Learned today that “Galápagos” comes from a Spanish word for tortoise, meaning that “Galápagos Tortoise” is,

in fact,

a tortology

Excited to share some cool results on the #visual #navigation of Asian weaver ants at #Behaviour2025 today @5:33 PM (Hall 7)

#VirtualReality
#ants
#behaviour

@behaviour2025.bsky.social @pvnkmrksk.bsky.social

As always, Ted Chiang is great in this interview.
cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...

A new evolutionary analysis of butterflies finds their “false heads” arose from the coalescence of multiple traits. scim.ag/3IsE93l

Our false head work is out! By analysing ~1000 #butterflies, we found many traits at posterior end of hindwings evolved correlatedly, likely forming a trait complex w/adaptive function to dupe predators into thinking these traits together are actual head!!

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Into the micro-cosmos! #insect #diversity

Fitting a generalized mixed model with a gamma distribution log link and random slopes to reaction time data to arrive at precisely the same point estimate as the authors did by simply averaging and conducting a t-test:

Save the native pollinators

My new substack newsletter explains the fundamental trade-off in experiments in ecology and environmental sciences: you can either have mechanistic resolution or realism, but not both in the same experiment.

#ecology #environment #science

matthiasrillig.substack.com/p/why-you-ca...

This week’s newsletter talks about why science is so hard, or at least one reason….this was something I struggled with at the beginning of my PhD.

I wonder if other people feel or felt the same way? Let me know….

#AcademicSky

open.substack.com/pub/matthias...