Congratulations to the *first* Chaturvedi Lab PhD candidate Vineesha, on passing her prospectus with flying colors today!!!! Here are both of us after all the exam (and a long discussion on statistics). Way to go Vineesha!!! #ProudPI

We did it! #proudPI

Concluding this years fieldwork with lots of Battus philenor caterpillars at the @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social Botanical Garden. It’s so cool to notice phenological differences within Bay Area.

Battus galore! More butterflies puddling on a lake shore near Shashta Lake!! A beautiful field day…all Battus philenor.

Ended first round of fieldwork around Redding, CA with an annual visit to Mt Shashta. This year we got lucky, there were no clouds and we marveled at the summit.

Discovering all the variations in Western Swallowtails near Lake Shashta, CA. Here we have the Western Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio rutulus, left) and Pale Swallowtail (Papilio eurymedon, right). Butterfly experts correct me if I am wrong!! Do you see the color variation? #lepidoptera

Kickstarted this years field work in California and was welcomed by all these butterflies puddling together! Spot the mimics!!!

So proud of my Ph.D student Vineesha who mentored the first undergrad in our lab (Jack). Jack presented the first research poster from our lab after quantifying body sizes from hundreds of digitized museum specimens and validating it with a computer vision model!!! #science #lepidoptera #visionmodel

Here is a female Pipevine swallowtail ovipositing on swan flower after finding it in the patch. It was amazing to follow the butterflies to find the plant. Taken in Austin TX last year.

Post rain live oaks are something else! #nola

Excited to share a new paper led by Marius and Hannes Roesti (in collab with
@InaSatok
, Janette Boughman, Jochen Wolf and Brian Langerhans) on proposing a standard model for predictability of speciation. This is part of the CSH Perspectives on Speciation. cshperspectives.cshlp.org/cgi/content/...

Just reread this beautiful butterfly hybrid zone paper from Dasmahapatra et al 2002. It still is one of the best papers that connects allele frequencies in natural hybrid zones to clinal and spatial patterns so well. Link: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...
Figure 7 is just so good!

Are you interested in evo. genetics, collecting butterflies and assisting in genomic data generation from field and museum samples? Look no further - I am looking for a lab tech/research assistant to start in my lab in March. Official link to follow but please spread the word!

First semester of teaching done, first ever NSF grant submitted, and first semester as a #newPI completed! Ready to sleep and descend into wintering! Thankful for new friends who have made this easier (and fun). @ferrisifolius.bsky.social ( + Hannah Frank)

It’s only fair that the poetry of the day is named after my study organism (I can definitely relate to this mood).

It’s a happy day for Chaturvedi Lab as both Ph.D. Students just won there very first grant to do a big chunk of fieldwork!! Go Vineesha and Kehinde! (No one told me about this happy feeling as a mentor) #newPI #newphds

As I prepare to teach and discuss Kimura’s classic neutral theory paper today - I again find a reminder about the “survival of the luckiest”.