Our fly room is up and running!

After *quite* a long wait our fly lab is now ready for use!

Excited to get some projects going at last!

New preprint!

Our new preprint looks at how differences in decision-making by researchers influence the results they report. This paper had 100s of researchers independently analyse two datasets and report their findings. Surprisingly, this resulted in a nearly continuous set of reported effect sizes across a wide range!

What to do about this problem is less clear – maybe multiple analyses per dataset? Model averaging? Have multiple researchers analyse each dataset?

Each of these solutions is far from perfect and it will be interesting to see how the field reacts to this paper.

New students!

Two new MRes students start in the lab this week!

Ian Green – who will be identifying genes that change in expression in response to cold in Drosophila.

Willow Legg – Willow will be looking at phenotypic plasticity in sun beetles (Pachnoda marginata).

A big welcome to both!

New incubators arrive!

After a long wait, my new incubators arrived yesterday! Now we just have to wait until the new insect room is ready for them…

TED-ED video!

Last week we (me and Susana Freitas) published a short video examining why some animals reproduce without sex for TED-ED.

Thanks to all the TED-ED team for making such a cool animation!

ASAB at Bangor

Last week we (myself, Richard Holland, Katherine Jones, Graeme Shannon, Kirsty MacLeod, Ewa Krzyszczyk, Caroline Bettridge, and Alexander Georgiev) hosted the Spring ASAB (Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour) conference at Bangor University.

It was great to hear the exciting work being done by so many students and great to be involved in organising a conference I first attended in 2009 (though it did make me feel very old)!

It was also great to attend a conference in person – long may it continue!