Jesse Czekanski-Moir
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jessecm.bsky.social
Jesse Czekanski-Moir
@jessecm.bsky.social
1.6K followers 2.2K following 140 posts
Ecology, Evolutionary Biology, Biogeography, ConBio; Ants, Land Snails, & sundry invertebrates, often in Belau (Palau), Micronesia; PhD from SUNY-ESF; future uncertain
jessecm.org
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jessecm.bsky.social
unrelated to the elephants, I'm just realizing that the screenshot reveals that according to the duckduckgo mobile browser I have "∞" tabs open, giving bluesky more of a glimpse into my psyche than I'd originally intended
small portion of a phone screenshot showing the infinity symbol as the count of how many tabs I have open on my phone in the duckduckgo mobile browser
September 24, 2025 at 3:10 PM
jessecm.bsky.social
this is very fun. check out the convergent evolution with Haidomyrmex
depictions of elephants from European texts between the 1200s and 1400s, including one that has its tusks turned upwards in a way that reminds me of the mandibles of the extinct ant genus Haidomyrmex
September 24, 2025 at 2:06 PM
jessecm.bsky.social
was trying to get a photo of the halictid bee, and it turns out there were four other insect species on this Coreopsis flower! Quite the hub of activity! I've uploaded this as five observations on iNat if you want to take a stab at any of the IDs! www.inaturalist.org/observations...
coreoposis ("tick seed") flower with five different insects on it: clockwise from the upper left: a small wasp, a Halictid bee, a firefly, and some kind of true bug that looks like it might be predating on a male aphid
July 11, 2025 at 3:11 PM
jessecm.bsky.social
teen vogue genuinely has been doing great reporting for years, but I couldn't help chuckle at the irony of this imbedded ad in their story about Venice booting out the Bezos wedding reception... maybe it's some 5D chess to get money from Amazon from an ad no one will click on?
ad showing three fashionable ladies I don't recognize with text that reads "Can't-miss-Amazon style and beauty deals—curated by Teen Vogue editors" imbedded in a Teen Vogue story seemingly celebrating the people of Venice for booting out the Bezos wedding reception. I included text from the original article in the screenshot, reading in part, "But organizer Federica Toninello, 33, also began to notice people whom they had never seen before, whom, she said, "were very angry, not only about hte impact of Bezos' wedding on the city, but also about Bezos..."
July 7, 2025 at 2:35 PM
jessecm.bsky.social
for sure! Caption in alt text
just some nifty ants from Palau: Microscope pictures of point-mounted ants: (A) undescribed Pheidole (Myrmicinae) MCZ-ENT00734643; (B) undescribed Proceratium (Proceratiinae) MCZ-ENT00784016; (C & D) Holcoponera (Ectatomminae) MCZ-ENT00784019; E & F) Rostromyrmex (Myrmicinae) MCZ-ENT00734667; (G & H) Myopias (Ponerinae) MCZ- ENT00734575. Scale bars at the base of each picture. Ant photographs courtesy of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University; © President and Fellows of Harvard College https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.en
May 9, 2025 at 1:34 PM
jessecm.bsky.social
I was initially annoyed that I had to make a list of all the figures in my dissertation, but it's honestly my favorite page now
just a screenshot of a table of contents style list reading: Figure 1.1: Behavior of Probability Distribution Extremes Figure 1.2: Total Dispersal Kernels at Different Spatiotemporal Scales Figure 2.1: Two-Way Classification of Organismal Traits Figure 2.2: Different Divergence Possibilities Figure 2.3: Modified ‘Stages of Speciation Framework’ Diagrams Figure 3.1: Distances Between Two Brownian Motion Paths Figure 3.2: A Whimsical Interlude Figure 3.3: Species Richness vs. Trait Dimensionality for Multivariate Brownian Motion Figure 3.4: Species Richness vs. Maximum or Minimum Trait Dimensionality Figure 3.5: Species Richness vs. Trait Dimensionality for Fat-tailed Step Sizes Figure 3.6: The Same Data as Above but Graphed Differently Figure 3.7: Species Richness if Both Trait Dimensionality and Range Size Vary Figure 4.1: Maps of Palau Figure 4.2: Maps of Palau Showing Geographic Groupings Figure 4.3: Species Occurrence Records as a Function of Distance from Dmasech Figure 4.4: Raup-Crick Similarity Between Sites and Four Islands Figure 4.5: NMDS of Island Level Raup-Crick Distance Figure 4.6: Spatial Autocorrelation of Site Level Raup-Crick Distance Figure 4.7: Four-Island Combination SLOSS Figure 4.8: Nine-Island Combination SLOSS Figure 4.9: Small Islands vs. Large Islands Figure 5.1: Ant Collection Localities Figure 5.2: Some Nifty Ants Figure 5.3: Percent Distance of COI from Nearest BLAST Match on Genbank Figure 6.1: An Abstraction of My Inadequacies
May 8, 2025 at 10:05 PM
jessecm.bsky.social
never trust a physicist to classify molluscs
A figure from page 544 of "Power of the Invisible" by Sander Bais, in which the author labels a cross section of a nautilus shell "The spiralling snail house" I'm sure there's a lot of great physics in the book... just don't use it as a fieldguide
March 26, 2025 at 6:01 PM
jessecm.bsky.social
am I a geologist now? genuinely thinking about printing this out wallet-sized to put next to my geologic time scale...
screenshot of a "Reviewer Certificate" indicating that I reviewed a manuscript for Geophysical Research Letters in 2024
February 19, 2025 at 12:10 AM
jessecm.bsky.social
love Reverence for Life!
photo of a framed print by Christi Belcourt depicting birds, butterflies, and plants on a blue background. It's really cool... I'm really sorry you can't see it
January 25, 2025 at 4:37 AM
jessecm.bsky.social
whelp, the dictionary has spoken ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
screenshot of a randomized, rapidly changing list of words from the Merriam-Webster BlueSky account that simply reads "spaghetti"
January 1, 2025 at 5:29 PM
jessecm.bsky.social
one of the unappreciated perks of having a last name that starts with Cz is that sometimes you get to be in some cool bibliographic company (from Illera et al.'s very cool chapter in the very cool "Speciation" book that came out this year cshperspectives.cshlp.org/content/earl... )
a photo of part of an alphabetically-organized bibliography that shows a citation of my (Czekanski-Moir and Rundell, 2019) paper just above Darwin 1859 "On the origin of species..."
November 26, 2024 at 2:03 AM
jessecm.bsky.social
for #arachtober , check out this cool figure of spider services from a preprint by by Cardoso et al www.authorea.com/users/825008...
cool schematics arranged in a web, illustrating different ways spiders help out: These services are categorised into four main types: (I) Provisioning: (1) Structural materials, (2) Engineering and Technology, (3) Medicine and Health, (4) Bio-insecticides, (5) Food, (6) Pets; (II) Regulating: (7) Pest control, (8) Disease control, (9) Invasive species control; (III) Supporting: (10) Nutrient cycling, (11) Food for other organisms, (12) Habitat provision; and (IV) Cultural: (13) Spiritual and cultural heritage, (14) Traditional medicine, (15) Contemporary culture, (16) Educational, (17) Mental Health, (18) Sense of place, (19) Scientific discovery, (20) Monitoring of biodiversity and ecosystem health.
October 17, 2024 at 1:57 AM
jessecm.bsky.social
not really sure I've actually found my footing on this site, but happy to be here 💁‍♀️
"bluesky elder certificate" saying I was in the first million people to sign up, about a year ago on Sept 7, 2023 (it says I was in the first 10% to join, but that percentage seems likely to change as more people join?)
September 17, 2024 at 4:46 PM
jessecm.bsky.social
I'm just genuinely curious how/why they got "Canskizek" 🤔
screenshot of a spammy scientific journal solicitation in which my surname is spelled "Canskizek," which is not how you spell my surname (Czekanski-Moir)
May 16, 2024 at 4:39 PM
jessecm.bsky.social
NYC and LA might be far apart, but did you know you can drive from Mexico to Canada in less than 2hrs?
screenshot of Google maps showing that the town of Mexico, New York, is less than a 2 hour drive from Kingston, Ontario
March 24, 2024 at 9:26 PM
jessecm.bsky.social
to the person at the Lab of O doing research on why people like birds (possibly Miyoko Chu), I'm very sorry for sullying your survey data with my cheeky reply, which I submitted by accident. I was just going to send a screenshot to some science friends to be funny, but my finger slipped
a screenshot of a survey from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in which I am asked "What do I love most about your experiences with birds?" and I reply, "I hate birds. They're not good."
March 20, 2024 at 9:53 PM
jessecm.bsky.social
see also:
a macro photo of a small land snail in the family diplommatinidae. The body is partially out of the shell, and you can see that its eyes are at the base of its eye stalks. For some reason, there is some pinkish pigmentation below and anterior to the eyes. I don't know what it is, but it looks endearingly like blush. The shell as some pretty cool rib- or sail-like ornamentation on it. It's on a piece of limestone, and there's an out-of-focus green background.
March 19, 2024 at 7:39 PM
jessecm.bsky.social
just downloaded all the squamate specimen data for Palau from GBIF, and, sure enough, the good folks at Cal Academy kept Ron Crombie's unofficial name for this peninsula in the specimen notes (for the herpetologists, see if you can spot what Crombie was referring to in the map on the right)
screenshot of a text file showing natural history specimen metadata downloaded from GBIF.org, in which a landscape feature is referred to as "Snake Dick Point." The word "Dick" is highlighted, as if someone has just done a text search for this term a screenshot of a USGS topographical map, showing a peninsula (called Ngerchelgnael in Palauan) that arguably resembles the hemipenes of a snake
February 22, 2024 at 11:51 PM
jessecm.bsky.social
pre-ordered it! can't wait!
December 4, 2023 at 12:06 AM
jessecm.bsky.social
the East African leaf-cutter ants featured in this shot of the Lion King
November 16, 2023 at 12:41 AM
jessecm.bsky.social
Miniaturization is an often overlooked evolutionary trend that that usually entails some level of morphological simplification. But this little ( <1mm) spider isn't as simple as you'd think #arachtober #invertebrates
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Miniaturization does not change conserved spider anatomy, a case study on spider Rayforstia (Araneae: Anapidae) Abstract: Miniaturization is an evolutionary trend observed in many animals. Some arachnid groups, such as spiders and mites, demonstrate a strong tendency toward miniaturization. Some of the most miniaturized spiders belong to the family Anapidae. In this study, using light and confocal microscopy and 3D modelling, we provide the first detailed description of the anatomy of a spider of the genus Rayforstia, which is only 900 µm long. In comparison with larger spiders, Rayforstia has no branching of the midgut in the prosoma and an increased relative brain volume. In contrast to many miniature insects and mites, the spider shows no reduction of whole organ systems, no allometry of the digestive and reproductive systems, and also no reduction of the set of muscles. Thus, miniature spider shows a more conserved anatomy than insects of a similar size.
October 17, 2023 at 9:14 PM
jessecm.bsky.social
uh oh... turns out different ecologists can get different answers from the same datasets: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...
graph showing variation in effect sizes different 85 different researchers/research teams calculated from the same dataset (involving Eucalyptus seedling recruitment); many z values overlap with 0, but both "significant" positive and negative relationships exist are on the graph as well
October 4, 2023 at 6:48 PM
jessecm.bsky.social
my bad for not publishing more, honestly (more words do pop up if I adjust the parameters, but the two-word word cloud seemed funnier)
a word cloud showing only the words "Species" and "evolution". "Species" is in a slightly larger font
September 23, 2023 at 8:38 AM
jessecm.bsky.social
My banner photo is two different genera of land snails in the family Diplommatinidae, also from Palau. Note that these land snails have eye spots at the base of their tentacles, suggesting that they're not Stylommatophorans like many conspicuous land snails and slugs in the Holarctic..
two Palau-endemic land snails on a small piece of limestone rock, with an out-of-focus green background. Note the eye spots at the base of their tentacles, indicating that they're not Stylommatophorans like many land snails in the holarctic
September 14, 2023 at 6:05 PM
jessecm.bsky.social
Hi everyone! I'm a PhD student at SUNY-ESF (in Syracuse, NY), working on diversity patterns of (mostly) terrestrial invertebrates, often in Palau. My profile photo is some undescribed Polyrhachis ants from Palau (larger photo below)
several black and gold spiny ants clustered around a food source (possibly gecko poop) on an Asplenium birdsnest fern leaf in the rainforest of Palau (Oceania; Micronesia)
September 14, 2023 at 5:53 PM