.science.org/content/arti...
www.science.org/content/arti...
November 14, 2025 at 6:47 PM
In the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, British and French scientists would cross the channel to present findings in Paris and London, respectively. This doesn’t appear to have hampered Wellington, Nelson, or Collingwood in thrashing Bonny