Hedylid butterflies 🦋 are unique in being primarily nocturnal - visual #genes are highly conserved in the #genome, however, hedylid opsins are more similar to nocturnal moths than their diurnal congeners www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Why do insect galls have such varied shapes even among closely related species?? The Enemy Hypothesis, posits that pressure from parasitoids drives the dynamic evolution of external gall traits. We have a new paper in @rsocpublishing.bsky.social on this hypothesis see more in this 🧵! 🧪 #galls

This year I always had my camera and a small photo box to hand when I was gardening. My children are always finding caterpillars outside, and I wanted to document that a bit this year. With the exception of the garden tiger moth (Arctia caja), they all came from my garden.

📣 📣 📣 Still lots of TT jobs being advertised: The 2024-2025 list of faculty and postdoc positions in ecology and evolutionary biology is out! Be sure to check out this active and helpful community run resources! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Kick off of project #DIVERSA in which we are involved with some biodiv research, funded as a Lower Saxony Climate Future Lab. Here's an interview with Jonas Hagge, the consortium spokesperson based at NW German Forest Research Institute:
zkfn.de/en/learning-...

#Butterfly people - do any of you know any references for the ways in which butterflies fly around flowers when feeding? 🙏🏻 I can’t much but I find it hard to believe some diligent flutterologist hasn’t sketched this out…

Sometimes it pays off to store samples from experiment for 15+ years!
#Trait analysis shows #evolutionary change in flight-to-light response in #urban #moths comes with changes in #wing #morphology.

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... #UrbanEvolution #LightPollution

I'm searching for a good meta-analysis summarizing the extent to which parasites (broadly defined) are specialist vs generalist (e.g., small vs wide host range). Would welcome suggestions!

#HiSciSky and #BlueSky folks! It's nice to see a high signal/noise ratio here so far, compared to the caged 🐦

Here's a lovely pair of Western Chinese Moon Moth♀️ & a Grass moth sitting together, next to the very busy screen. The diversity and sheer numbers were mind-boggling. (Siang Valley,India)