Oonagh Barker
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obarker.bsky.social
Oonagh Barker
@obarker.bsky.social
PhD student at the University of East Anglia researching the effects of nutrition on fitness& lifespan in fruit flies 🪰 (she/they)

Interested in evolution, life history, ageing, behaviour, cool things along those lines.

Not enough hiking& caving 🧗🏼‍♀️
Pinned
Hello Bluesky! I'm Oonagh, a penultimate year PhD student working on life history responses to nutrition in Drosophila. Interested in sexual selection, lifespan, ageing, evolutionary ecology - lots. Looking forward to making connections on a less unhinged platform.
Reposted by Oonagh Barker
In what may be one of Earth’s craziest forms of mimicry, researchers in 2023 reported a species of rove beetle that grows a termite puppet on its back to fool real termites into feeding it.

Learn more on #NationalWildlifeDay: https://scim.ag/4mM2aS9
September 4, 2025 at 12:47 PM
Plot twist from @obarker.bsky.social, starting at diet choice and finding parental age effects, nice work Oonagh! #eseb2025
August 19, 2025 at 1:10 PM
First time I've dropped a tray, am I right in feeling like this is a milestone in a Drosophila-based PhD?

Incredible luck in that this is the best possible time this could have happened, and least important tray it could have happened to, in this 4-months-and-counting long experiment!
April 22, 2025 at 12:44 PM
Reposted by Oonagh Barker
Hurray! Some good news for bees at last. Our new government has followed the science, and refused the application by sugar beet farmers to use banned neonicotinoid pesticides.
January 23, 2025 at 7:05 PM
Reposted by Oonagh Barker
Just making sure that everyone is aware of this crab that NOAA scientists found
January 19, 2025 at 1:39 PM
Reposted by Oonagh Barker
The wholesale extermination of predators on grouse moors needs to stop. Please consider signing this petition in order to speed things up.

petition.parliament.uk/petitions/70...
Petition: Ban driven grouse shooting
Chris Packham, Ruth Tingay and Mark Avery (Wild Justice) believe that driven grouse shooting is bad for people, the environment and wildlife. People; we think grouse shooting is economically insignifi...
petition.parliament.uk
January 16, 2025 at 6:48 AM
Reposted by Oonagh Barker
I love this article partly because it details how this little fly has been vital for all sorts of research, including for human health.

But I really love the part about where fruit flies originated and how they’ve conquered the world. 🍓🍒🍷🪰

🧪 🪲 🪳

phys.org/news/2025-01...
'One of the most important species for science': How the humble fruit fly transformed four fields of research
The common fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster), more correctly called the vinegar fly, is a frequent visitor to ripe fruit in households around the world, where it often deposits eggs on rotting flesh...
phys.org
January 4, 2025 at 7:59 PM
Reposted by Oonagh Barker
Ok people. I’m drawing silhouettes this afternoon. If you have a paper coming up and you are in need of a #silhouette please let me know and I will have it ready today. As always I upload all my silhouettes to phylopic.org

I also have tutorials on how to put a silhouette in a plot in R.
PhyloPic
PhyloPic is an open database of free silhouette images of animals, plants, and other life forms, available for reuse under Creative Commons licenses. Download silhouettes for use in educational materi...
phylopic.org
December 26, 2024 at 6:47 PM
Reposted by Oonagh Barker
Hello Bluesky,
We're so excited to be launching our first post for EMPSEB30! 🎉🤩
We've got lots of news to share! We've found an amazing venue and some fantastic plenary speakers, and we're on the lookout for sponsors!
Visit empseb30.mpipz.mpg.de to dive in!

#EMPSEB30 #Students #Conference
December 13, 2024 at 7:45 PM
Delighted to have had a small part in this very cool paper - my undergraduate final project contributed to the dataset. And big congrats to Rob and the others on the outcome! 🎉
Big news! 🎉 My first PhD chapter has been published in @PLOSBiology, and it just made the cover! 🐦🌍 Perfect time to dive into the key findings from our global study on sexual selection in birds. 🧵👇
📖 Read the paper: doi.org/10.1371/jour...
December 15, 2024 at 1:15 PM
Predictive text being helpful as ever as I tried to decide on some keywords for my bio...
November 29, 2024 at 12:10 PM
Hello Bluesky! I'm Oonagh, a penultimate year PhD student working on life history responses to nutrition in Drosophila. Interested in sexual selection, lifespan, ageing, evolutionary ecology - lots. Looking forward to making connections on a less unhinged platform.
November 19, 2024 at 12:31 PM
Reposted by Oonagh Barker
My first 🦋 thread - a bit of science stuff for new followers. 👋
Friday night release by PLoS Biology. Not ideal but some weekend reading for fans of sexual selection journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... 1/9
November 15, 2024 at 10:01 PM