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Michael Skvarla

@napoleonicento

PhD in entomology, professor of insect ID. Co-host of @Arthro_Podshow. Slava Ukraini. Views are my own.

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Latest posts by Michael Skvarla @napoleonicento

Petition e-7195 - Petitions

To my Canadian friends, an acquaintance started a petition to allow US transgender citizens to claim refugee status here.

www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en...

If you’re Canadian please sign it.
If you’re not, please share ❤️

06.03.2026 17:49 👍 698 🔁 688 💬 11 📌 21

seeing more disgusting genocidal racism talk coming from Israeli politicians now that more bombs are dropping.

There is no justification.

Every human being's life is equally precious and demands our dignity, care and consideration.

Full stop.

07.03.2026 00:05 👍 407 🔁 80 💬 8 📌 2

“MAGA’s fundamental shared quality is a total lack of theory of mind for other people” is a theory that keeps getting validated by reality - look at almost every decision they’ve made in the war with Iran, and how they seem constantly surprised by the unanticipated actions of other parties.

06.03.2026 14:20 👍 2787 🔁 580 💬 55 📌 66
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Bodycam video contradicts ICE claims in fatal shooting of U.S. citizen Ruben Ray Martinez in Texas Video of last year's fatal shooting of Ruben Ray Martinez obtained by CBS News appears to contradict claims that Martinez was shot by an ICE agent because he "accelerated" and "intentionally ran over"...

DHS claimed "an ICE agent had fired 'defensive shots' into Martinez's vehicle after Martinez 'intentionally ran over' another agent."

But body cam video now "shows that Martinez's vehicle, a blue Ford Fusion, was stationary or going at a very low rate of speed when he was fatally shot."

07.03.2026 00:59 👍 4976 🔁 2292 💬 88 📌 148

A lot of hate in the comments, but I'm cautiously excited. I need something to look forward in these trying times. I just hope Joss Whedon isn't involved.

06.03.2026 21:28 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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Don’t let mega-constellation-building billionaires steal your night sky Satellites are wonders of modern technology that have improved all of our lives. But having more than a million of them in orbit could destroy our view of the heavens and seriously damage our planet

Elon Musk has already started plans to launch a million satellites.

Yes. A MILLION.

This is a colossally bad idea, and it's not too late to make your voice heard. I explain everything:

www.scientificamerican.com/article/ramp...

🔭 🧪

06.03.2026 16:05 👍 1392 🔁 772 💬 63 📌 68

They are just handing themselves our money, is all this is.

06.03.2026 16:36 👍 31 🔁 7 💬 2 📌 0
laser scan showing a Fractofusus

laser scan showing a Fractofusus

Laser scanning Johnson surface

Laser scanning Johnson surface

This #FossilFriday we have a fantastic post as part of our 5 year project on Understanding selection in the early animals of the #Ediacaran. This research technician post will process our #Ediacaran laser scan data - DM/email: ek338@cam.ac.uk, deadline 12th April 2026

www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...

06.03.2026 09:11 👍 27 🔁 10 💬 0 📌 0

I don’t think people have grasped what it means to have a WH & a military who commits mass murder over and over for the sole purpose of committing mass murder.

06.03.2026 13:23 👍 891 🔁 290 💬 28 📌 21

a public utility does not need to turn a profit. this is intentional.

06.03.2026 01:20 👍 1054 🔁 379 💬 11 📌 4

did this happen after the primary on Tuesday??? lmao oh my god are other transphobe Dems just quitting because they got stomped so badly

06.03.2026 00:13 👍 697 🔁 122 💬 3 📌 0

NIGHT AND DARKNESS ARE INTEGRAL TO EVERY LIVING THING’S RHYTHMS.

06.03.2026 03:50 👍 5 🔁 3 💬 1 📌 0

Another timely update for my measles lecture

06.03.2026 13:04 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

This is why I set my cellphone ring tone to the dial up noise

06.03.2026 13:03 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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ICE detains reporter Estefany Rodríguez in Nashville - Nashville Banner Reporter Estefany Rodríguez, detained by ICE with no arrest warrant, may face deportation. Her attorneys seek immediate review of the legality of her case.

ICE has arrested and detained a Nashville journalist who reported stories critical of ICE. She’s married to a U.S. citizen and has been seeking asylum here after fleeing death threats in Colombia because of her journalism there.

They’ve already sent her to Louisiana.

05.03.2026 23:41 👍 12231 🔁 7395 💬 292 📌 337
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"Forcibly displaced Lebanese are now gathering along the sea; they have nowhere to go; Israel has announced its intent to make conditions that render civilian life unsustainable. A second genocide. Now in Lebanon."(Philip Proudfoot on X) #Israel #Lebanon

05.03.2026 20:21 👍 233 🔁 180 💬 7 📌 3

7 year old student from the California School for the deaf Fremont was kidnapped by ICE along with his mom, an asylee, and his sibling. ICE has removed them from CA.

06.03.2026 06:01 👍 231 🔁 159 💬 6 📌 4

do you want ISIS? this is how you get ISIS. But way worse actually, because Iran is way larger and more populated and will likely rapidly fall into fascistic chaos

06.03.2026 06:03 👍 49 🔁 14 💬 2 📌 0
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Google pledges roughly three hours of its annual profit to fight climate change Google and others are committing $100 million to combat climate change.

The perfect headline doesn’t exi…

05.03.2026 20:24 👍 7507 🔁 2177 💬 29 📌 65

I did the math once and the cost of covering gender healthcare Medicaid for all 180,000 trans recipients is around $1 billion dollars. For *ten years.*

That's the amount of money being burnt in Iran every single day, to bomb schoolchildren.

06.03.2026 08:06 👍 330 🔁 100 💬 5 📌 0

AJ is reporting that they're hitting Iranian water infrastructure, something I'm sure the gulf states, with their big undefended desalinization plants, are thrilled to hear.

05.03.2026 22:02 👍 593 🔁 108 💬 22 📌 32
A phylogenetic tree of insects is shown annotating the presence or absence of a an antimicrobial peptide gene across winged insects

A phylogenetic tree of insects is shown annotating the presence or absence of a an antimicrobial peptide gene across winged insects

Various phylogenetic secondary loss events are mapped to a tree of insects to explain the parsimony calculations necessary to explain the diversity of insect Drosomycin antimicrobial peptide genes

Various phylogenetic secondary loss events are mapped to a tree of insects to explain the parsimony calculations necessary to explain the diversity of insect Drosomycin antimicrobial peptide genes

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are key defence molecules of the innate immune system of plants and animals. Understanding the evolutionary origins of AMPs can help to explain how immune systems acquire novelty and vary in their defensive capabilities. However, AMPs evolve rapidly, and so the origins of similar AMPs across organisms is often unclear. Furthermore, false negatives due to low search sensitivity are common and can hinder confident annotations about true absences. Due to these difficulties, understanding whether similar AMP genes found in diverse organisms represent ancestral molecules or evolutionary novelties has been challenging. In this report, we present evidence of
horizontal gene transfer (HGT) of the antifungal peptide gene Drosomycin across insects. We show that in Diptera, the presence of Drosomycin is restricted to the Melanogaster group and additionally the
distant relative Drosophila busckii. We go on to recover Drosomycin genes in cockroaches (Blattodea), mantises (Mantodea), one katydid (Orthoptera), various beetles (Coleoptera), and a recently acquired
pseudogenized Drosomycin locus in Liposcelis booklice (Psocodea), but no other insects. Explaining this diversity through shared ancestry requires at least 50 independent loss events, or just seven HGT
events. Previous studies have suggested that similar AMPs found across divergent species reflect conservation from a common ancestor, or due to their small size, that they arose via convergent evolution resulting from pathogen-imposed selection. Our findings suggest horizontal gene transfer can be responsible for the presence of some AMP genes found scattered across the tree of life. By presenting a mechanism through which immune systems can acquire novelty, our study also suggests a possible explanation for certain lineage-specific competencies for defence against infectious disease. While loss of AMP genes is common in certain lineages, here we suggest gain of AMPs can occur just as suddenly.

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are key defence molecules of the innate immune system of plants and animals. Understanding the evolutionary origins of AMPs can help to explain how immune systems acquire novelty and vary in their defensive capabilities. However, AMPs evolve rapidly, and so the origins of similar AMPs across organisms is often unclear. Furthermore, false negatives due to low search sensitivity are common and can hinder confident annotations about true absences. Due to these difficulties, understanding whether similar AMP genes found in diverse organisms represent ancestral molecules or evolutionary novelties has been challenging. In this report, we present evidence of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) of the antifungal peptide gene Drosomycin across insects. We show that in Diptera, the presence of Drosomycin is restricted to the Melanogaster group and additionally the distant relative Drosophila busckii. We go on to recover Drosomycin genes in cockroaches (Blattodea), mantises (Mantodea), one katydid (Orthoptera), various beetles (Coleoptera), and a recently acquired pseudogenized Drosomycin locus in Liposcelis booklice (Psocodea), but no other insects. Explaining this diversity through shared ancestry requires at least 50 independent loss events, or just seven HGT events. Previous studies have suggested that similar AMPs found across divergent species reflect conservation from a common ancestor, or due to their small size, that they arose via convergent evolution resulting from pathogen-imposed selection. Our findings suggest horizontal gene transfer can be responsible for the presence of some AMP genes found scattered across the tree of life. By presenting a mechanism through which immune systems can acquire novelty, our study also suggests a possible explanation for certain lineage-specific competencies for defence against infectious disease. While loss of AMP genes is common in certain lineages, here we suggest gain of AMPs can occur just as suddenly.

Pleased to finally share this fun collab that began at #Ento23

@cedricaumont.bsky.social presented & I had seen NCBI annotated some cockroach genomes as "contaminated." Turns out NCBI & I were wrong (much more fun).

Horizontal transfer of an #AntimicrobialPeptide across insects
bit.ly/DrsHGT

1/🧵

06.03.2026 08:22 👍 54 🔁 20 💬 2 📌 1
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Bird nests support a diverse, dynamic and distinctive macroarthropod community on the forest floor Nests built by vertebrates, such as birds and mammals, constitute diverse microhabitats that are inhabited by many arthropod taxa and represent important hubs of local biodiversity. Compared to leaf...

New paper! Bird nests (Wood Warblers) are hubs of invertebrate biodiversity on forest floor, hosting more species/individuals than leaf litter. Probably due to heat & food detritus. Losing Wood Warblers = ecological networks lost. #ornithology
resjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

06.03.2026 10:17 👍 131 🔁 56 💬 0 📌 2
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Marsupials previously thought extinct for millennia discovered in New Guinea The chances of finding one mammal species thought to be lost was ‘almost zero’ and finding two is ‘unprecedented’, biologist Tim Flannery says

Celebrate the positive when it comes along:
Two charismatic marsupial species that had been thought extinct for 6,000 years are alive in rainforest in remote West Papu
www.theguardian.com/environment/... 🧪

05.03.2026 19:14 👍 174 🔁 72 💬 1 📌 9
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Steve-O was on Joe Rogan's show trying to defend trans people and Rogan went off, he called trans people "fucking perverts" and "mass shooters" who have done the majority of school shootings.

Completely unhinged bigotry paid for by your Spotify subscriptions.

05.03.2026 19:30 👍 3863 🔁 858 💬 216 📌 293

Democrats may not be able to prevent Mullin's confirmation, but they can certainly turn his track record of offense and stupidity into two days of televised humiliation so spectacular that he is wounded in Trump's eyes from day 1. That is the job.

05.03.2026 20:14 👍 7321 🔁 2021 💬 154 📌 88
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RFK Jr: "President Trump understands that we're engaged right now in spiritual warfare and that the malevolent forces want to drive us apart and end our connection to each other. One of the ways we can remedy that is by reinstituting this sacred ritual of eating with each other and cooking."

05.03.2026 17:03 👍 876 🔁 214 💬 665 📌 406

Today's (March 5) war on #Iran thread.

In the shadow of what is happening in the Persian Gulf, #Israel is in the process of ethnically cleansing large swaths of Lebanon.

This is a grievous war crime.

05.03.2026 17:33 👍 38 🔁 24 💬 1 📌 0

It is so damning of US news media that so many outlets refuse to just straight up say that Senator Tim Sheehy assaulted an activist.

He did not "help" Capitol police. They did not need his help. He wanted to assault the guy and did. He should resign.

05.03.2026 03:28 👍 20108 🔁 5695 💬 513 📌 220