The evolution of ants from a mechanistic perspective 🐜🧬. I mostly retweet bugs. John Harvard Distinguished Science Fellow | Principal Investigator | He/him
Cambridge, MA
Joined September 2016
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Hey friends, today our 7-year queen-like mutant project is out in Current Biology. These mutant raider ants show the core traits of parasitic ant species, but arose in a laboratory stock just a handful of generations before we discovered them -- probably due to a mutant supergene
Really fun conversation with Michael Levin (Tufts) today. Michael invited me to discuss ant castes for his YouTube channel after I reached out to ask his thoughts about hourglasses & intelligent behavior in development = ). Lots to learn fsho...
youtube.com/watch?v=g5Ob5eD2…
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Congratulations!!! The JH-induced queens w a spermatheca but no ovaries is a gorgeous finding :). This cleanly sets up lots of questions about how caste traits are coordinated & im looking forward to future work
Excited to see this out. Many thanks to all collaborators.
Juvenile hormone as a key regulator for asymmetric caste differentiation in ants | PNAS pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.24…
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Dope and so fucking earned, congrats man <3. Having someone to champion these insects w so much energy and creativity and manpower is great thing for us all :)
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Buck Trible retweeted
The Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology @ Kennesaw State University is currently advertising for two tenure-track positions: one in ecology and one in animal physiology. Come work with us! Share the adds (see below) with anyone who might be interested.
Buck Trible retweeted
Completely floored and honored to have received the Don Quixote Award for best talk today at the @hispanicpsych conference! 😭 🥹 thank you to @PerezLab1 for telling me abt this amazing conf and to @CRodriguezMDPhD for being my discussant & always encouraging me! #ASHP
Buck Trible retweeted
In all the decades of caterpillar rearing, I have never seen a case of parasitoidism as extreme as this. Anyone knows what it is? On tomato today, Gainesville, FL (host - probably once was a cabbage looper). RT if you don't but want to find out.
Buck Trible retweeted
my grandfather was a sophomore when Thomas Hunt Morgan took him into his lab (Fly Room @ Columbia) and as a sophomore he computed the worlds 1st genetic map! sturtevant.com/sturtevant/ah…
The abstract is *superb*! Looking forward to reading, and congratulations!
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Beautiful ants and description = ). Love the discussion at the end about how the Trible/Kronauer hourglass model can be used to explain the origin of a novel caste in these ants!!
🆕paper: "Biological notes, nest architecture & morphology of the remarkable ant Hylomyrma primavesi Ulysséa, 2021".
Mônica A. Ulysséa, Cliver F. Farder-Gomes & Lívia P. Prado investigate the biological aspects of the recently identified ant, H. primavesi.
myrmecologicalnews.org/cms/i…
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Lovely = ))). 2024 year of the supergene? Or maybe it's always been the year of the supergene we just didn't realize 😜
How supergenes shape evolution
By locking together traits that work well together, supergenes provide striking evolutionary advantages. But they can also be costly because they make it nearly impossible to purge bad mutations
scientificamerican.com/artic…
This article is so beautiful! science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…
Native Americans had a whole clade of dogs; on breed in the PNW were cherished ‘like gold’: wooly dogs that could be sheared to make fabric
Lovely blog posts here: metafilter.com/201762/Woolly…
A few things too cute to handle:
