iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 4m

It’s true and you should say it

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Tapani Hopkins @tapani-hopkins.bsky.social · 8m

The first rule of practical entomology is, you always underestimate how hard stuff is.* Anyone who's not daft in that way is wise enough not to get involved in the first place. 😎

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 5m

Returning a long overdue Anthia loan to its rightful place, they’re a perfectly handsome carabid but you could fit SO many fungus beetles in that unit tray

A large unit tray holding its full capacity of nine (9) Anthia burchelli (a very large black and white African carabid)

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New Phytologist @newphyt.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Humidity-driven shape morphing enhances fog harvesting in porous cactus spines Huss et al. @j2huss.bsky.social @hultinelab.bsky.social @mingchaoliu.bsky.social @fwf-at.bsky.social @bokuvienna.bsky.social @univie.bsky.social nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Spine anchorage and chemical composition of the attachment layer in Turbinicarpus alonsoi.

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invertebrate @crevicedwelling.bsky.social · 13h

there are now baby pill millipedes. for your information there are baby pill millipedes here. did I mention the baby pill millipedes

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 22h

(Brother Desman regrets nothing)

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 23h

Sorry for your loss but I’m pleased to say this is a product category with all-time incredible merch photos

Two cats awkwardly photoshopped into what appears to be God’s ricketiest desk side cat tray. It’s clearly intended to hold THREE cats but even the manufacturer clearly finds this implausible

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 23h

This is the exact face I would also make if Brother Desman shoved me into the pond again

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Different species but this bad boy can fit SO many weird bugs in there

Monstrously oversized Inonotus polypore that I stupidly selected for the maiden voyage of my emergence trap

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

What do you do with all the beetles? Or is it too fresh for them?

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Prof Susie Maidment @tweetisaurus.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Fossil taxa are sometimes considered island weirdos without any actual evidence that island effects were important in their evolution. So we wrote a paper on how we could do actual island biogeography in deep time. If you want a copy but can't access it, email me: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

nature.com

Island biogeography in deep time - Nature Reviews Biodiversity

Island ecosystems feature unique species assemblages with diverse evolutionary histories, but identifying island communities in deep time comes with its own challenges. This Perspective explores the a...

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

…what are you doing with the polypore

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mossworm.bsky.social @mossworm.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

What especially bothers me about science / natural history orgs using genAI to make LOGOS of all things is that a logo can literally be whatever you want. Draw a squiggle in paint right now and you're already good. A logo can be a single letter in TNR. There are no rules.

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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 10/10/2026

in 2020 my lab quit Microsoft Word and began writing in R Markdown, an open-source document-publishing system that facilitates a clear, permanent link between statements in text (scientific prose) and the code producing analyses and visualizations supporting those statements (scientific analyses)

a preprint generated with R Markdown with the following text

Ecological momentary assessment reveals causal effects
of music enrichment on infant mood
Eun Cho1,∧,∗
, Lidya Yurdum1,2,∧,∗
, Ekanem Ebinne1
, Courtney B. Hilton3
, Estelle Lai3
, Mila Bertolo1,4,5
,
Pip Brown3
, Brooke Milosh6
, Haran Sened7
, Diana I. Tamir7
, and Samuel A. Mehr1,3,∗
1Child Study Center, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
2Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam 1018WT, Netherlands.
3School of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland 1010, New Zealand.
4Centre for Research in Brain, Language and Music, McGill University, Montréal, QC H3G 2A8, Canada.
5
Integrated Program in Neuroscience, McGill University, Montréal, QC H3A 1A1, Canada.
6Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, Hempstead, NY 11549, USA.
7Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
∧These authors contributed equally.
*Corresponding authors. E-mails: eun.cho@yale.edu, lidya.yurdum@yale.edu, sam@auckland.ac.nz
Music appears universally in human infancy with self-evident effects: as many parents know intuitively,
infants love to be sung to. The long-term effects of parental singing remain unclear, however. In an offsetdesign exploratory 10-week randomized trial conducted in 2023 (N = 110 families of infants, Mage =
3.67 months, 53% female, 73% White), the study manipulated the frequency of infant-directed singing
via a music enrichment intervention. Results, measured by smartphone-based ecological momentary
assessment (EMA), show that infant-directed singing causes general post-intervention improvements
to infant mood, but not to caregiver mood. The findings show the feasibility of longitudinal EMA
(retention: 92%; EMA response rate: 74%) of infants and the potential of longer-term and higherintensity music enrichment interventions to improve health in infancy.
Keywords: music, infancy, parenting, infant-directed song, ecological moment…

the journal article version of the previous image

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TallFroGuy - Shape Decider @tallfroguy.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

(The top left hole has two pigeons) #critterposting

Crude drawing of 10 white pigeons in 9 brown and black squares. Shaped like shapes

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

This is a wild assertion to make in the introduction to your 200-page treatise on paederine staphylinid trichobothria

“Matsuda (1970), in a dense, difficult to read, 400-page treatise on the evolution of the insect thorax, rejected the Ferris hypothesis after studying numerous species across the orders of Insecta” (the author is criticizing a seemingly crackpot theory about an internal structure of the beetle thorax)

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Friday night in the Big Apple, you know what that means (time to perch on a big rock and read the latest in weird beetle morphology)

Emeritus beetle curator Lee Herman gave me some of his recent monographs. This one is about staphylinids with thoracic stridulatory files!!

The story of every genus revision: “this seemed like a simple project I could finish quickly but it actually took me 10 years and I ended up creating a new subtribe”

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Josh Luke Davis 🏳️‍🌈 @joshlukedavis.com · 09/10/2026

this is nice! from a low of about 1,000 animals, there are now over 180,000 giant tortoises on the Seychelles! there are more tortoises than people! 🎉🐢 www.theguardian.com/environment/...

theguardian.com

Scientists discover 180,000 giant tortoises on one Seychelles island

Free-roaming Aldabra population far exceeds human population of Seychelles after decades-long recovery programme

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Oh no Thomas Barr don’t go in there

A VERY poorly labeled Mexaphaenops cave beetle from “Cueva del Vandalismo”

I’m not a great Spanish speaker but that must be Vandalism Cave

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paper beetles OUT NOW! @sneepsnorp3d.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

inside you there are two Weevils

Low poly, toon-shaded acorn weevil. An arrow points to the weevil with text that reads, "Has never heard of Excel."

Low poly acorn weevil wearing a tie. Text above the weevil reads, "Weevil who knows Excel."

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I would also ask the lepidopterists of the world to cut it out

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

One presumes he was tenured at this point

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Also in the carabid files: a strongly worded editorial by cave beetle expert Thomas C. Barr, a professor at the University of Kentucky. Dated Nov. 17, 1984.

“Creationist phoenix rises around election time,” an opinion essay by Tom Barr published in the Lexington Herald-Leader. He notes that creationist rhetoric always seems to flare up every time there’s a TN school board election.

“The real question becomes: Can
we afford to teach teenagers the
twisted credo of a small, fundamentalist, anti-scientific sect as a substitute
for the best thought modern science has to offer?”

“Can we afford to continue censoring biology textbooks so that evolution is not mentioned or is relegated to a brief, incomplete section in the back? Can we afford to hobble and harass science teachers by dictating that they cannot teach the greatest unifying theme in biology?
Mayor Scotty Baesler has said that businesses have been reluctant to relocate in Lexington because of "hor-ror stories about Kentucky schools.
Do we want to add another "horror" chapter?”

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Today in the carabid section, a question we all must ask

Unit tray of many multi-mounted beetles (Oxypselaphus obscurus) with a large typewritten note from the previous collection manager (in what might have been his 1st or 2nd year on the job). The note reads “What the hell’s the story with these?” and notes that a bunch of specimens were mixed in with a similar North American species, despite the fact that they are exclusively palearctic

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The roundest! Well, hemisphericalest, there are more spherical LBBs

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

hey Ohio you should have specified

Wiki page for state symbols of Ohio, including the state insect, “ladybug not otherwise specified”

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.net · 07/10/2026

ah damn, RIP Margaret Hamilton. she took safety-critical software engineering seriously, and got people to the moon and back. news.mit.edu/2026/margare...

old photos of a woman (Margaret Hamilton) standing next to a tall stack of books (printouts of Apollo space mission software source code)

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Omg is this where the Pittsburgh Crow River ends up??

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

define "art," I know some folks at the CMOA and the Warhol...

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The Narwhal @thenarwhal.ca · 22/09/2026

Once ubiquitous among Coast Salish communities, woolly dogs went extinct in the late 1800s. The only known pelt is now on display at the Museum of Anthropology in Coast Salish territory, more than two decades after it was discovered in a drawer at the Smithsonian.

thenarwhal.ca

After 167 years, this Salish woolly dog pelt has returned to B.C.

The Coast and Interior Salish dogs were carefully bred for thousands of years, then they went extinct. The only known pelt is in Vancouver until next August

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

see also advancements in photobiomodulation and optogenetics which are already being used to sell absolute nonsense garbage in Walmart

lady wearing an extremely stupid electric hat filled with red LEDs

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

prediction: this research will be used to market (unregulated) "gut health supplements" to the MAHA crowd by this time next year

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

their ideal professor is doing all of those things simultaneously while ALSO taking care of at least one toddler

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

tiny brown creatures who all kind of look the same and you can only tell them apart by dissecting the genitalia? CHIPMUNKS ARE NOW BEETLES

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Sarah Hird, PhD @sarahhird.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

That time I put almost all the chipmunk species in the western USA on one map. Did you know there’s 1 species of chipmunk in Asia, 1 in eastern USA & >20 in western USA? (I’m not the crazy one here. The chipmunks are the crazy ones.)

Map of the western USA with 20 overlapping chipmunk species distributions in different colors.

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Oooh I hope there’s gonna be stupid googly eyes

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Jack Stack @jackstack.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Hot off the presses! I reviewed the history of early ray-finned fishes, with a focus on their morphology, fossil record, and taxonomy. My principal goal is a guide for other workers to make the rich record of early actinopterygian evolution more broadly available. dx.doi.org/10.1002/jmor...

dx.doi.org

The Evolutionary History of Early Ray‐Finned Fishes (Pan‐Actinopterygii)

Ray-finned fishes, the most diverse living vertebrate clade, include over 600 extinct early actinopterygian species whose evolution is an enigma.

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Derek Hennen, Ph.D. @derekhennen.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

It's hard not to fall in love with microsnails.

Me holding a small vial of even smaller helical snails between my thumb and forefinger. There are about 8 snail shells inside the vial, all less than 5 millimeters wide.

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

omg they have a cafe now? (Possibly it was there in 2010 but I was too busy radiating beetles to notice)

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Oh okay, so the authors are all either 30 or 60 years old

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Ainsley S @americanbeetles.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I just want to shake it and cast my last, cindered kernel to the soil

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Julian Resasco @julianresasco.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I’m recruiting a grad student to join our lab at CU-Boulder in Fall 2027. I’m especially interested in students excited about insect community ecology and biodiversity, sp. interactions, and landscape connectivity. Please share with students who may be interested! www.colorado.edu/lab/resasco/...

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