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Michael Hickerson

@hickerlab.bsky.social
390 followers 337 following 19 posts

professor at CCNY/CUNY/EEB (population genetics+community ecology) 🍄foraging 🪕

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Michael Hickerson @hickerlab.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Very happy this one is finally out. Laura Bertola wrangled genomic data from 27 taxa, frogs to conifers, across one biodiversity hotspot, and kept a couple dozen of us pointed in the same direction over a long haul. Great explainer thread
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Michael Hickerson @hickerlab.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
That's exactly where this came from: the 6-phylum stew at the Friday Harbor Labs marine invert course, many years ago. Who was your professor? I suspect it's the same lineage. I will track down that recipe and get the score
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Michael Hickerson @hickerlab.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Good point, and it's the reason i like the score as Faith's PD (total branch length rather than depth). Cow + wheat hits LECA and scores > 3K Myr. A cheeseburger, ~5.5K Myr. Beef ramen with a kombu dashi, a sheet of nori, shiitake, and uni on top, ~9.3K Myr. Same root, three times the tree
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Michael Hickerson @hickerlab.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
the other night i scored a 6% and it was good!
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Michael Hickerson @hickerlab.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Love that assignment. Phylodiet would slot right in: phyloT gives the topology, this adds dated branches, so students can also put a number on how much evolutionary history each dish covers. Happy to help if you try it.
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Michael Hickerson @hickerlab.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
and viruses aren't on the tree of life at all, so cauliflower mosaic virus gets off on a technicality
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Michael Hickerson @hickerlab.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
A future option will be a second metric that weights branches by how much you ate (phylogenetic Hill numbers, Chao et al. 2010).
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Michael Hickerson @hickerlab.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Ha, both fair, and I should have said it in the thread. Eukaryotes only, by design: bacteria come with everything we eat, mostly by accident, and counting them would push every plate past 3 billion years and flatten the scores.
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Michael Hickerson @hickerlab.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
credit to the FHL Marine invert zoo summer course's 6 phylum stew for the original inspiration
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Michael Hickerson @hickerlab.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Ha, perfect! I'll surely be phylo-scoring my turkey-day plate this year. Then we can compare with Canadian Thanksgiving and Chuseok and other traditional harvest festival plates
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Michael Hickerson @hickerlab.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
and testers who broke it in useful ways: @johnwares.bsky.social , @guillermodelia.bsky.social, Justin Yeager, and Jessica Garb. Bug reports welcome, there's a "suggest a fix" link on the page. #phylogeny #TreeOfLife #Evolution
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Michael Hickerson @hickerlab.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
It got better fast from a bunch of help and it's easy to update and more comes in: @brucedstaylor.bsky.social for the protists root, @jessicalwarelab.bsky.social and her lab for the insects, Rachel Swenie and Tim James for fungi, Hocheol Kim for red algae (preprint) and others
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Michael Hickerson @hickerlab.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
The tree is grafted from published chronograms (seed plants, ferns, mammals, birds, fish, herps, mushrooms, red algae) onto a Strassert et al. eukaryote backbone. Every node's source is in the repo. Works in English and Spanish. Open, citable: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22997190
doi.org
Phylodiet: phylogenetic diversity of what you eat
Renamed from Phyloplate. Open tree open-0.18 (red algae from Kim et al. 2026), dish table 0.1.
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Michael Hickerson @hickerlab.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
A cheeseburger is a cow, wheat, yeast and some garden plants, mostly shallow branches. Add kelp, a sea urchin and a mushroom and the score jumps, because those lineages split from ours over a billion years ago. Variety within a species adds nothing
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Michael Hickerson @hickerlab.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
How much of the tree of life did you eat? Phylodiet scores a meal by phylogenetic diversity: type what you ate and it builds the dated tree of the organisms in it, from ~3,300 edible eukaryotes, back 2 billion years. Last night's dinner, below. 🧵 mjhickerson.github.io/phylodiet/app/phylodiet.html
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Michael Hickerson @hickerlab.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/s...
nytimes.com
The Secret History of Bats: A New Study Redraws Their Family Tree
The largest analysis of bat genomes and fossils suggests that the first bats emerged in Europe roughly 65 million years ago and that echolocation evolved early.
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Michael Hickerson @hickerlab.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Congratulations @ariadnamorales.bsky.social! New bat tree of life from 103 genomes and 44 fossils: laryngeal echolocation predates crown bats and powered flight arose in Europe in the late Palaeocene. Nature and the NYT in one week. The Morales Lab launches at CCNY and CUNY in 2027. We are thrilled
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Ariadna Morales @ariadnamorales.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Very happy to see our paper out in Nature! 🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇 A huge collaborative effort to revisit the evolutionary history of bats using 103 reference-quality genomes and an extensive fossil dataset, and to build a genomic resource for many questions still to come. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Reference genomes and fossils revise bat family phylogeny and biogeography - Nature
An updated phylogeny of bats is presented, based on new genome assemblies and many ancient fossils and including all known bat families.
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Bruce Taylor @brucedstaylor.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Here's a fun thing! Prof. Mike Hickerson @hickerlab.bsky.social has created Phylodiet, an app that reveals "How Much of the Tree of Life is on your plate": mjhickerson.github.io/phylodiet/ap... Enter your meal, and see how the ingredients are related. #phylogeny #TreeOfLife #Evolution
mjhickerson.github.io
Phylodiet
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Michael Hickerson @hickerlab.bsky.social · 28/10/2025
We are seeking an Assistant Professor (Tenure-Track) in Comparative Genomics (loosely defined). I'd be happy to answer any questions (like teaching load etc) - feel free to DM me. cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/...
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Patrick McKenzie @patrickmckenzie.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
super excited to share this big project with @daeaton.bsky.social out now in Systematic Biology! We derived distributions for -- given an arbitrary species tree model -- how far you have to move along a genome before observing a change in the underlying genealogy: doi.org/10.1093/sysb...
doi.org
Estimating waiting distances between genealogy changes under a Multi-Species Extension of the Sequentially Markov Coalescent
Abstract. Genomes are composed of a mosaic of segments inherited from different ancestors, each separated by past recombination events. Consequently, genea
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Ana Bedoya @botana-bedoya.bsky.social · 29/08/2025
I am recruiting a postdoc to work for 2-3 yrs on our NSF-funded project aiming to investigate plant migration and river connectivity with the closure of the Isthmus of Panama. Leading publications, fieldwork in CR & Panama, applying and expanding phylo. & pop.gen tools👇 www.nybg.org/about/work-w...
nybg.org
Employment | New York Botanical Garden
Find out what employment opportunities are available at The New York Botanical Garden.
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Reposted by Michael Hickerson
Anna Thonis, PhD 🦎 @annainthefield.bsky.social · 16/12/2024
The third chapter of my dissertation is out now in the Journal of Biogeography! For this work, we examined the implications of using range maps to extract species richness for use in macroecological models. DM me if you don't have access & want a copy! :) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Perils of Using Range Maps in Macroecological Models of Species Richness
Aim As range maps do not imply the continuous presence of species across their extents—and are commonly developed with species conservation in mind—their underlying assumptions unsurprisingly lead t...
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Bruce Taylor @brucedstaylor.bsky.social · 16/12/2024
Netzelia corona is an amoeba with teeth. Can a model proposed by Kenneth Dumack and colleagues explain that? A brief blog post. www.itcamefromthepond.com/2024/12/16/a... #Protists #Amoebae #ProtistsOnSky @dumack.bsky.social
itcamefromthepond.com
A new way of looking at the shells of arcellinid amoebae – It Came from the Pond
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Michael Hickerson @hickerlab.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
We are seeking a Quantitative Ecologist (tenure-track). I'd be happy to answer any questions (like teaching load etc) - feel free to DM me. cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/...
cuny.jobs
Jobs | City University of New York
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