Gary Burness
garyburness.bsky.social
Gary Burness
@garyburness.bsky.social
Ecological and Evolutionary Physiologist. Our lab studies animal energetics, mostly birds, sometimes mammals or fish; most recently butterflies too. Trent University (Peterborough, Ontario, Canada).

Webpage: BurnessLab.ca
Reposted by Gary Burness
1/13 New paper out! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Historical records across thousands of women showed that mothers with more children had shorter lifespans during a famine, fitting an evolutionary explanation for why we age
@hannahdugdale.bsky.social
@lummaalab.bsky.social
@erikpostma.bsky.social
November 10, 2025 at 10:57 AM
Reposted by Gary Burness
We're hiring! Post-doctoral fellow in evolutionary ecology w/focus on ecophysiology.
Uncover why global warming and heatwaves reduce reproductive success and cause excess mortality in wild birds. Work with @cyanistesnord.bsky.social 👏

Please apply no later than 25 November.
👉 lnkd.in/dkAh9jnc
November 5, 2025 at 7:30 AM
Reposted by Gary Burness
November 7, 2025 at 6:13 PM
Reposted by Gary Burness
The Fudge Lab at Chapman University is recruiting a postdoc for an NSF-funded project on the biophysics of hagfish defensive slime deployment. Please repost!
Apply here: tinyurl.com/4p937dn5
November 7, 2025 at 6:36 PM
We are looking for new graduate students! Feel free to repost or pass along to prospective students
November 6, 2025 at 9:01 PM
Reposted by Gary Burness
We should be paying more attention to this situation. An online letter has been put together and is being circulated to stop this data from being disclosed. Please sign the online letter here, if you are comfortable: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
November 4, 2025 at 1:22 PM
Reposted by Gary Burness
It took me about three months to get here but...

Here's a 🪶 for (nearly) every species of bird, with colors extracted from wikipedia descriptions.

10,151 species.

#dataviz #birds #data
November 4, 2025 at 1:26 PM
Reposted by Gary Burness
The epigenetic clock measures biological age and could help scientists assess the health of polar bears, dolphins, baboons and other threatened creatures “while recovery is still possible”
#conservation #endangeredspecies
This 'Clock' Could Warn of Hidden Stresses to Animals, Offering a Long-Sought Signal That a Population Is Nearing Collapse
The epigenetic clock measures biological age and could help scientists assess the health of polar bears, dolphins, baboons and other threatened creatures "while recovery is still possible"
www.smithsonianmag.com
October 29, 2025 at 5:56 PM
Reposted by Gary Burness
if you see this post, your actions are:
- if you have a spare buck, give it to Wikipedia, then repost this
- if you don't have a spare buck, just repost

your action is mandatory for the world's best source of information to survive
I’ve never donated to Wikipedia before but I set up a small monthly donation as a fuck you to the world’s richest psychopath.
Elon Musk takes aim at Wikipedia
Musk has denounced Wikipedia as "Wokepedia" on X and urged people not to donate to the platform.
www.newsweek.com
December 26, 2024 at 12:03 PM
Another useful reminder to not divide metabolic rate by body mass!
This classic work by Regnault & Reiset was published in 1849. It conclusively showed that correcting metabolic rate for body mass by dividing by body mass is a worthless & misleading technique. They knew better, unlike the legacy metabolic phenotyping companies today!
October 24, 2025 at 7:39 PM
Reposted by Gary Burness
I've received an 'exclusive' invite to try Nature's new 'research assistant', which will burn down a forest to provide a 'summary of the paper' I'm reading and I have SUCH exciting news for them, that's called an 'abstract' and the actual authors already wrote it for me, no forest-burning required.
October 17, 2025 at 2:10 PM
Reposted by Gary Burness
Sharing this one last time: we're looking for a tenure track ecologist at UW-Green Bay. Applications close on Oct 19 🧪🌍🪶
October 16, 2025 at 2:45 PM
Reposted by Gary Burness
Don't you wish your department/university did more to help grad students learn to write? Teaching writing is hard, but students are eager to learn.

I can help! I can teach a one-week intensive course for you. Details here: scientistseessquirre.... Get in touch!
Writing Course
I can help your students write! I can offer a one-week, in-person writing course for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows at your institution. Class sizes of 8-25 work well; we can discuss la…
scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com
October 16, 2025 at 10:53 AM
Reposted by Gary Burness
In mice, prior COVID infection in males can affect anxiety in offspring by passing on altered RNA in sperm which reprograms gene expression in the hippocampus of the offspring’s brains. buff.ly/hUz5dIh

#medsky #reprosky 🛟😷🧪
October 15, 2025 at 2:21 AM
Reposted by Gary Burness
🧪🪶🌍🕊 25 Critically Endangered Birds
All of these species are on the brink of extinction.
A poster to raise awareness and inspire action. Every effort counts. ✨
October 9, 2025 at 3:05 PM
Reposted by Gary Burness
Our new paper is out! @camillasoravia.bsky.social leads this research, which looks into the relationship between heat- mediated cognitive impairment and the antipredator response in wild pied babblers. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
Investigating the relationship between heat-mediated cognitive impairment and antipredator response in a wild bird | Royal Society Open Science
Increasingly frequent heatwaves require animals to spend more time thermoregulating at the expense of other fitness-related behaviours. Emerging evidence also indicates that high temperatures can impa...
royalsocietypublishing.org
October 8, 2025 at 9:57 AM
Reposted by Gary Burness
Do you like songbirds? Are you concerned about how wildfire smoke may impact their physiology?

I'm searching for graduate students who are interested in looking at the effect of wildfire smoke on songbird physiology! Come join my lab @usaskartsci.bsky.social!

research-groups.usask.ca/ivy-lab/
The Ivy Lab! - Welcome to the Ivy Lab!
research-groups.usask.ca
May 6, 2025 at 10:20 PM
Reposted by Gary Burness
#SICB job share- an opening for

Assistant #Professor of #Vertebrate #Physiology

towson.taleo.net/careersectio...
Email Dr. Vonnie Shields
vshields@towson.edu with any questions

#biology #physiology #anatomy #research #PhD
October 6, 2025 at 11:28 AM
Reposted by Gary Burness
Application deadline approaching.
Tenure track faculty position in bioinformatics in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Guelph. Please consider joining our dynamic department. @integrativebiology.Baku.social

careers.uoguelph.ca/job/Guelph-A...
Assistant Professor of Bioinformatics
Assistant Professor of Bioinformatics
careers.uoguelph.ca
October 3, 2025 at 5:31 PM
Reposted by Gary Burness
Wear bright clothing.
October 2, 2025 at 12:57 PM
Reposted by Gary Burness
RIP Jane Goodall. She was such an inspiration & role model. May her memory be a blessing 🧪👩‍🔬 #HPS
October 1, 2025 at 6:29 PM
Excited about a new preprint from PhD candidate Megan Heft, showing that nestling provisioning rates in male tree swallows are not limited by the male's risk of overheating (in contrast with previous studies of females) 🧪 #ornithology #science
www.biorxiv.org/content/bior...
www.biorxiv.org
October 1, 2025 at 1:03 PM
Reposted by Gary Burness
We are seeking an ornithologist/modeller for a 2-year POST-DOC in Turin. Using archaeological remains, we will reconstruct past avian communities to understand the impacts of climate change and human pressure on birds through time. For details see cutt.ly/irN76QDZ PLEASE RT. #ornithology #AviArch
September 29, 2025 at 7:20 AM
Reposted by Gary Burness
This is my regular reminder to everyone that jstor is open to the general public now; a free account there will give you access to 100 papers a year.
regrettably if you try to point this out online you'll get yelled out by 79208 journalists going OH SO YOU WANT JOURNALISTS TO STARVE??? even if you're, say, a journalist yourself, and point out that while there are clearly no easy answers, the status quo isn't exactly working for society
September 29, 2025 at 1:19 PM