Our new paper is out now with @SciReports! Invasive Northern Giant Hornets (NGH) were found in North America in 2019, leading to a concerted govt and public extermination effort. But where did they come from, and what led to their eventual decline? 1/7 https://t.co/sqVcdoc2wY

Thanks to @USDA_APHIS for funding; to my coauthors Telissa Wilson, Luke Tembrock, @MSankovitz , Chris Looney, Junichi Takahashi, Todd Gilligan, Allan Smith-Pardo and @Harpur; and especially to the many int'l collaborators and volunteers that made this work possible!

Tireless tracking efforts by WSDA and the public made it possible to locate and destroy four more NGH colonies in the two years following the initial introduction. Without that intervention, there might have been very little to stop these bee-hungry hornets from spreading!

The Pacific Northwest is a comfortable habitat for invasive NGH, with a suitable climate, plenty of prey and no natural enemies. So if inbreeding depression wasn't an issue, why did these populations ultimately fail? We think that govt and public intervention was key.

We also showed that the longer-lasting of the two North American populations showed strong signatures of inbreeding- but so did some of the native populations. That means that inbreeding depression probably wasn't the root cause of this invasion's eventual failure.

We sequenced those hornets' genomes to show that invasive populations of NGH in North America, despite being discovered in the same year and less than 100km apart, had two separate origins: one from Japan, and one possibly from South Korea.

An international team of volunteer and professional collaborators helped us collect 114 hornets across seven populations (two invasive, five native) worldwide. Not easy work: these hornets can sting right through a bee suit!

New open-access paper out with Gard Otis and Heather Mattila! This is a really comprehensive review of invasive hornets past and present (yes, including 'murder hornets'🤦‍♂️). Should be a fantastic resource for anyone interested in the field

Our paper exploring the potential of gene drive as a control measure for invasive wasps is out! Congrats to @YMeiborg @Nicky_Faber_ @Harpur @GregorGorjanc and thanks for giving me the opportunity to contribute to a really cool project

Incredibly excited to share my first first author pre-print! Thank you @Nicky_Faber_ , @GregorGorjanc, @BenTaylorEvo, and @Harpur for the great collaboration! Head-on to BioRxiv or come to my talk during #IUSSI2022 to know more about the use of gene drives in social wasps.

Want to gain fieldwork experience & help with a cool project on rhesus macaque sexual behaviour 🐵🍆💦? Seeking 2 research assistants to help collect behavioural data on Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico, starting early Feb 2022. Accom., travel & stipend covered. Please retweet/share!

New favourite word: meliponiculture, the keeping of stingless #bees

Very excited to be joining @Harpur's lab in October for a postdoc exploring the genetic diversity and divergence of invasive hornets!

Our results might reflect a form of genetic 'priming', where the loss of one queen puts workers on high alert for further succession opportunities. They also raise an interesting question: how much variation in gene expression is actually reflected at the level of the phenotype?

This response is really surprising, because most individuals stay in a completely 'worker-like' phenotype after queen removal. We found little evidence of succession conflict among workers, yet workers' gene expression profiles became more 'queen-like' when the queen was lost

We generated a support vector machine (SVM) classifier to classify individuals' gene expression profiles based on reproductive status. Applying this classifier to disrupted groups, we found substantial responses to queen loss— even in wasps that didn't respond phenotypically

We know that groups in this species are good at handling a queen's death. Using a simple age-based mechanism, they can replace a queen quickly and without much conflict ( https://t.co/bOfowziD0b). But what does that process look like at the level of gene expression?

Our new paper is out today in @NatureComms! We used machine learning to analyse gene expression changes in paper wasp social groups following the death of a queen. Big thanks to my co-authors @CiniAles @Wyatt1Chris @MaxReuterEvo @WaspWoman

Run out of quarantine drama? Check out our new paper on queen succession! It's like Game of Thrones if all the characters were paper wasps. Queen succession conflict in the paper wasp Polistes dominula is mitigated by age-based convention

Great to talk #taraiti and #littletern #conservation and #decisionmaking with @OSNZBirdsNZ this eve! #phdchat #seabirdconservation