jstgerlach.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

An excellent @peterhousecam.bsky.social Biology Symposium yesterday. Abstracts will be available in a few days at islandbiodiversity.com/petbiosymp.htm. 🧪

submitted 9 days ago • 1 comment

Everything is ready for this year's @peterhousecam.bsky.social Biology Symposium. It looks like being another set of exceptionally interesting presentations. 🧪

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

A day out from the last week of the Cambridge University admissions process - snail research in the @nhm-london.bsky.social. Extremely productive, lots of interesting material to work on. Back to admissions tomorrow.

submitted 42 days ago • 0 comments

🌍🧪🐌🐢

submitted 46 days ago • 0 comments

This has been a remarkable week for new projects & collaborations for DNA analysis of complicated snails across Indo-Pacific islands, reconstructing diet of extinct giant tortoises and identifying new subfossil finds of giant tortoises in Madagascar

submitted 46 days ago • 0 comments

THE RESTAURANT AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, by me and @kelsijosilva.bsky.social, is out TODAY in the UK! Available in all good bookshops and online.

submitted 54 days ago • 4 comments

Received my copy of Tom Lathan's Lost Wonders yesterday. Stories of 11 recent extinctions: well researched and put together - a good read. The Partula chapter goes up to April of this year, shortly before we were able to show success with one species.

submitted 63 days ago • 0 comments

After a busy week of @peterhousecam.bsky.social admissions interviews (exhausting but enjoyable for us, I hope for the candidates too) a complete change of pace. Very interesting discussion about Madagascar giant tortoises. So much we don't know: the beginning of a new research opportunity

submitted 68 days ago • 0 comments

1/3 - I have only just heard that plans for a GCSE in Natural History have been dropped. This is a bad mistake. There would have been issues getting it taken seriously as a qualification but it is needed. Understanding diversity of the natural world is ecological literacy. 🌍🏫

submitted 87 days ago • 3 comments

I really like what was done in the paper this thread links to - applying game theory to the evolution of dodos and solitaries is something I never expected to read!

submitted 89 days ago • 1 comment

A disruption to my normal Tuesday supervising with a very interesting day with the rest of Cambridge University's Environment Advisory Panel visiting some of the university's environmental management projects. Here we consider what we can do with a currently dull field. 🌍

submitted 98 days ago • 0 comments

I wont have time to dig into this for a while, but I love the idea of Darwin's 'coral of life'; looking forward to digging into this as soon as my time isnt taken up with teaching students (currently on origins of life, anatomy of circulatory system, population dynamics & game theory - what a week!)

submitted 103 days ago • 1 comment

Here's something I've never thought of: impact of snail slime on ecosystems. In this case algal colonisation in a marine setting. I wonder what it does on land - it can be quite a significant addition to the environment!

submitted 107 days ago • 0 comments

Very interesting article on the complexity of giant tortoises coping with ecological change

submitted 120 days ago • 0 comments

This year's Peterhouse Biology Newsletter is now online; see what Peterhouse students and researchers have been up to this year islandbiodiversity.com/petnewslette... 🧪🌍

submitted 148 days ago • 0 comments

The Partula snail reintroductions I've been working with over the past three weeks were a great success, this discovery that we've managed to re-establish Partula tohiveana in the wild was obviously the highlight.

submitted 149 days ago • 0 comments

Back from a week in Spain's Sierra de las Villas looking for a lammergeier. Staying by a griffon vulture nesting cliff was a good start. Plenty of great animals including many beetles, moths and butterflies - particularly good acorn weevils and two-tailed pasha butterflies

submitted 176 days ago • 1 comment

We just spent a week’s holiday in Wales enjoying the weather (unexpectedly) and following Charles Darwin’s beetle hunting footsteps from the 1820s. 🌍🐞

submitted 204 days ago • 1 comment

A surprise in July's monitoring of ecological improvement in the Peterhouse ditch: a great diving beetle. Not uncommon but at over 3cm long Britain's biggest water beetle is always startling. Previously the ditch has turned to mud by July, now with restoration it is thriving. 🌍🐞🐛

submitted 222 days ago • 0 comments

First day of monitoring flying insects in Peterhouse gardens for BIOSCAN. I'll be running this once a month for the next 5 years. This will provide useful data on diversity in college and how populations are changing.

submitted 235 days ago • 0 comments

I'm particularly gratified to see the relatively large predatory snails of Seychelles have been given a new genus name: Gerlachina! "Descriptions of four new higher taxa of “hunter snails” (Gastropoda: Stylommatophora: Streptaxidae) in the Afrotropics" doi.org/10.61733/jco... 🌍🐌

submitted 274 days ago • 1 comment

And on to a new project, just received - subfossils shells from Mauritius all with identical holes made by some sort of predator. However, there is no animal in Mauritius that could do that, so it must be an extinct predator: but what? I do like a good mystery. 🐌🌍🦤

submitted 284 days ago • 0 comments

Our Darwin's beetle paper just published, great fun to work on at the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge & at Down House. This started as undergrad projects for students at Peterhouse and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Charles Darwin's early beetle collections www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 🌍🐞

submitted 285 days ago • 0 comments

Particularly good views of a muntjac deer in Peterhouse gardens today 🌍🦌

submitted 291 days ago • 0 comments

Today was a lovely day for the @Peterhouse_Cam wildlife survey. We had a very successful outing with plenty to see. The fen ditch is improving remarkably rapidly, now full of life (including sticklebacks). We have no identified 781 species in the gardens (bit.ly/Petwild)

submitted 296 days ago • 0 comments

I'd just concluded that the Peterhouse badgers were not in residence this year when a camera trap caught a glimpse of one in the distance. They aren't using the usual sett entrances, so there's another entrance somewhere. I also came across another grass snake; much more active with warmer weather🌍🦡

submitted 300 days ago • 0 comments

This is awful to hear. St Helena is one of the most damaged environments, while studying its extinct snails I've been impressed that 2 species have clung on to the cabbage trees in the remaining forest fragment. They survived forest clearance and goats but may finally go due to an invasive fungus!

submitted 313 days ago • 0 comments

A zoo day: at London zoo introducing some of my Peterhouse students to the Partula snails that they will study in Polynesia this summer, both ones we've reintroduced already and the ones we will be releasing. Hopefully we'll soon change the status from 'Extinct in the Wild'

submitted 315 days ago • 0 comments

Exciting finds at Peterhouse this week: no sooner do we start rehabilitating the fen ditch than we have a sighting of a kingfisher, and today the first grass snake for 10 years. 🐍🌍

submitted 323 days ago • 0 comments

An exceptionally productive snail day: at Natural History Museum, London working on extinct snails of St Helena. Here are Darwin's specimens of 'Bulimus darvinianus' (we are stuck with the original misspelling). Also planning more conservation research on Partula and a new project on Mauritius.🐌🦤🌍🧪🐛

submitted 336 days ago • 0 comments

Latest issue of the Mollusc Specialist Group's newsletter 'Tentacle' now out, with a summary of last year's work to re-establish Partula snails in the wild. www.hawaii.edu/cowielab/Ten... 🧪🌍🦤🐌

submitted 339 days ago • 0 comments