Jonathan Keller

New Science paper by Ohlert et al with a rainfall-exclusion experiment at 74 sites over the globe shows extreme droughts caused high productivity declines and low recovery, especially in drier locations with low plant diversity. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

My first dissertation chapter is published, announcing the v2.0 release of the Mammal Diversity Database! How many mammal species are there now? Updates and trends in taxonomic, nomenclatural, and geographic knowledge. academic.oup.com/jmammal/advanc…

@caryatis @KelseyTuoc "Capture all your complicated feelings about gender" is needlessly condescending.

@KelseyTuoc We could but it sure doesn’t seem like this administration wants to Better to spread the news to trans people: you CAN get a passport, just accurately list your sex as M or F, it’s okay if a government form doesn’t fully capture all your complicated feelings about gender

Instead of turning low-level passport office officials into mandatory transvestigators and leaving thousands of people passportless and stranded, we can just undo the mistake we made in the Carter administration, take sex off passports, and issue them to everyone.

Our paper on trait diversity indices is out now in PLOS ONE! Great paper to share with the trait nerd in your life. journals.plos.org/plosone/articl… @MeghanAvolio @drcynthiacchang @phylofeast @ge54783 @hobbie_sarah @drkimkomatsu

Driving the New World Screwworm to extinction using 'gene drives' could do more to improve animal welfare than eliminating factory farming globally. Hard to believe but so argues MIT biologist and inventor of the gene drive, @KEsvelt:

@IainCampbellPhD @ChrisPalmerMD For anyone else wondering about the Russian methods: "The fast consist[ed] of total abstinence from food for a period of 25-30 days."

🥼In Russia, since at least the 1950s, psychiatrists have been putting psychiatric patients into ketosis through fasting. ✈️An american psychiatrist Dr. Allan Cott travelled out to witness this first-hand and spent time with Professor Yuri Nikolaev who used this treatment with over 6000 patients. 🗨️ Dr Cott, who went on to treat his own patients in New York with fasting, wrote the article linked below reporting his observations: "A recent study of Prof. Nikolaev's statistics revealed that 70 percent of the 6,000 patients treated by controlled fasting achieved such significant improvement that they were restored to functioning. This represents an unparalleled achievement in the treatment of schizophrenia when one considers that these patients had an endless number of failures in all forms of therapy; they were all chronically ill and felt hopeless about their future." "Forty-seven percent of patients followed for a period of six years maintained their improvement." isom.ca/wp-content/upl… See also: academic.oup.com/schizophreniab… Thanks to @ChrisPalmerMD for making me aware of this on a recent podcast.

🚨ENMs differentiate Pacific from American pine martens in North America, with potential ecological displacement when the two species are in sympatry: tinyurl.com/mv4sxee2 Thanks to coauthors @Smilodontology @_danielleland @omys_omics + K. Stone + J. Cook

Maybe the real @Napc2024 was the wonderful time with friends we had along the way. Feeling so blessed to be a paleontologist

Giveaway time! As a thank you to my twitter followers (all 500 of you!) I'm giving away a paint-it-yourself green frog model in the spirit of amphibian week To enter, all you have to do is follow me and retweet this tweet. On May 11 at 8pm EST I'll draw a winner from the retweets

@lukenweaver @UMich @MichiganEarth @UMichPaleo Congrats, Luke! I hope to see you at NARLEE/NAPC!

I’m thrilled to announce on #FossilFriday that I will be joining @UMich in Fall 2024 as an asst professor @MichiganEarth and asst curator of fossil mammals @UMichPaleo. Truly a dream come true, and I couldn’t be more grateful. 1/3

@DrPardi *ephemeral signal. I'm still hesitant to do much stream of consciousness-ing on Xitter because uneditable errors are visible to so many.

@DrPardi Looks we had the same thought at the same time on two different platforms, haha. My reading suggests the marshmallow poops don't last long in cattle. So the elevated d15N would be an ephemeral ephemeral averaged over some period depending on the sampled predator's tissue type.

I wonder if dire wolves were into baby megaherbivore scat?

@DrPardi I'm on board with bioavailable fat and protein likely being higher in unweaned calf scat. I just wonder how that changes in scat derived from in utero nutrition vs milk-only vs weaning — and which of these give rise to the wolf-desired marshmallow poops.

@jonathanimals How long is "not long?" And I would expect elevated fat/protein content in individuals that aren't weaned, no?

@DrPardi "Excrement (poop) from a healthy milk-fed calf is usually yellow or light brown in color and has the consistency of caulking compound. As the calf matures (at about 30 days of age) their stools will become stiffer" per bulletin 1058 on an extension pub from U Maine.

Ranchers on Facebook be like

Another MDD update! Definitely pretty late, but a pretty big set to end 2023 and start 2024! This update broke 6600 living mammal species as well.

NEW paper on carnivoran ecomorphology!!! 🐆🐅🐈🐕🦭 Check out our review paper on how geometric morphometrics can tease apart ecomorphological signals: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rs…

You know you're gonna get a good #OpenDay experience when the UoAPalaeos show up! 😉🦖🦴🦘🐚

Check out #IMC13 poster 160, one of our @Mammalogists undergraduate honoraria recipients. Esteban identified apomorphies across species of Reithrodontomys using CT scanning.