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Rebecca Bliege Bird

@parnajarlpa.bsky.social
276 followers 63 following 13 posts

Anthropologist at Penn State studying and posting about indigenous land/resource ecology, behavioral ecology, cooperation, sharing, costly signaling, women’s hunting, fire ecology, plant dispersal. Also a feminist.

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Reposted by Rebecca Bliege Bird
Penn State Anthropology @psuanthro.bsky.social · 01/03/2025
We’re at the PREMIERE of “A Century after Nanook!” A documentary film by our own Dr. Kirk French!
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Lil Boo-kens 👻 @paleosol.bsky.social · 20/02/2025
What does US tax money (via #NSF research grants) pay for? Example: I employ 3-5 UG researcher in my lab w/NSF $$. - They quit jobs in retail, - Spend more time in scientific spaces, - Gain confidence, - GPAs rise, - They graduate and join the workforce, ... and we get competent geoscientists. 🧪
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Jeremy Koster @jeremykoster.bsky.social · 19/02/2025
Upon learning that yesterday would be my last day as a program officer at the National Science Foundation, I shared this parting message with my colleagues. The next few months will be frenetic and stressful for them. Here are some things that you can do to help them with the mission ahead. (1)
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James Holland Jones @juemos.bsky.social · 09/02/2025
Hard to overstate how bad the Musk administration is going to be for American agriculture.
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Jay D. Aronson @jaydaronson.bsky.social · 09/02/2025
Michael Roth is one of the few university president who actually gets the urgency of the moment. slate.com/life/2025/02...
slate.com
Dear Fellow College Presidents: We Need to Do More Than Wait This One Out
Why civil society needs university leaders to speak up.
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American Opposition @americanopposition.org · 08/02/2025
On February 17, we hope to see the largest peaceful protest event in American history. We want Donald Trump and his supporters in Congress to know that the American people will not surrender to fascism. Share this widely. Take your friends. Show up for your nation. #NotMyPresidentDay
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Miriam Goldstein @miriamgoldstein.bsky.social · 06/02/2025
Just in case you thought that removing DEI criteria would mean that everyone is competing equally: NIH is removing grad students from underrepresented backgrounds from the applicant pool altogether. Their applications will not be considered. Other students, not from these backgrounds, will be.
Update: They were removed from our reviewer assignments completely. I'm so sorry to all those graduate students. 

Anonymous to protect the identity of the NIH employee I spoke to...I am on study section next month to discuss F awards. We were just instructed to put the F31-Diversity applications on the bottom of our priority list for review because there is a chance we may not be able to review them. My heart is breaking for the grad students and their mentors that put so much work into these just for them to be disqualified and thrown out.
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Chris Martine | Plant People FTW @martinebotany.bsky.social · 07/02/2025
I feel so fortunate to be part of this ongoing #NSF funded work in collaboration with the Martu community. #Solanum #TEK #ozplants #iamabotanist
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Darby Saxbe @darbysaxbe.bsky.social · 04/02/2025
🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.
list of banned keywords
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Steve Pyne @sjpyne.bsky.social · 19/01/2025
The Hollywood Reporter asked for 700 words for a special section on the fires they have just published. Something looking at the fire itself.So I repurposed some sentences on 'fire as biology' and gave the notion a long leash. Alas, the title is *not* mine. www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/local-n...
hollywoodreporter.com
What Fire Wants: Understanding the Enemy
What long has been considered merely a chemical reaction perhaps is best compared to another all-too-familiar scourge — a virus.
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Tobias Plieninger @plieningerlab.bsky.social · 19/01/2025
"The people shepherding livestock across the continent's great open grasslands have been widely seen as the enemies of its charismatic wild mammals — to be fenced out of protected areas and policed by armed rangers. But that image is outdated..." @yalee360.bsky.social. e360.yale.edu/features/afr...
e360.yale.edu
How African Communities Are Taking Lead on Protecting Wildlife
A new analysis shows that African wildlife increasingly depend on lands managed by villagers and herders. In many areas, locally-run conservancies now more effectively protect wildlife than national p...
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Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 19/01/2025
Despite patriarchy's persistence, growing numbers of men believe they have it worse off than women. And, new research shows this "male victimhood" ideology is most common among men who aren't facing hardship. Which means what they're really feeling is status loss. 1/ www.psypost.org/male-victimh...
psypost.org
Male victimhood ideology driven by perceived status loss, not economic hardship, among Korean men
Research published in Sex Roles suggests that male victimhood ideology among South Korean men is driven more by perceived socioeconomic status decline rather than objective economic hardship.
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UVicAnthro @uvicanthro.bsky.social · 17/01/2025
New open publication in @annualreviews.bsky.social on "Including People in Our Models of Nature and Modes of Science" by anth faculty member @iainmckechnie.bsky.social & co-author Anne Salomon #historicalecology www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
Ecological functions (gold arrows) and feedbacks (teal arrows) of contemporary place-based coastal ocean societies. These reciprocal relationships, which develop over time through trial and error from ancestral practices, are mediated by governance principles, social norms, decision-making protocols, and intentional caretaking (i.e., management and conservation) actions. Illustration inspired by Bliege Bird & Nimmo (2018) and created by Arianna Augustine, Stz'uminus Nation.Ancestral sea gardens across the Pacific Ocean, from the Pacific Sea Garden Collective (https://www.seagardens.net). Artwork by Lilly Crosby, design by Heather Earle, base map © Mapbox, © OpenStreetMapMakah fishers congregating on Tatoosh Island, Neah Bay, Washington State, in the late 1800s. This island was also the site of Robert T. Paine's foundational research on keystone predation and trophic cascades for more than 40 years. In the late 1960s, Paine moved his research program from its original location in Makah Bay to this exposed outer coast island in part to reduce human influence on his experiments. Tatoosh is one of many ancestral settlements of the Makah Tribe and has a thousand-year-old shell midden that includes many of the macroinvertebrates (Friedman
1976) that were studied by Paine and his students and are still harvested by the Makah today. Photo reproduced with permission from the Bert Kellogg Collection of the North Olympic Library System, Port Angeles, Washington.
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Jake Holland-Lulewicz @archaeojake.bsky.social · 14/01/2025
🚨🏺🍑 Nature Ecology & Evolution (@natureecoevo.bsky.social) chose our work tracking the spread of peaches through Indigenous networks as one of ten ecology papers published in 2024 to be included in their Year in Review set! www.nature.com/articles/s41... Original: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Indigenous networks map peach spread - Nature Ecology & Evolution
Nature Ecology & Evolution - Indigenous networks map peach spread
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Penn State Anthropology @psuanthro.bsky.social · 15/01/2025
🚨 New paper coauthored by Dr. Sagan Friant and colleagues in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B!! “Towards a ‘people and nature’ paradigm for biodiversity and infectious disease” royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
royalsocietypublishing.org
Towards a ‘people and nature’ paradigm for biodiversity and infectious disease | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Zoonotic and vector-borne infectious diseases are among the most direct human health consequences of biodiversity change. The COVID-19 pandemic increased health policymakers’ attention on the links between ecological degradation and disease, and sparked ...
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Saimi Hanma ⚔️ サイミ @saimihanma.northsky.social · 15/01/2025
I'm realizing a lot of you probably aren't familiar with March Mammal Madness so here's what it's all about. You fill out your bracket of animal 'battles'. Then each battle will be narrated live by scientists here on Bsky in the most absurd and nerdy way possible. libguides.asu.edu/MarchMammalM...
libguides.asu.edu
LibGuides: March Mammal Madness: How to Play
The official location for March Mammal Madness tournament information and resources! If you're learning, you're winning!
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Fábio Zuker @fabiozuker.bsky.social · 16/01/2025
In just one month our Science article on Indigenizing Conservation Strategies in the Amazon has reached nearly 10,000 downloads! 🌱📖 #IndigenousKnowledge #AmazonConservation #EnviroAnthro
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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 16/01/2025
Gender roles have always been complex and flexible; time to retire for good the idea of “traditional” gender roles www.theguardian.com/science/2025...
theguardian.com
Iron age men left home to join wives’ families, DNA study suggests
Study highlights role of women in Celtic Britain and challenges assumptions most societies were patrilocal
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Sagan Friant @saganfriant.bsky.social · 16/01/2025
Anthropological Research in Science Education (ARISE) at Penn State is a summer institute in integrated anthropological sciences for historically underrepresented and underserved undergraduate students from the United States. APPLY NOW!
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anthrofuentes.bsky.social @anthrofuentes.bsky.social · 14/01/2025
Terrific review by Eva Jablonka of @kevinlala.bsky.social and colleagues new book Evolution Evolving!!!
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Jake Holland-Lulewicz @archaeojake.bsky.social · 11/01/2025
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. 💙📚 Day 15 #BookSky #BookChallenge
Cover of Elinor Ostrom’s book: Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
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Jake Holland-Lulewicz @archaeojake.bsky.social · 30/12/2024
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. 💙📚 Day 3 #BookSky #BookChallenge
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Rebecca Bliege Bird @parnajarlpa.bsky.social · 28/12/2024
#booksky
Changes in the land by William Cronon
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anthrofuentes.bsky.social @anthrofuentes.bsky.social · 12/12/2024
read the article and check out the table in the supplementary materials for actionable goals and possibilities...
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Prof. Gillian Brown @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social · 13/12/2024
🎉Publication day! The third edition of my book 'Sense & Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour' co-authored with @kevinlala.bsky.social is now available! Paperback and eBook formats (Kindle etc): global.oup.com/academic/pro... #evolsky #philsci #philbio #PsychSciSky #HPbio #EHBEA🧪🏺
Stack of books with bright red cover and a Franz Marc image of monkeys running through a landscape with red mountains in the background.
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Christina Hansen Wheat @chansenwheat.bsky.social · 12/12/2024
Brilliant paper demonstrating that dingoes represent a unique canid lineage that contrary to popular belief is not hybridized with dogs. Dingoes should be protected as the unique animals they are, not persecuted. academic.oup.com/evlett/artic... 🧪🌍🦊🐶 #AcademicSky
academic.oup.com
Genetic structure and common ancestry expose the dingo-dog hybrid myth
Abstract. The evolutionary history of canids has been shown to be complex, with hybridization and domestication confounding our understanding of speciation
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John Hawks @johnhawks.net · 12/12/2024
Interesting idea. I'm uncomfortable with this because of the implicit opposition of "anthro" and "bio". Humans are parts of biomes, are agents that change and shape biomes. Yet it's undeniable that new patterns are emerging that humans have influenced more than past biomes.
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John Hawks @johnhawks.net · 11/12/2024
The term “modern humans” really did originate in the late 19th century at a time when biologists and anthropologists took seriously the idea of end-directed evolutionary process. johnhawks.net/weblog/there...
johnhawks.net
There are no “anatomically modern” elephants. Why do we treat humans differently?
A quote from Phillip Tobias illustrates the strange way that we talk about human variation compared to other species.
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Alan McElligott @amcell.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
“One Health” needs ecology | PNAS 2024 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
pnas.org
“One Health” needs ecology | PNAS
“One Health” needs ecology
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Anne Pisor @annepisor.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
Sustainability requires collective action. The bigger the thing to be sustained, the more people have to work together. We find having friends in different communities predicts more participation in resource management: conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/.... 🧵 on why & implications /1
conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Long‐distance Friends and Collective Action in Fisheries Management
Much received wisdom in the conservation literature is that individual connections across community boundaries undercut natural resource management. However, when multiple communities access the same....
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Steve Pyne @sjpyne.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
A couple of colleagues suggested I organize my scattered comments of this year's fires in the Northeast into a short (!) narrative. History News Network has graciously published it: www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/the-...
historynewsnetwork.org
The Burned-Over District
The Northeast caught fire this fall, in a way that recalls its past. History has some lessons about how to manage the region’s fire seasons to come.
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Penn State Anthropology @psuanthro.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
🚨 Applications are OPEN for our Anthropological Research in Science Education program! ARISE is a summer institute in integrated anthropological sciences for historically underrepresented and underserved undergraduate students from the United States. 🔗 tinyurl.com/4z86aucv
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Dezene Huber 🍁 🌻 @dezene.me · 09/12/2024
The Blackfeet Tribe of the Blackfoot Confederacy is working to bring back herds of plains bison (aka buffalo). Besides being amazing in their own right, buffalo are walking ecosystems and ecosystem engineers. Their presence would reinvigorate the grasslands. 🦬 🧪🌎 thenarwhal.ca/blackfoot-gu...
thenarwhal.ca
On Blackfoot land, the buffalo roam | The Narwhal
The Blackfoot Confederacy is working toward free-roaming buffalo crossing the border once again — and revitalizing traditional hunts
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Jake Holland-Lulewicz @archaeojake.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
Published last year by myself and @isazooarch.bsky.social. Would love to see more use of network graphs to think about ecological data from the archaeological record! “A network approach to zooarchaeological datasets and human-centered ecosystems in southwestern Florida” 🔗 tinyurl.com/mf2xp6x2
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Holly Kirk @hollykirk.bsky.social · 08/12/2024
Next up at #ESAus2024 we have the Indigenous Keynote: Joe Morrisson, from Indigenous Land and Sea Corporation. www.100climateconversations.com/joe-morrison Joe is reflecting on how Indigenous leadership can help meet #NaturePositive goals, in particular through the Caring For Country movement.
100climateconversations.com
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Nicole Boivin @nicoleboivin.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
The narrowing academic career path for women - POSTER! This seems to have struck a chord with #WomenInStem, and we've even had a few requests for a poster-sized version so here it is: zenodo.org/records/1424... From our paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41... @janethering.bsky.social
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Christopher Brown @christopherbrown.bsky.social · 17/09/2024
My new book A Natural History of Empty Lots is released today. I hope you like it—it distills 20 years of exploring the edgelands, working on rewilding projects, and trying to understand what such places teach us about our lives, history and future: www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/chris...
Cover of A Natural History of Empty Lots
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Needhi Bhalla 💅🏽 @needhibhalla.bsky.social · 08/12/2024
A PERFECT example of how science has ALWAYS been political: “This was [a time] of colonialism, and you had all of these assumptions about what variation meant amongst humans and what it meant for potentially taking over other cultures and extracting resources from them.”
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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 07/12/2024
“a culture of aggressive egalitarianism may have thwarted the emergence of enduring wealth inequality until the Late Neolithic, when new farming technologies raised the value of material wealth relative to labor” www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...
aeaweb.org
The Origins of Enduring Economic Inequality
(December 2024) - We survey archaeological evidence suggesting that among hunter-gatherers and farmers in Neolithic western Eurasia (11,700 to 5,300 years ago) elevated levels of wealth inequality occ...
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Penn State Anthropology @psuanthro.bsky.social · 07/12/2024
🚨 New paper out in Population and Development Review by Dr Mary Shenk and colleagues! “Intensive Kinship, Development, and Demography: Why Pakistan has the Highest Rates of Cousin Marriage in the World.” 🔗 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
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Penn State Anthropology @psuanthro.bsky.social · 07/12/2024
🚨 New paper by Drs. @parnajarlpa.bsky.social, @dwbird.bsky.social, and colleagues in Nature Communciations! “Seed dispersal by Martu peoples promotes the distribution of native plants in arid Australia” 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Jake Holland-Lulewicz @archaeojake.bsky.social · 07/12/2024
Hey! Our department is here! Give us a follow for ✨top-notch✨ anthropology content!
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Rebecca Bliege Bird @parnajarlpa.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
In Alaska 8-12kya, people had mutualistic and predatory interactions with a wide range of canids: pet wolves, pet coyotes, pet dogs descended from wolves, wolves and coyotes feeding on human refuse, people eating wolves. Very cool work on the messy ecology of domestication.
science.org
Late Pleistocene onset of mutualistic human/canid (Canis spp.) relationships in subarctic Alaska
The processes of dog domestication and human-wolf mutualism were ancient and complex in northern North America.
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Roope Kaaronen @roopekaaronen.net · 04/12/2024
I am delighted to share our latest piece of research: ‘A global cross-cultural analysis of string figures reveals evidence of deep transmission and innovation’. This was long in the works and is by far the largest project I’ve led to date. A thread: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
A huge phenetic tree visualising our global string figure dataset.
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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
We humans are more helpful than you might currently be thinking. @leahshaffer.bsky.social wrote about our work looking at need-based helping across societies as part of The Human Generosity Project in @sciam.bsky.social www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-a...
scientificamerican.com
Is a More Generous Society Possible?
Generosity helps communities cope with risks and disasters; new research untangles the factors involved
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Ed Hagen @edhagen.net · 29/11/2024
We extended an agent-based model from Aktipis et al., & similarly found that in interdependent groups, as long as some (but not all) requests for help involved genuine need, always sharing was individually beneficial, but stinginess was individually detrimental: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
In need-based sharing, sharing is more important than need
Cooperative resource sharing is widespread across cultures, and it was likely critical during much of human evolutionary history for pooling risk. Nee…
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Madhu Pai, MD, PhD @madhupai.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
How to write an effective journal peer review using a staged writing approach: a best-practice guide for early-career researchers academic.oup.com/ije/article/...
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Konrad Kording @kordinglab.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
NSF makes you say who you got conflicts (coauthored) with. We (really just Jordan Matelsky) just built you a tool for that. Literally one click: bib.experiments.kordinglab.com/nsf-coa
bib.experiments.kordinglab.com
NSF COA | Jordan Matelsky
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Sheina Lew-Levy @sheinalew.bsky.social · 29/11/2024
I'm so excited about our (>60 contributors) forthcoming edited volume! A Field Guide to Doing Cross-Cultural Research on Childhood Learning journeys through history, theory, fieldwork near or far, and policy, with loads of personal stories in between. tinyurl.com/mvxxus55
openbookpublishers.com
A Field Guide to Doing Cross-Cultural Research on Childhood Learning: Theoretical, Methodological, Practical, and Ethical Considerations for an Interdisciplinary Field
This volume addresses the critical gaps in developmental research on childhood learning by advocating for a more inclusive and cross-cultural approach. Recent studies highlight a concerning over-relia...
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Erle Ellis @erleellis.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
Great Abandonment? Nature Needs People 🌍 www.theguardian.com/news/2024/no...
theguardian.com
The great abandonment: what happens to the natural world when people disappear?
The long read: Across the globe, vast swathes of land are being left to be reclaimed by nature. To see what could be coming, look to Bulgaria
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