Anat Belasen, PhD

Holy fuck! 🧪

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

[alt text: spotted brown and white cattle dog mix wearing a dark grey snood over ears, a purple horse coat style winter coat, and small black booties, standing on terracotta tile floor]

The Belasen Lab postdog is not very cold tolerant

smol frown

if any of you are in Austin, my farewell show is tonight! i've only done 4 comedy shows total, and now i'm doing a 55 minute set. what is wrong/right with me!? 😎

tix:
linktr.ee/hotdad

Photo of a bunny (snowshoe hare) trail through green Sphagnum moss. The trail is lined with red bog bolete mushrooms.

A mushroom-lined bunny trail through Sphagnum moss. Newfoundland, Canada.
#mushroom #fungi #fungifriends #moss #bryophyte #bolete

Literal dream!!! 😭😭

Snow! YouTube video by Project RattleCam

The first snow at the Colorado site means snake season is almost over! Watch til the end though, to see who braves the weather. www.youtube.com/watch?v=5deX...

Impacts of sequential and simultaneous coinfection by major amphibian pathogens on disease outcomes In natural environments, hosts frequently experience infections from multiple pathogenic species or strains, significantly influencing disease dynamics. Despite shared susceptible hosts and overlappi...

Check out this awesome paper on coinfections in amphibians, first-authored by my first academic granddaughter! (undergrad mentee of my undergrad mentee - I'm counting it)

esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Cal Poly is hiring! We are looking for multiple tenure-track colleagues, including animal physiology, cell biology, and microbiology! Please spread the word. Links in thread. bio.calpoly.edu

Anat is doing a Q&A for her panel so if anyone has questions has any froggy questions for her please feel free to drop by the stream or ask us in the Frog Con Discord server! discord.gg/szgkgmXQhc

A smiling green yellow frog with a red clown nose and blue party hat peak from below. It is saying “frogs await you!” With “frog con 2025 is now live!!!” On top of it. The background is a light yellow stripes with come to the center of the yellow pom-pom on top of the blue hat.

Happy Frog Con everyone! The website is officially live!! Hop on over and check out all the activities we have lined up for you!! Our the opening ceremony will be streamed on our twitch! Thank you guys for all the love and support, it’s an honor to be able to bring so many frog lovers together 🐸💚

Very honored and excited to be an invited panelist for Frog Con 2025! So much good froggy content this week, be sure to check it out 🐸

- pare back whatever you can (other than the grants)
- do things that are restorative for you (long walks in nature, spend time with pets, baking, reading fiction, fitness activities, etc)
- take good care of yourself physically (sleep, hydration, nutrition)
- remind yourself this is temporary <3

A rocky creek runs alongside a light colored bank where a large cypress tree grows

Pretty cool to have this right on campus at UT Austin. And to think I only got this view because all the closer parking garages were full

My new small museums for mental health w'shop is on Sat 4 Oct
Recent compelling research shows that collecting & arranging collections neatly alleviates anxiety & lifts mood.
Includes:
🌿2 hr zoom-we'll make & photograph small museums
🗝️30% off my Etsy shop:
workshops.emmamitchell.uk/courses/smal...

Why should I write better when a machine can do it for me? Because actually no one can do it for you, because your voice is unique among all the people on earth. Siri never petted a horse's neck. Alexa has never been ghosted by the captain of the football team. But you have lived, your heart is beating, you have suffered, and you have something important to say. It's a human's job, to use words, and whatever job you give to a machine, that part of your brain goes dark. Maybe it's worth it when it comes to remembering phone numbers and directions, but when that part of your brain that uses words goes dark, that's a vast area that's very close to your soul. Don't let some internet platform convince you that what you have to say and create isn't worthwhile. Words are the echo of your soul. Honing that echo matters.

this iconic advertising copywriter named Kathy Hepinstall Parks died over the weekend and I wanted to share something from her website I thought Bluesky would like

if you wanna throw a little money at an Austin institution and certified cool queer spot, they have a kofi 💖 (linked in their insta bio if you want to verify)

ko-fi.com/cheerupcharl...

SNAKE LUNGWORM ALLIANCE AND MONITORING The invasive lung parasite, Raillietiella orientalis , was first introduced in South Florida with Burmese pythons. It is now found in 34 counties and 18 native snake species, with infections...

There is more information about the invasive pentastome species in Florida here if you’re interested: slamconservation.weebly.com

If you'd like to follow some other trans people who work with nature too, I made a helpful starter pack! It's not exclusively scientists and it's opt-in so let me know if you'd like to be added.

Hi! I'm Anat, soon to be assistant professor (!) who studies disease and conservation with a focus on herps. I study immunogenetics and responses to pathogens (mostly Bd/chytrid) through time, disease x global change interactions, and other conservation-relevant questions.

Frontiers | High partner specificity in an algal-salamander mutualism at continental scale The mutualism between the green alga Oophila amblystomatis (“Oophila”) and egg masses of the spotted salamander Ambystoma maculatum involves acquisition of a...

New #symbiosky paper from Cory Bishop and collaborators (including me 😊) on the remarkable specificity of the symbiosis between spotted salamanders and the alga in their eggs. Cory organized colleagues to get egg fluid from NC USA to NS Canada. He found extremely low...

tinyurl.com/2jmwce2s

omg i love it

heck yeah

Amazing weekend herping in the desert! Thanks @alexvguzmann.bsky.social for the invite 🦎❤️

Anat takes a selfie with a striped whipsnake - long thin snake that is mostly black with thin white strips along its sides. The end of the belly toward the tail transitions from cream to pink

Striped whipsnake being held. Its face is positioned straight on to the camera, giving a view of the pink belly as well as its round eyes and seemingly frowning mouth

And one more - a beautiful Masticophus taeniatus (striped whipsnake) - we love a pink belly

A very round and relatively cryptic adult canyon tree frog sitting on a well matched rock. Both frog and rock are mottled gray, tan, and black.

A recently metamorphosed canyon tree frog sitting on a greenish algae covered rock in a stream. The little frog is tan with dark markings on its face, back, and legs

A recently metamorphosed red-spotted toad sitting on a rock in a stream. Lots of bright green algae on the rock and in the water.

A purplish gray rock rattlesnake sits on a lichen covered rock, with leaf litter in the background.

And some extra herps just cuz

Hyla arenicolor (canyon tree frog) - very round adult and very squishy metamorph

Anaxyrus punctatus - (red-spotted toad) - also a metamorph. Lots of tads and metamorphs of both species in this stream 🥲

Crotalus lepidus - rock rattlesnake ✨

Anat (me) dressed in blue field clothes, a red bandana, and a green leopard frog hat, holding a blue-bellied and blue-throated male lizard

A yellow-throated female lizard held in a hand. Researchers in field clothes are in the background

Researcher using a fishing pole to catch a lizard. She stands on a pinkish rocky ridge with green shrubs in the foreground and trees in the background

Helped out with some Urosaurus ornatus (ornate tree lizard) fieldwork in West Texas 😍

@allyboville.bsky.social lassoing a lizard in photo 3!

Bird are not just birds - they are also whole communities of microbes, viruses, and parasites. Marcella Biaz shows differences in microbial and viral compositions between two warbler species and their hybrid. This info can help us understand the evolution of diseases and life histories. #AOS25

I finished my 1st draft!!

Pro tip for writers:

A very bad first draft is not a failure—it’s a great start, Congratulations!

You can’t revise a blank page, but you can shape a bad one into something really great

🌟Editing is easier than Creating🌟