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Wouter van der Bijl

@vdbijl.bsky.social
781 followers 285 following 36 posts

Evolutionary biologist @ UBC.

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Reposted by Wouter van der Bijl
Judith Mank @judithmank.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Delighted to see that @plosbiology.org has a feature of our guppy paper on their landing page. The real star is the guppy photo by @vdbijl.bsky.social, and I am at peace with this. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
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PLOS Biology @plosbiology.org · 24/09/2026
Some genomic inversions can persist for millions of years. This study by @judithmank.bsky.social @vdbijl.bsky.social & Yuying Lin reveals how ecological conditions and mate choice help maintain this hidden layer of #genomic diversity in guppies. 🧪#evolution #academicSky buff.ly/6sEgmgT
Male wild type guppies. Image credit Wouter van der Bijl.
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Judith Mank @judithmank.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
So very, very happy to see this out @plosbiology.org : Ancient inversion polymorphisms associate with sexually selected traits across natural guppy populations. Beautiful work by two very clever and talented coauthors, Yuying Lin and @vdbijl.bsky.social . journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... 1/
journals.plos.org
Ancient inversion polymorphisms associate with sexually selected traits across natural guppy populations
Genomic inversions spanning many genes can persist for millions of years. This study of Trinidadian guppy populations reveals how both ecological conditions and mate choice help maintain this hidden l...
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Wouter van der Bijl @vdbijl.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Some of these changes were overdue, but it can be hard to find the time to actually implement them. I found that Claude made this all much easier! Claude also found and corrected a plethora of small bugs, but they either don't effect results, or are edge cases that likely no-one ever encountered.
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Wouter van der Bijl @vdbijl.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
phylopath v1.4.0 is now on CRAN. This release improves a lot of the messaging to users in print outputs, warnings and errors. In particular, it is much clearer about what path coefficients represent, and warns users when they are not comparable (i.e. when mixing binary and continuous traits).
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Linley Sherin @linley-sherin.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
🚨My first PhD chapter is now out on bioRxiv ! A 🧵 1/n
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Judith Mank @judithmank.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Long-reads reveal 6X more guppy genes are sex-biased for splicing compared to short-reads. But male isoform richness mostly reflects transcriptional noise, not proteomic expansion. Beautiful analysis by @linley-sherin.bsky.social out now doi.org/10.64898/202...
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Wouter van der Bijl @vdbijl.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
Also not sure the incentives are well aligned here. The company creating this quality index is also offering a service to get feedback based on the same understanding model.
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Judith Mank @judithmank.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Mankees are headed to #Evol2026! Come see my talk- Sexual Selection Maintains Ancient Structural Polymorphisms- by Y Lin & @vdbijl.bsky.social, Tues 12PM in Sexual Selection & Recomb (Room 25A) and @jacejostles.bsky.social 's poster about Sam Snow's work on Mate Choice in the Age of AI.
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Dylan Wilbanks is not a Halloween person @dylanw.social · 01/06/2026
Reminder that Klingons say TRANS RIGHTS BRING HONOR TO YOUR HOUSE
DS9 scene: Kor, a Klingon, greets Dax as Curzon. Dax corrects him as the host is now in Jadzia, a Trill female. Cor immediately responds, "Jadzia, my beloved old friend" without missing a beat. 

Right: Two tweets from 2019: "This Pride Month, never forget that Klingons had trans rights"; "No hostility, no confusion, no clumsy excuse-filled justification, just a quick self-correction and the exact same amount of love and respect before and after. Cis allies: Be like Kor."
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Judith Mank @judithmank.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
Mankees are headed to #CSEE2026! Check out @squarehare.bsky.social's and @joellelafond.bsky.social's talks about Poecilia sex chromosomes, and @vdbijl.bsky.social's talk about evolutionary repeatability of male colour.
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Tuna @antea04.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
I'm a data scientist @ourworldindata.org and I need help from a botanist or someone local to Kyoto, Japan! 🌸 We present one of the world’s longest climate records: 1,200 years of peak cherry blossom dates in Kyoto. The researcher who maintained it, Prof. Yasuyuki Aono, sadly passed away last year.
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Jess Stephenson @jfstep.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
I'm looking for a lovely, talented PhD student, working on my ERC-funded project investigating the links between sexual selection and epidemic dynamics. The project uses guppies, worms, behaviour tracking, big experiments, and maths.. email me! Must have a masters! su.varbi.com/what:job/job...
su.varbi.com
Doktorand i sjukdomsekologi och partnerval
Zoologiska institutionen är en av de äldsta institutionerna vid Stockholms universitet med en lång historia av grundläggande och tillämpad forskning om djur, från leddjur till stora däggdjur. I
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Christina Hansen Wheat @chansenwheat.bsky.social · 03/09/2025
🚨 PhD position in behavioural evolution 🚨 Come do your PhD with me in Linköping, Sweden, using the domestic dog (and some wolves) to answer fun questions on how complex behaviours develop and evolve. Application deadline September 24 2025 🧪 🌍 🦊 #AcademicSky #ScienceJobs liu.se/en/work-at-l...
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Joe Hanly @hanliconius.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
I've just had a jaw-to-the-floor moment with this new paper from the Hines lab. They describe a yellow-white switch in bees, which maps to the same TF as the yellow-white switch in Colias butterflies, previously described by the @chriswheat.bsky.social lab. journals.plos.org/plosgenetics...
A map of anatolia, indicating the spatial distribution of yellow and white bees. Figure 1 from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13596-2
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Judith Mank @judithmank.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
Congratulations Dr. Fong! First PhD from the UBC Mank Lab! @squarehare.bsky.social
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Tim Janicke @timjanicke.bsky.social · 19/02/2026
Led by my talented PhD student @justine-armg.bsky.social we’re running a #meta-analysis of #cross-sex-genetic-correlations in fitness components. If you have unpublished data or know of studies that might not appear in a systematic search, please reach out, we’d love to include them! Please share!
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Judith Mank @judithmank.bsky.social · 11/12/2025
Now out! How important is social experience in male mating behavior? @corrallopeza.bsky.social found that experienced males were more likely to coerce non-receptive females, but did not change overall preference onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... w/ @vdbijl.bsky.social @idarolti.bsky.social
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Judith Mank @judithmank.bsky.social · 05/12/2025
Please help! We are looking for tissue-specific RNA-seq datasets or pubs with both male and female individual gene expression data, not pooled, from animal species. If you know of any relevant resources, please drop a link in the comments or send me a DM. Also, please help spread the word - thanks!
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Michael Friendly @datavisfriendly.bsky.social · 28/11/2025
#rstats It is with profound sadness I heard that my long-time friend and colleague, John Fox passed away this week. He was the author of {car}, {effects}, {Rcmdr}, ... and numerous influential books. I will miss him greatly. www.john-fox.ca
john-fox.ca
John Fox: Books and Software
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Judith Mank @judithmank.bsky.social · 20/11/2025
Team fish - we need your help! We are trying to build a database of all the fish chromosome-scale genomes where sex chromosomes have been identified. Have you build one or some? Do you know someone who has? Can you post the link in the comments? Please spread the word and repost! Thank you!
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Alison Wright @alielw.bsky.social · 17/11/2025
Join us! 🧬🪰🎉🔬 We are currently advertising two #PhD projects to study the #evolution, #development and #genomics of sexual traits in stalk-eyed flies. Deadline for applying is Wednesday, January 7, 2026. Get in touch for more info!
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Wouter van der Bijl @vdbijl.bsky.social · 09/11/2025
So Google Scholar now links to an.. 18+ website to read my latest @natecoevo.nature.com paper. 🤔 It does include some guppy mating behavior.. but this seems like an overreaction.
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Damon Beres @damonberes.com · 04/11/2025
NEW: Common Crawl, the massive archiver of the web, has gotten cozy with AI companies and is providing paywalled articles for training data. They’re also lying to publishers who have asked for material to be removed. “The robots are people too,” CC’s exec director told us when we asked about this.
theatlantic.com
The Nonprofit Feeding the Entire Internet to AI Companies
Common Crawl claims to provide a public benefit, but it lies to publishers about its activities.
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Society for the Study of Evolution @sse-evolution.bsky.social · 31/10/2025
Did you publish part of your PhD work in Evolution or Evolution Letters this year? You may be eligible for this award! Papers must have been included in a 2025 issue to be eligible. Apply by January 30: shorturl.at/CnVo6 @journal-evo.bsky.social @evolletters.bsky.social
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Tim Janicke @timjanicke.bsky.social · 22/10/2025
Does #SexualSelection fuel #Speciation? Our new #meta-analysis of comparative studies finds support for a positive relationship, but the rather moderate global effect suggests it’s not necessarily a dominant force. doi.org/10.1093/evle...
doi.org
Sexual selection and speciation: a meta-analysis of comparative studies
Abstract. Understanding the drivers of biodiversity is a central goal in evolutionary biology. In particular, sexual selection has long been proposed as a
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Wouter van der Bijl @vdbijl.bsky.social · 09/09/2025
Thanks Andrew!
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Wouter van der Bijl @vdbijl.bsky.social · 09/09/2025
While we all share our sequencing data freely, image datasets like these are still often kept private. I am only aware of a single other study on guppy coloration (there are many!) where images are available, and it's also from our lab (Morris et al. 2020). I hope this can improve in the future!
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Wouter van der Bijl @vdbijl.bsky.social · 09/09/2025
Our paper on the genetics of guppy color patterns has now been assigned an issue in NEE: doi.org/10.1038/s415... With this paper, we also publish all 14,100 guppy photos used in the study, including before and after alignment and ornament extraction: doi.org/10.20383/103...
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Maxwell Shafer @maxshafer.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
Now published @natecoevo.nature.com with @annika-nichols.bsky.social, our latest on the evolution of 𝘴𝘭𝘦𝘦𝘱 across 𝟲𝟬 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘀 of cichlid fishes! doi.org/10.1038/s415... with members of the @schierlab.bsky.social and Salzburger labs, as well as the burgeoning Shafer lab @uoftcellsysbiol.bsky.social
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Laura K Hayward @lkhayward.bsky.social · 24/08/2025
Full paper now out in GENETICS: The relationship between sexual dimorphism and intersex correlation: do models support intuition? 🔗 academic.oup.com/genetics/art... #Evolution #QuantGenetics @GeneticsGSA
academic.oup.com
The relationship between sexual dimorphism and intersex correlation: do models support intuition?
Abstract. The evolution of sexual dimorphism (the difference in average trait values between females and males, SD), is often thought to be constrained by
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Judith Mank @judithmank.bsky.social · 22/08/2025
Many of us are using LLMs in coding and scientific writing. They are very helpful tools, but we need to be thoughtful as we integrate them into our work flows to preserve accountability, voice and trust. academic.oup.com/evlett/advan.... An editorial at @evolletters.bsky.social for discussion:
academic.oup.com
Editorial: Accountability, voice, and trust - responsible use of GenAI in scientific publishing
Over the last few years, the development and rapid advancement of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatG
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Wouter van der Bijl @vdbijl.bsky.social · 22/08/2025
Yes I personally prefer to use “deep learning” over “AI”. Not much use for LLMs for now (but perhaps for eg meta-analyses in a couple of years?), but transformer architecture may still hold a lot of promise for sequence data.. Time will tell.
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Wouter van der Bijl @vdbijl.bsky.social · 22/08/2025
And yes, we used unets for segmentation.
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Wouter van der Bijl @vdbijl.bsky.social · 22/08/2025
Guppies! ;) I didn’t talk about it, but we also use triplet learning to do GWAS on whole patterns: doi.org/10.1038/s415.... There were quite a few posters on neural nets for image analysis and this is a domain where one can be effective with modest sample sizes.
doi.org
Deep learning reveals the complex genetic architecture of male guppy colouration - Nature Ecology & Evolution
Guppy colouration is a very diverse trait under natural and sexual selection. Using a combination of high-resolution phenotyping and genomic analysis, the authors reveal the genetic architecture of th...
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Tilly S Scott @tillysscott.bsky.social · 20/08/2025
ESEB Day 3! Molecular clocks & identifying ghost lineages; marrying micro & macro evolution; female polymorphism; balancing selection in round-nose grenadier; the genetics of guppy colour polymorphisms; modelling genetic interactions; antagonist selection in flying ants #eseb2025 #eseb #sciart
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Judith Mank @judithmank.bsky.social · 20/08/2025
Just in time for her #eseb2025 poster on Thursday, @squarehare.bsky.social 's paper on the Poecilia bifurca sex chromosomes was published today academic.oup.com/g3journal/ad...
academic.oup.com
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Wouter van der Bijl @vdbijl.bsky.social · 19/08/2025
I hate conference apps with a passion.
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Wouter van der Bijl @vdbijl.bsky.social · 15/08/2025
This website seems odd, it assumes MEPs will vote along country blocks, not European or individual parties?
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Judith Mank @judithmank.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
I’m really sorry to be missing #eseb2025, but for those sorting out their conference plan there are several lab talks and posters about what we are up to. Spoiler, they aren't all talking about guppies, or even fish! 1/n
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Judith Mank @judithmank.bsky.social · 17/07/2025
‪A really lovely commentary on @vdbijl.bsky.social's paper by Nidal Karagic and Claudius Kratochwil in @natecoevo.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
The next generation of colour pattern genomics - Nature Ecology & Evolution
Convolutional neural networks and genetic association analysis decode the evolution of colour pattern diversity and its underlying complex genetic architecture in the Trinidadian guppy.
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Wouter van der Bijl @vdbijl.bsky.social · 03/07/2025
Thanks Will, hope you’re doing well!
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Nature Ecology & Evolution @natecoevo.nature.com · 02/07/2025
Guppy colouration is a very diverse trait under natural and sexual selection. Using a combination of high-resolution phenotyping and genomic analysis, the authors reveal the genetic architecture of this complex trait www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Deep learning reveals the complex genetic architecture of male guppy colouration - Nature Ecology & Evolution
Guppy colouration is a very diverse trait under natural and sexual selection. Using a combination of high-resolution phenotyping and genomic analysis, the authors reveal the genetic architecture of th...
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Mark Peifer (He, him) @peiferlabunc.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
This is amazing work and a great thread, revealing the hidden genetic complexity behind the equally complex pigmentation patterns. Check it out! 🧪
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Wouter van der Bijl @vdbijl.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
Yes I’ll be there.
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Wouter van der Bijl @vdbijl.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
Thanks a lot Alex!! Guppies continue to be amazing.
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Wouter van der Bijl @vdbijl.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
Thanks Chris!
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Wouter van der Bijl @vdbijl.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
Thanks Stephen!! And congrats to you on the new gig!
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Wouter van der Bijl @vdbijl.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
This paper is the result of years of hard work, and would not have been possible without all the help from my co-authors. Special thanks to @jacejostles.bsky.social for taking ~8k photos (+fig 1a), and to @judithmank.bsky.social for her unwavering support of this project.
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