Craig Smith

Having a super time bird-watching in far north western Victoria, Australia. #birds #birdwatching

Happy Good Friday! Craig's wildlife photo of the week. I spent some time this afternoon with a small group of Yellow-Tailed Black Cockatoos. (The male has pinkish skin around the orbit - the eye- while the female has dark grey skin).

Tonight’s back steps sunset here in Prahran, Melbourne.

@SandyHorne61 👍👍

Photos from my son and daughter-in-law in Seattle. I love PNW people 😄

@JaneCaro Thank goodness we don’t have this mindless shit here in Australia 🇦🇺 (as far as I know !)

Actually, men meed to stop wielding their God as some kind of spiritual coercive controller.

Happy Friday everyone ! Craig's wildlife photo of the week. Its Lilac-Breasted Roller, quite common in Africa. (Botswana, 2017).

@rrbehringer @YoshiakiraKanai @SocDevBio Wonderful. Wish I was there, but could not attend. My student is speaking about Müllerian duct. Her name is Lan Tan.

Getting ready to start the 10th Intl Symposium on Biology of Vertebrate Sex Determination in Crete 🇬🇷. ⁦@SocDevBio⁩

LOL. abc.net.au/news/2026-03-1…

@ProfJennyGraves Wonderful cover. Congrats, Jenny.

My book "Sex, genes and Chromosomes" comes out tomorrow. After 33 years' gestation! I planned to launch it at a meeting in Crete, but since none of can get there, I'm working on a virtual launch.

@_Tumbawumba @Currentreport1 Well, as an Aussie, I fully support our government’s stance.

@Currentreport1 How sad that we can't stand along side with our allies and gain valuable experience in the field. Simply because our government hasn't seen a need to keep our Royal Australian Navy resourced. Shame on Labor for allowing this to happen.

BREAKING: Australia has officially rejected Trump's request and will not send naval ships to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

@SandyHorne61 @abcnews Yeah, that irritates me too. I see it a lot. (Vaguely related: Virginia Trioli was interviewing Hugo Weaving about his “blue-tongued lizard “ costume in Priscilla. But it was most definitely a frill-necked lizard ! Hehe)

Argh! ABC Landline just showed some video of two "owls". Except they weren't owls. They were tawny frogmouths. (I'm sure they did that just to upset me.) Tawny frogmouth photo for reference. Mood. @abcnews

Amazing :

A new mechanism for “RNA memory”! 😱 Thrilled to share another crazy paper from the lab (can’t believe we posted 2 in 2 days!), summarizing >10 years of research: Work on transgenerational inheritance of small RNAs in the powerful model organism C. elegans changed how we think about what’s possible in inheritance and evolution, because it allows the most heretical thing: inheritance of parental responses to the environment! However, it’s still unclear whether RNAs are inherited across generations in other animals, largely because the RNA-dependent RNA polymerases that amplify heritable small RNAs and prevent their dilution in C. elegans are not conserved in mammals. In this new work, an amazing collaboration with the Rink and Wurtzel labs, we show that planarians establish long-lasting and heritable small RNA–based gene regulatory states despite lacking canonical RNA-dependent RNA polymerases and nuclear RNAi machinery (that are required in C. elegans). You might say “they are both worms…” BUT planarians are evolutionarily very distant from C. elegans (flatworms vs. roundworms, diverged more than 500 million years ago), making this particularly surprising. These are totally different animals. We find that ingestion of double-stranded RNA induces sequence-specific silencing that persists for months and survives repeated cycles of whole-body regeneration. Even more strikingly, RNAi can be transferred between animals, echoing James V. McConnell’s controversial “RNA memory” experiments from the 1970s (his lab was targeted by the Unabomber terrorist Ted Kaczynski, who sent McConnell a bomb. This and other controversies ended this line of experiments…) Mechanistically, we find that the response transitions from a transient systemic dsRNA-triggered phase to a stable, cell-autonomous post-transcriptional “memory phase” maintained by antisense small RNAs. Using a new luminescence reporter (transgenesis is currently impossible in planarians), we show that silencing spreads along the targeted gene and identify a weird type of planarian small RNAs with untemplated polyA tails. RNAi inheritance without canonical RdRPs establishes planarians as a powerful system for studying RNA-based regulatory inheritance beyond C. elegans and raises the possibility that RNA-mediated inheritance may be more broadly conserved in animals, potentially even in mammals. Here’s a video of a planarian that is treated by RNAi against β-catenin and develops multiple heads instead of just one. This is one of the phenotypes that is inherited. Another phenotype is “loss of eyes” (which we show is not only inherited across multiple regeneration cycles, but can also be transmitted between animals in transplantation experiments). Amazing work led by first authors Prakash Cherian and Idit Aviram (co-supervised by Omri and me). Please read the preprint, the link is in the next tweet, and share!

@JaneCaro Paywall

This, exactly this. smh.com.au/national/nsw/m…

EVERY Australian should know how to ID a native Antechinus from a pest mouse. I've made it easy. Same place, same view, same night. Stop killing the good guys (or in this case good girl). #ScienceNews #EnvironmentalStorytelling

Hapy Friday. Craig’s wildlife photo of the week. Meeting Indo-Pacific Bottlenose Dolphins at Monkey Mia (Shark Bay, Western Australia, 2012) #Wildlife

@Peter_Fitz Seriously, that guy is a zealot, a very hawkish nut job.

Shocking!

@Peter_Fitz Either AI or he’s a nut job.

Who are his advisers?

Engineer

Happy Friday. Craig's wildlife photo of the week. Panthera leo, late arvo. (Savuti, Botswana, 2017). #wildlifephotography #botswana