Sunset sky with hundreds of birds flying around.
purple martin bird
purple martin feeding baby purple martin
One flying purple martin
A new UMass study in @natecoevo.nature.com has found how many purple martins died in The Great Texas Freeze of 2021—and how long recovery may take.
https://bit.ly/40JO1eK
1/ Remember when Ted Cruz went to Cancún as the Texas power grid failed? It wasn't just the people of TX left behind, it was also the wildlife. Out now @natecoevo.nature.com, our paper led by @mstager.bsky.social & @treeswallows.bsky.social documents how bad the storms were for birds.
rdcu.be/e7aUy
Meet a new species of dinosaur - Spinosaurus mirabilis!
Its fossils have been found in the Sahara Desert, including a striking crest on its head that was probably used to show off to mates and scare off rivals.
Find out more about this dinosaur 👇
www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/new...
Weak trophic position–body mass relationships undermine simple size-spectrum models for coral reefs 🦑🧪
royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...
The sheer number of ecologists who had their LOI rejected this week is comical. I'm honored to be part of the club 😂
Meme with top photo of Grogu (baby Yoda) and text: Professor on website Bottom photo of Yoda and text: professor in reality
No no, you should keep it forever, as is traditional!
Woody Guthrie's New Year's resolutions at 30 yrs old, 1943:
woodyguthrie.org/newyearsruli...
🚨 Research Highlight | New tools—Surprising findings: A new study shows human impacts cause relatively little changes in energy flow on coral reefs
📖 Read the research highlight ➡️ buff.ly/J52H2WN
📖 Read the full paper ➡️ buff.ly/W98t51d
who decided to call it Secret Santa when Nondisclosure Claus was right there
Community structure and microhabitat associations of cryptobenthic fishes in Veracruz, Mexico
First PhD-paper by @r-higueras.bsky.social, exploring the tiny fish communities on reefs off the coast of her hometown 🥹
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Did someone say resting fish face?
The #LonghornCowfish is easy to spot with its bright yellow color and the signature horns jutting from its head. But those horns aren’t just for style — scientists think they evolved to make this little cowfish a mouthful most predators can’t swallow.
A three panel comic. In panel 1, two people are facing each other. The first person asks "Hey, do you want to drive really far and spend hours staring at distant, rapidly moving gray-brown objects while trying to find subtle differences between them?" and the second says "No." In panel 2, the first person says "What if they're bird-shaped?" and the second person says "Then absolutely, yes." In panel 3, the two people are standing and looking through binoculars at distant shorebirds on a beach. The first person says "Yay shorebirds season!" and the second says "Woo!"
It's that time again :>
New study from @wcs.org and partners document 85% decline in abundance of Nassau grouper at their spawning site at Glover's Reef over 20 years, moving the population to local extirpation. Read more from Coral Reefs: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Photo (c) Connor Holland/Ocean Image Bank
Tiny blue-green crystals (there's a green coloured arrow stuck on the specimen to point these out) with some leaf-green illite and blue azurite on a matrix. From Bambollita Mine, Moctezuma, Sonora, Mexico. Specimen from the Natural History Museum, London's collections.
1 of #365Minerals 🧪⚒️
Quetzalcoatlite:
- Named after Quetzalcoatl, an Aztec and Toltec god of the sea, due to its sea-blue colour
- Forms in the oxidised zone of tellurium-bearing hydrothermal deposits #minerals
- This below is a co-type specimen (one of the specimens used to define the species)
New manta ray new manta ray NEW MANTA RAY!
Phenomenal first PhD paper by the marvelous @lljeannot.bsky.social – check it out folks, it has birds, coral reefs, and tiny fish!
🐠🦈 Just out: In this paper we ask "How has reef trophic structure changed since humans started removing predatory fishes from Caribbean coral reefs?".
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Illustrations @cookedillustrations.com
New research challenges the long-held belief that coral reefs are “oases” in marine deserts. While among the world’s most productive ecosystems, their existence in nutrient-deprived oceans is the exception rather than the rule. @gobyone.bsky.social @utmsi.bsky.social
cns.utexas.edu/news/researc...
Yes, @joey-squishfish.bsky.social – this is fossilized marine lint! 😁
Our new paper on the historical and scientific basis of Darwin’s ‘coral reef paradox’ is out @currentbiology.bsky.social! Summary below by @gobyone.bsky.social.
Also with @paulinenarvaez.bsky.social
@oclaripv.bsky.social
and Vale Parravicini!
Free-access link:
authors.elsevier.com/a/1lDFm3QW8S...
Cool description of seven miniature fish species from the Triassic that may be similar to modern day cryptobenthics. Apparently they were all over the Tethys Sea 240 million years ago, measuring in at a whopping 4cm adult body size 🥹 Scale bar in 📷 is 5mm!
linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii...
Global Patterns and Drivers of Freshwater Fish Extinctions: Can We Learn From Our Losses?
🔗 buff.ly/1ljgy5X
A detailed summary of our paper's results is provided below. This work was funded by a Branco Weiss Fellowship and the US National Science Foundation.
Photos by @jordancasey.bsky.social
www.eurekalert.org/news-release...
Scientific semantics aside, why does this matter? It matters because reefs clearly depend much more on their surrounding oceans than commonly assumed. As we alter not just reefs themselves, but also broader dynamics like nutrients, currents, and plankton blooms, reefs will have to cope with both.
Not really, because the oceans around reefs aren't deserts. Most reefs do not occur in conditions we would define as nutrient-poor. They thrive instead across a vast spectrum of oceanographic regimes, and 80% of reefs are surrounded by waters we would generally classify as meso- or eutrophic.
Does that mean it's all wrong? Not quite, because coral reefs are indeed ridiculously productive. We compared net primary production across Earth's ecosystems and found that reefs outpace almost all other systems in their ability to produce biomass. They're absolute powerhouses. Dare I say, oases?
First, Darwin never said nothing about reef productivity & nutrients. In fact, old Chucky D didn't have the basic oceanographic knowledge to arrive at the paradox conclusion. Instead, it arose after the first coral reef ecosystem metabolism studies in the 1950s and was misattributed in the 80s/90s
Our new paper in @currentbiology.bsky.social, led by @renatoamorais.bsky.social, examined the history and veracity of the alleged paradox and its patron Charles Darwin.
www.cell.com/current-biol...
@oclaripv.bsky.social
@paulinenarvaez.bsky.social
@utaustin.bsky.social
@psl-univ.bsky.social
Heard of "Darwin's paradox"? It refers to Charles Darwin's observation that coral reefs are wildly productive despite occurring in nutrient-poor tropical oceans. Reefs are, so the story goes, oases in marine deserts 🏝️...
Turns out that 2/3 of these assertions are very wrong...
🌐
🦑🧪
🧵⬇️
