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Joel McGlothlin

@joelmcglothlin.bsky.social
3.8K followers 5.4K following 512 posts

Evolutionary biologist. Professor at Virginia Tech.

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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
Thanks for the shoutout! I would not be doing what I do today without the mentorship of Dave McCauley. He was my freshman advisor, my researcher advisor, and my professor for Evolution and Biostatistics. He was brilliant, kind, and generous, and was a perfect example of how to be a great scientist.
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
😂
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
It's sad that this assignment is now vulnerable to being completed by ChatGPT. I know Henry didn't use it, but I suspect some students did. My instructions included "Don't use AI!" But in the future, I am either going to have to change this assignment, or just live with some undetectable cheating.
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Every time I teach Evolutionary Genetics, I assign the students to write a Digest in the style of the journal Evolution and encourage them to submit it if they are eligible. This past spring, an undergraduate student, Henry Ayers, decided to submit his, and it just got published. Way to go, Henry!
academic.oup.com
Digest: Longitudinal striping in rodents
Abstract. Why do some rodents exhibit longitudinal dorsal stripes rather than the much more common monochromatic pelage coloration? Caro et al. (2026) inve
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
It ended up being very easy to deal with. I just emailed the editor and they let me submit the right review by email. Whew!
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
I was working on two overdue manuscript reviews for different journals but both in the same review system. I had the windows open in adjacent tabs. I finished my review for MS #1 and confidently hit submit. Guess what?
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
#Evol2026 #DNA
DNA
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
If you're at #Evol2026 and want to talk about publishing a review in Proc B, come find me. royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/pages/r...
royalsocietypublishing.org
Reviews | Proceedings B | The Royal Society
Reviews | Proceedings B | The Royal Society Review Articles   Associate Professor Joel McGlothlin is the Proceedings B Reviews Editor. Proceedings B welcomes unsolicited review prop...
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
I'll come say hi
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
#Evol2026 is my 19th Evolution meeting (I count 2021), and my 16th in a row. I feel really lucky to be part of this community. I also feel old!
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
I haven't seen you yet!
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
At
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
Hey, #Evol2026 people. It's a small meeting. Let's talk.
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
@adarowski.bsky.social This was fun. I left yesterday's @immaculategrid.com open in a tab, started playing it this morning, and then refreshed the window. Who knew Mario Soto was such a great hitter?
Impossible Immaculate Grid results
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
Past studies have suggested that some snake populations are resistant enough to withstand any response from newts. But our results suggest that the coevolutionary arms race between newts and snakes may proceed through the evolution of chemical diversity in the newt's defense.
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
The short answer is yes. Extremely toxin-resistant snakes have sodium channels with hydrophobic substitutions in the pore. Some of the analogs have hydrophobic functional groups which allow them to bind into and block these resistant channels better than regular TTX does.
Selected poses (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9) of the highest scoring analog, 11-deoxy-4-epi-TTX (cyan, ball and stick) in NaV1.4LVNV. N1568 and V1569 in Domain IV are shown as sticks with TTX-N1568 interactions shown as yellow dashes. V1569 and the C11-methyl of 11-deoxy-4-epi-TTX are shown as surface to showcase hydrophobic interactions.
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
Kelly Robinson showed that there is lots of variation within and among newt species in what TTX analogs they have on their skin. We wondered if some of these might be more effective defenses against their garter snake predators than regular TTX, so Kait used docking models to test this idea.
Relative abundance of TTX analogs Pacific newt (Taricha) species
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
Happy to share this new preprint, the first submitted chapter from Kait Malewicz's dissertation and a collaboration with Chris Feldman's lab at UNR. Pick your poison: Tetrodotoxin variants give Pacific newts a potential leg up in the coevolutionary arms race with resistant garter snake predators
biorxiv.org
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
What are people using to make their lab webpages now? Mine (made on WordPress) is horribly out of date and I'm thinking about just starting over.
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
🤣
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
In August, I will no longer merely associate with professors
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
Check out Kait's work as highlighted by the ACS!
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
A quick post to note that I noticed that I haven't been posting and it's been great, so back to not posting now
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Reposted by Joel McGlothlin
EEID 2026 at Virginia Tech @eeid2026.bsky.social · 20/10/2025
Hope you can join us for three full days (June 2-4th, 2026) of great science in a beautiful setting!
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 10/10/2025
Very bad start to the day. I got Jeff Samardzija and Jake Arrieta confused on @immaculategrid.com. These two now join Jon Lester and John Lackey as commonly confused former Cubs pitchers with J names.
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
We are reading that too!
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
Reading this with my class today. I love this paper. www.cell.com/current-biol...
cell.com
A stabilizing eco-evolutionary feedback loop in the wild
Reciprocal interactions between ecological and evolutionary processes are a central tenet of eco-evolutionary dynamics but have rarely been demonstrated. Zamorano et al. demonstrate that changes in th...
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 23/09/2025
Eight manuscripts in my editorial queue. Deep breaths.
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 23/09/2025
Regretting not using this answer yesterday for a shot at @learnedleague.com best-wrong-answer glory: After a series of high-profile incidents, in 2001 a table replaced a horse for future competitions in what Olympic event, per the broader sport's international rules federation? HORSE TENNIS
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 20/09/2025
If he had stayed healthy, this might have been right. What a game he had the other day.
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
Oops
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
PowerPoint will do this too, but I didn't have it turned on 😭
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
Thanks!
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
Thanks! 🤞
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
For me it usually happens if I let the computer go to sleep overnight. Today it was I just went to get coffee and everything stopped working. I had tons of files open, so it was probably a memory thing.
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
I got it fixed, so I'm OK
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
This happened to me this morning while doing a last-minute revision of my promotion talk that I'm giving today, nbd
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
If the wizards at Microsoft could make PowerPoint stop doing that thing where all of a sudden all your pictures disappear and you can't save your file and you lose three hours of work that would be great
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
Just found that the title of one my papers has been wrong on my CV for 18 years. The reviewers requested that we shorten it in the final revision and I forgot to change it on my CV when the paper went to press.
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 29/08/2025
75% of academia is writing reports and then writing other reports that report on the reports
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
Or they mean "I'm mad that the party I don't like is deciding how money gets spent"
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
It's wild to me how the years run together. I didn't realize until I wrote it down on paper how much of the stuff I've done has been started as an associate professor.
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
To PRofessor
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
I have been writing my statement for my promotion packet, and I think I now have managed to convince myself that I should be promoted.
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 08/07/2025
Proposal: A Tex-Mex/Italian fusion restaurant called Fajitaboudit
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 03/07/2025
#1: The Fourth of July is a holiday about opposition to monarchy, and as a nation, we should probably get back to that
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 03/07/2025
Also, I want a button to auto-archive all the threads I have already responded to but forgot to archive. This is always 75% of my inbox clog when I get behind.
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 03/07/2025
AI is everywhere. Why can't it read my email backlog and make me a priority list of which ones to deal with first? I would prefer this to the distracting auto-suggestions of words I don't actually want to type.
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 29/06/2025
Good to see you and sorry I didn't catch you again at the social!
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Joel McGlothlin @joelmcglothlin.bsky.social · 27/06/2025
I will be in Cleveland for sure!
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