Dimitris Kontopoulos
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dgkontopoulos.ecoevo.social.ap.brid.gy
Dimitris Kontopoulos
@dgkontopoulos.ecoevo.social.ap.brid.gy
Walter Benjamin Fellow @ UCLA with Noa Pinter-Wollman. Looking at the impacts of temperature changes on diverse biological systems. Also husband & dad.

🌉 bridged from ⁂ https://ecoevo.social/@DGKontopoulos, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact
Samraat Pawar and I wrote a #commentary for a recent #pnas paper by Arnoldi et al., titled: "A universal thermal performance curve arises in #biology and ecology."

Find our commentary here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2528528122
December 15, 2025 at 8:23 PM
📢 New #preprint alert 📢
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.18.689136v1

Several lineages of #birds and #mammals appear to have independently gained or lost the ability to enter #torpor. 🧵1/4
November 19, 2025 at 3:06 PM
When reviewing manuscripts or referring to other people's #research, there are seemingly two camps.

1/4
October 29, 2025 at 6:04 AM
My h-index just levelled up from 13 to 14! 😀

(I know it's only a metric that does not necessarily reflect the quality of the science, but I think it's important to celebrate every little win!)
October 27, 2025 at 3:57 PM
Reposted by Dimitris Kontopoulos
A new banner on a Wiley site.
I am not a healthcare professional, so am I not supposed to look at this evo-devo paper now? Can I read the abstract?

Any ideas why this new #enshittification feature? #publishing
September 29, 2025 at 6:28 AM
All of US academia is very stressed right now. On top of everything else, could you please NOT send me an invoice that is due only 5 days after the date of issue?
September 25, 2025 at 6:03 PM
We have a #newpaper in Evolution (@journal_evo), led by Xueling Yi, on the #Evolution of dietary preferences across (but not only) Phyllostomid #bats. 🦇

https://academic.oup.com/evolut/advance-article/doi/10.1093/evolut/qpaf154/8222499
September 22, 2025 at 4:37 PM
I am deeply honored to announce that the Early Career Section of the Ecological Society of America has awarded me the co-second place for the 2025 Outstanding Paper #award by an #earlycareer #ecologist. 🧵1/12
September 20, 2025 at 4:48 AM
"Ice gliding #diatoms establish record-low #temperature limits for motility in a eukaryotic cell"

https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2423725122?af=R
September 10, 2025 at 8:24 PM
"High temperatures amplify aggressiveness of an invasive lizard toward a native congener"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306456525002141?dgcid=rss_sd_all#bib64
September 10, 2025 at 8:16 PM
"Repeated heatwaves can age you as much as smoking or drinking" 🤯

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02729-x
August 26, 2025 at 4:33 PM
On GitHub moving to integration with Microsoft's AI team (see https://ecoevo.social/@mcc@mastodon.social/115011101022724613).

Switch to @Codeberg. I recently made the move from GitHub to Codeberg to store code that reproduces the analyses of my latest paper ( […]
Original post on ecoevo.social
ecoevo.social
August 11, 2025 at 6:39 PM
I am excited to introduce our new @EvolLetters paper that has just come out:

https://academic.oup.com/evlett/advance-article/doi/10.1093/evlett/qraf026/8223096

🧵1/7
August 6, 2025 at 5:09 PM
6 years ago, I had written some code to estimate the correlations between my ratings on IMDB and those of IMDB itself, Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic. The correlations were weak, leading me to conclude that consulting these websites before watching something isn't very useful for me. 1/2
July 26, 2025 at 10:18 PM
I sometimes take a quick look at my LinkedIn feed. The toxicity I encounter there serves as a reminder as to why I do that only sometimes and not regularly.
July 8, 2025 at 5:22 PM
Paper accepted! 🎉🎉🎉🎉

Stay tuned... ;)
July 3, 2025 at 4:26 PM
When ResearchGate alerts me that a paper of mine has been cited, I sometimes check the context in which it was cited.

My latest citation comes from a paper that has absolutely NOTHING to do with my paper. My paper is not even remotely relevant to their research.

There is an explanation. In the […]
Original post on ecoevo.social
ecoevo.social
July 1, 2025 at 6:26 PM
The more supervisors you get in your academic career, the higher the chance that you'll receive the exact opposite advice on any given topic. #PostdocLife
June 17, 2025 at 5:40 PM
Reposted by Dimitris Kontopoulos
Very happy to announce the publication of our latest work by my former student Sylvain Pouzet in @journal-evo.bsky.social: "Gene network topology drives the mutational landscape of gene expression". Based on simulations, we show that the size and pleiotropy […]

[Original post on fediscience.org]
May 16, 2025 at 1:08 PM
Reposted by Dimitris Kontopoulos
Just discovered my bridged account over on bluesky has actual followers?! Hello! Amazing. Hope folks over there know they need to follow this account https://bsky.app/profile/ap.brid.gy so we can interact between the two places. More info here https://fed.brid.gy/
Bridgy Fed
<a href='https://fed.brid.gy/'>Bridgy Fed</a> is a bridge between decentralized social networks like the <a href='https://indieweb.org/'>IndieWeb</a>, <a href='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse'>fediverse</a>, <a href='https://bsky.social/'>Bluesky</a>, and others. <a href='https://fed.brid.gy/docs'>More info here.</a>
fed.brid.gy
February 23, 2025 at 5:02 PM
We have a new @biorxivpreprint #preprint on dietary #Evolution across phyllostomid #bats 🦇: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.04.636560v1
Comprehensive phylogenetic reconstructions support ancestral omnivory in the ecologically diverse bat family Phyllostomidae
Adaptive radiations often occur with an early burst of ecological diversification, which requires not only various available niches but also a generalist ancestor with wide ecological niche breadths. However, ancestral generalism remains hard to test in empirical cases. The New World leaf-nosed bats (family Phyllostomidae) represent an unparalleled mammalian adaptive radiation with diverse dietary niches including arthropods, blood, terrestrial vertebrates, nectar, and fruits. However, when and how often phyllostomid bats transitioned from insectivory to fruit or nectar feeding remains unclear. Here we tested the hypotheses of ancestral insectivory versus ancestral omnivory in Phyllostomidae (141 species) using improved trait reconstructions based on multi-response phylogenetic threshold models, while explicitly accounting for phylogenetic uncertainty. Our results indicate that complementary fruit feeding has fully evolved at the early burst of the phyllostomid radiation and started to evolve in the most recent common ancestor of the family, supporting the ancestral omnivory hypothesis. In addition, fruit feeding probably evolved before nectar eating in Phyllostomidae, in contrast to the claims of previous studies. Extending this analysis to all bat families (621 species) reveals independent evolution of ancestral fruit feeding in four families, namely the Pteropodidae (Old World fruit bats) and three families from the Noctilionoidea superfamily. Despite the ancestral omnivory of these fruit-eating families, only Phyllostomidae and Pteropodidae show high species diversity and evolved predominant and strict fruit feeding. Therefore, our results reveal that ancestral generalism (i.e., omnivory) may be a precondition of but does not necessarily lead to adaptive radiations which also require subsequent niche partitioning and speciation. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.
www.biorxiv.org
February 7, 2025 at 11:15 AM
Thrilled to share my first main #paper from my #embo #postdoc fellowship that is out today in #FunctionalEcology: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2435.14739 🥳

Read on to learn about the #Evolution of #torpor among #mammals and #birds!

🧵 1/12
January 6, 2025 at 12:00 PM