Matt Rockman
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wormsrock.bsky.social
Matt Rockman
@wormsrock.bsky.social
2.9K followers 1.5K following 170 posts
Evolutionary zoology & quantitative genetics
Biology Professor, New York University
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wormsrock.bsky.social
Reminds me of this amazing homeotic mutant I found on google streetview
Google streetview image of a UPS truck, with images stitched together badly so that it reads “worldwiddwide services” and synchronizirhonizing the world of commerce”
November 9, 2025 at 2:20 AM
wormsrock.bsky.social
LFG NYC!
New York City “I Voted” sticker
November 4, 2025 at 5:26 PM
wormsrock.bsky.social
Another amazing Open House New York weekend full of usually-hidden art
James Turrell sky space at the friends’ school on East 16th St. a glowing blue square in a glowing pink ceiling Giant tile mural in the lobby of the AT&T Building, 1932. Map of the globe, extremely Mercator, reads “telephone wire and radio unite to make neighbors of nations” Tiny sculpture of Cass Gilbert, architect of the Woolworth Building (1913), tucked into a corner of the ceiling in the Woolworth lobby. He’s wearing glasses and holding a model of the building A view of the Woolworth Building (green roof) and the rest of Manhattan from the 60th floor bar at Manahatta. This isn’t part of Open House— just a bar that apparently isn’t crowded on Sunday mornings and has a nice view
October 19, 2025 at 7:14 PM
wormsrock.bsky.social
No Kings filling up Times Square
Crowd with flags and signs in Times Square, looking North Crowd with flags and signs in Times Square, looking South
October 18, 2025 at 3:37 PM
wormsrock.bsky.social
Finally, Pohnpei is one of the most fascinating and delightful places imaginable - spectacular scenery, unique biology, and most of all, exceptionally generous people and culture. It was an incredible privilege to visit and work there.
A view of Sokehs Ridge from the northwest edge of Kolonia. A thatched-roof shelter is at right. From the foreground the land drops down, over some banana plants, toward the lagoon. Sokehs Rock, a basalt monolith 200m high, looms in the distance. The picture doesn't show the endemic serehd lorikeets or pwehk flying foxes, but they're in there.
September 24, 2025 at 8:33 PM
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Surprisingly, the phylogeny implies (equivocally, to be sure) that the Elegans Supergroup of species, which includes C. elegans, is derived from American ancestors, and that a lot of the groups diversification may have taken place in Oceania, prior to subsequent invasions of Asia.
Biogeographic ancestral area reconstruction, with pie-charts at the nodes of a phylogeny indicating estimated marginal probabilities for each region. This phylogeny excludes a bunch of species whose distributions reflect human activity and whose pre-anthropogenic-movement distributions are unknown. The main result is that there's a lot of red (Oceania) in the deeper nodes of the Elegans Supergroup. There's other colors too, to be sure.
September 24, 2025 at 8:33 PM
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The goal was to understand biogeography, so we sequenced transcriptomes for the new species, and several others, and built the largest-yet Caenorhabditis phylogeny. The most common Pohnpeian species (C. pwilidak sp nov) is sister to a Hawaiian endemic clade!
A phylogeny of 70 Caenorhabditis species, based on protein sequences for 2955 genes. Adjacent to each species name is a set of colored circles indicating which continents each species is known from, with Remote Oceania included as its own region. Names of the nine species found in Pohnpei are bolded.
September 24, 2025 at 8:33 PM
wormsrock.bsky.social
In Pohnpei, we processed more than 500 samples through Baermann funnels and established more than 1000 isofemale cultures of Caenorhabditis. Our data let us estimate basic parameters of Caenorhabditis population biology (e.g., ~5 worms found each new patch).
Figure 4 from the preprint. At left, pictures of six different kinds of rotting thing that we extracted worms from, with their Pohnpeian and scientific names. At right, two graphs related to estimates of the number of worms that colonize each rotting thing. Back in the lab in New York, about 1000 3.5cm petri dishes, each containing an isofemale or isohermaphrodite culture of Caenorhabditis from Pohnpei. Next steps were to ID each to species, and cryopreserve. This picture is here to remind everybody that this was not a vacation! Hard work!
September 24, 2025 at 8:33 PM
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This was a great collaboration between my lab - me, Sophie Tintori, and Tuc Nguyen - and Harmony Yomai, a Micronesian plant ecologist. We also had help from fantastic local experts who led us to sites all over the island, including the spectacular cloudforests in the island’s interior.
Cloudforest on top of Kupwuriso; tall kotop palms (Clinostigma ponapensis) covered in epiphytes.
September 24, 2025 at 8:33 PM
wormsrock.bsky.social
We went to the only place with high elevation forest between Hawaii and Asia: the island of Pohnpei in the Federated States of Micronesia. An extinct volcano older than the main Hawaiian Islands, Pohnpei is covered in intact ancient rainforest and cloudforest.
A view toward the ocean across forested mountain scenery, with palms in the foreground. This is on the slopes of Kupwuriso. A map of the southwest Pacific Ocean, with an arrow pointing to Pohnpei (capital city Kolonia). It's about 1500 km northeast of New Guinea and 1500 km southeast of Guam and 5000 km southwest of Hawaii and perfect in every way.
September 24, 2025 at 8:33 PM
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Preprint teaser!
Keep an eye out for our forthcoming paper on the Caenorhabditis nematodes of Pohnpei, Micronesia, and their implications for biogeography and ecology.
A view of Nan Madol, the temple precinct and seat of government of Pohnpei under the Saudeleur dynasty. The city was built about 700 years ago from massive columns of basalt. The image shows one corner of the Nandauwas, with 25-foot high walls built Lincoln-log-style from the basalt columns. In the foreground is one of the canals that form the streets of Nan Madol.
September 22, 2025 at 2:11 PM
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Ithaca is gorges
Gorges. Here’s Lucifer Falls in Treman State Park. Water flows over layers of shale, tree-topped cliffs on each side. Sun glinting off water, backlit foliage, Treman State Park Water flowing through a strikingly linear channel in perfectly horizontal strata of Devonian shale, Buttermilk State Park. Curvy pedestal of rock left by years of erosion in Buttermilk Gorge
September 19, 2025 at 2:48 PM
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Her name is MOTHER OF EXILES. From her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome.

Pictures from a visit yesterday
The Statue of Liberty! A view of the statue's torch-bearing arm, from the windows in the crown. The arm and its clothes are green. Behind it, New York Harbor with some boats. The Verrazano Bridge is in the distance. A view from inside the statue of a metal ladder that leads up to the statue's torch. Off limits! The plaque bearing Emma Lazarus' poem, The New Colossus. The National Park Service is super clear that this is a central part of the meaning of the statue. Here's the poem text: Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
September 8, 2025 at 5:16 PM
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No Kings New York
Protesters marching south on 5th Avenue, Empire State Building in the background
June 14, 2025 at 10:19 PM
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Are mitochondrial genomes and their nuclear partners coadapted? Sometimes! But maybe not as much as we'd have guessed.
A two-panel figure. Each plots worm phenotypes for four different genotypes, the four combinations of two mitochondrial and two nuclear genomes, presented as norm-of-reaction plots. In the set of four genotypes at left, the matched pairs (mitochondrial and nuclear genomes found together in nature) fare worse than the mismatched pairs. At right, the two matched pairs fare better. In each case, there's really dramatic mitonuclear epistasis.
April 25, 2025 at 8:44 PM
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Tuc used a worm genetics trick to move mt genomes among nuclear backgrounds, generating hundreds of new strains with new combinations of mt and nuclear genomes. Then he measured the worms in 6 different environments. It turns out mitonuclear epistasis is everywhere and consequential.
A two-panel figure. At left, the size of worms grown at 20 degrees is plotted as a function of the specific combination of nuclear genome (color) and mitochondrial genome (x-axis). The nculear genome explains most of the variation but the mitochondrial genomes also matter, in a kind of idiosyncratic pattern. In the right panel, it's the same thing for worms grown at 25 degrees. The patterns are different, in a way that implies a three-way interaction between temperature, nuclear genome, and mitochondrial genome. In the manuscript, Tuc shows that yeah, p < 10^-16.
April 25, 2025 at 8:44 PM
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With genomes of >500 C. elegans isolates (from EC Andersen's CaeNDR), Tuc found that mitochondria fall into eight groups that are roughly concordant with structure in the nuclear genome. But the mt genome is teeming with variation, and tons of triallelic sites and sites with many mutations.
A two-panel figure. At left, an unrooted mitochondrial gene tree, highlighting the 8 haplogroups of C. elegans. Strain ECA1298 is off on its own long branch-- a distinctive mt genome found only in one spot in Hawaii. At right is a principal components plot of the nuclear genome, each strain's point colored by mitochondrial haplogroup, showing that the nuclear genome population structure echoes the mitochondrial pattern.
April 25, 2025 at 8:44 PM
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Sunset tonight in New York
(Part 1 from my 1-part series, “things that are not horrific right now”)
Orange purple sunset behind the west village
April 23, 2025 at 12:08 AM
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Happy to join a few thousand friends in midtown today.

Free Mahmoud
Free Rumeysa
Free Kilmar and everyone at Cecot
Due process
No kings
Protesters marching north with diverse signs demanding due process Protesters marching east in 42nd st, Chrysler Building in the background
April 19, 2025 at 5:56 PM
wormsrock.bsky.social
Lots of people at the rally in New York!
Josh Dubnau from Stony Brook gave the speech the moment demands: attacks on science funding are bad, but they’re downstream of fascism, and we need to fight the fascism even when we’re not the targets
100s of people at the Stand up for Science rally in Washington Square Park. They’re holding signs in front of the Wash Square arch
March 7, 2025 at 6:48 PM
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I think about the Lincoln Brigades sometimes.
Kyiv Maidan, people walking around on Ukrainian Independence Day, 2019. A child stands on the edge of a fountain in Kyiv, flowers in her hair. Her parents stand nearby and watch. Ukrainian Independence Day 2019. Amazing vibes.
March 1, 2025 at 12:28 AM
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In college I thought I'd be an art historian, but in my third semester I took Elisabeth Vrba's course and it immediately converted me. With her advice I switched to a geology major. She helped me find a summer research internship at the AMNH and set me on the path that I'm still following.
A stack of 30-year-old file folders full of handouts from Elisabeth Vrba's course, Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory. On top of the stack is part of page 1 of the syllabus, printed on blue card stock for some reason.
February 11, 2025 at 3:05 PM
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The egg hulls are super weird and interesting and I didn't know what they were when I first saw them. Here's some SEM images from other species: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29300540/
Here's bonus gill and radula images.
A view of the tip of a gill structure, showing multiple lamellae from the side. The whole structure tapers to a point, where we see lots of extra-long cilia. A closeup of the radula, showing the rows of black teeth flanking a central row of yellowish translucent teeth, with more rows of such teeth on the outside.
January 12, 2025 at 10:55 PM
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Four views of a chiton. These beautiful marine molluscs are full of surprises!
Eastern beaded chiton, Chaetopleura apiculata, from the Gulf of Mexico.
a close up of the back of a chiton, showing parts of four valves-- the shell plates that cover the animal's dorsal side. A microscopic view of four sheets of gill (lamellae), each bristling with cilia. These pull water through the mantle cavity along the underside of the chiton. The chiton's radula, a ribbon of tissue covered with precisely arranged chitinous teeth, dissected out of its mouth. The chiton uses this to scrape food off rocks. The radula has two long rows of black teeth, sclerotized and maybe enriched with iron, and then lots of smaller teeth that are more transparent. Female chitons encapsulate each egg in an elaborately sculptured hull. Here we see a close up of some of the sculptural elements, called cupules. They resemble pineapples maybe?
January 12, 2025 at 10:55 PM
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Also, females lay their embryos inside their molted cuticle-- a little extra protection from the elements.
Two round tardigrade embryos inside the ghostly outline of a tardigrade -- the shed skin of their mother Same two embryos, but now the focus is on the claws of the molt, at the tips of the eight legs. There are a few green algal cells too. Here's an adult, showing all its anatomy. The gut is full of green algae. Anterior to the gut is a narrow esophagus and a big round pharynx. Anterior to that is a pair of stylets (the upside-down V thing) leading to the mouth, with an eye on each side.
January 3, 2025 at 9:39 PM