Chris Martin

Just returned from an incredible deep sea cruise with Dahiana Arcila and Ben Frable at Scripps - and we found a deep sea #anglerfish!!!!!!! 😱😱😱🤯🤯🤯 Dream come true since I was 6 years old 🥲. Stay tuned for more highlights of the catch (from a single midwater trawl at 600 m!). 🧪 #evo #evosky 🐟🐠

Three years ago, my dad said that all fish are the same shape. Out of spite, I decided to draw all 478 families of bony fish listed in Nelson 2016. There's still some stuff I need to edit and some fish I want to redraw but, after 985 days, I finished my big dumb fish project last night.

I made a quick plot of the data from ecoevojobs.net over the last four years. 2026 faculty job postings are way down compared to previous years.

#SaveTheAcademy of Natural Sciences and reopen its public museum! It holds one of the largest collections of South American freshwater fishes in the world including type specimens that I and my peers described and entrusted the museum to curate for perpetuity. @acadnatsci @savetheacademy @drexeluniv

📣 📣 📣 UPDATE: The 2026-2027 list of faculty and postdoc positions in ecology and evolutionary biology is out! Be sure to check out this active and helpful community run resource! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

We at Skype a Scientist are deeply troubled by the closure of the Academy of Natural Sciences. We urge you to contact Drexel University Leadership and Academy interim leader Trish Wellenbach to urge them to reopen the museum. President Merlo president@Drexel.edu Trish Wellenbach tw958@drexel.edu

You're gonna need a bigger chart

I (and pretty much everyone in biomedical research) would love nothing more if we never had use another animal in our experiments. But our ability to model organ-level biology is nowhere close to that.

Red Lip Bat Fish I swear they are real

Apparently people are sharing this far and wide on social media, which I think is horrible. This could cripple ICE operations. PLEASE do not share this.

NIH's Aug 2026 proposal would scrap exact scores and percentiles for three broad bins (top = top 25%). With funding rates at 5% or lower, too much then rides on administrative discretion. It devalues peer review and is a deterrent to engage. Tell NIH before Oct 13. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

New preprint led by amazing undergrad @ogolwala.bsky.social! Within ~10,000 years, sperm traits have diverged between trophic specialists in this young radiation of pupfish. Hybrids are fertile, but show transgressive sperm kinematics and reorganized integration. With @fishspeciation.bsky.social.

We are looking for an **assistant professor in ecology** in our integrative biology department, a vibrant dept focused on ecology, evolution, organismal biology, with several linked centers including natural history collections! PLEASE APPLY! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05489

One day, it will be on the front page of every newspaper, and the fact that I don’t even have to specify what “it” is says it all

I put a call out for mural walls yesterday and I got a lot of VERY good walls for projects of a variety of scales. Unfortunately I have only sold enough shirts this summer to cover 2 of those walls. This means more people need to buy shirts. Thems the breaks. More shirts more art. SquidFacts.Net

“It could take at least a year for OMB to respond to the comments and amend the draft rule”. Friends, this is a direct result of our collective action. The OMB Rule that would require political review of grants has prompted at least 50K comments. Thanks to all who commented, and you still can.

1. A bit of evolutionary biology. I'm really intrigued by a new perspective piece from Steve Frank that explores connections between how natural selection creates systems that generalize and recent work in machine learning about the surprising capabilities of massively overparameterized systems.

This is the NIH grant screening disfavored words list published by Nature: media.nature.com/original/mag...

lol

Let's Streisand-effect these people. Here's the editorial that somehow merited calling the cops. Read and share.

Twenty five years on from Dolph Schluter's book "The Ecology of Adaptive Radiation" that reshaped the way adaptive radiation was studied, this review revisits key questions raised to evaluate the progress made over the past quarter century, 8 of which remain unresolved...🌍🧪👇

impartial scientific research is the enemy of despotism and so naturally vought wants to destroy it

Feeling like it's officially #pupfishweek, so here's another one of my favorite videos but this time from the field! I took this video of a cutely colorful male #Cyprinodon beltrani while swimming in less than a meter of water in Laguna Chichancanab during our last field season with … 🧵👇

NIH funded peeps: This is insane and coming for us.

I'm on NPR "All Things Considered" today talking about the near-extinction of the Devils Hole pupfish this past year and the federal agency management chaos that ensued! 🐟😈🕳️ www.npr.org/2026/05/07/n...

Move over "cellar door", "distinctively ornamented ichthyolith" is the new most beautiful phrase in the English language

Same energy:

Exactly 💯 I did the same with our funded NSF climate change adaptation grant in 2025

You ever try to code switch at work and fail? 😂

I hate when fantasy films I made a long time ago begin to come true in real life.

AOC all the way!!!!!! Siemens high school science fair award winner, too ☺️

you, a naive fool: i do believe there are some things the nytimes won’t both sides the nytimes:

Omg! Huge shoutout to San Francisco, CA! Ocean Beach, you crushed it! 🌊

If we want to motivate voters of all ages, we have to try something different. I propose kindness, authenticity, and unapologetic progressivism. People power over entrenched power. That’s the future.

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted. What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards. Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

The boycott of OpenAI(ChatGPT) has now surpassed 4 million. We’re also seeing many small businesses (and even some mid-sized companies) cancel their subscriptions. One of the most amazing things over the past year has been watching consumers remind big corporations just how much power they have.

love when democrats talk about kitchen table issues as if trans people and immigrants don’t have kitchen tables 🙃