🍁 Alex Smith 🍁
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alexsmithants.bsky.social
🍁 Alex Smith 🍁
@alexsmithants.bsky.social
8.3K followers 5.7K following 770 posts
Assoc. Prof of #Biology at UofG, Guelph, ON, Canada. Inspired by the #Biodiversity in ACG, Costa Rica. #Ecology, #Evolution, #Entomology

Opinions my own & do not overlap with my employer.

he/him
www.malexsmith.com
www.youtube.com/@Alex_Smith_Ants
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alexsmithants.bsky.social
🍁 Alex Smith 🍁 @alexsmithants.bsky.social · Jul 27
🧪 🪲 🌋 🌡️

When are things too hot to handle? Our new paper on insect thermal tolerance across elevation in @pnas.org nas.org suggest perhaps not too far in the future. @gdfcf.bsky.social sky.social @alexandreloureiro.bsky.social

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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photo of dorsal view of 15 species of staphylinid from ACG photo of an array of tubs containing ACG staphylinids with light in the background photo of strangler fig standing in cloud in ACG photo of co-authors Smith and Loureiro in ACG
Reposted by 🍁 Alex Smith 🍁
shoshanahjacobs.ca
#HigherEd Admin: we're growing enrolment by 6000 students.

Collegial governance: reads about it in the news.

news.ontario.ca/en/release/1...
Ontario Newsroom
news.ontario.ca
October 9, 2026 at 1:58 PM
Reposted by 🍁 Alex Smith 🍁
drandrewthaler.bsky.social
Seems important, re: deep-sea mining:

Spontaneous combustion of metal sulfide minerals and implications for seafloor massive sulfide mining: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Spontaneous combustion of metal sulfide minerals and implications for seafloor massive sulfide mining - Scientific Reports
Scientific Reports - Spontaneous combustion of metal sulfide minerals and implications for seafloor massive sulfide mining
www.nature.com
October 8, 2026 at 4:21 PM
Reposted by 🍁 Alex Smith 🍁
ecoevorxiv.bsky.social
Life-history traits do not always evolve in response to changing thermal environments

doi.org/10.32942/X20...
August 4, 2026 at 10:01 PM
Reposted by 🍁 Alex Smith 🍁
liamdougherty.bsky.social
New pre-print led by the amazing @patricepottier.bsky.social - very little evidence for evolution of life history traits in response to warming, even in insects. Rapid adaptation is unlikely to mitigate the continuing impacts of climate change 🔥🔥🔥
ecoevorxiv.bsky.social EcoEvoRxiv @ecoevorxiv.bsky.social · Aug 4
Life-history traits do not always evolve in response to changing thermal environments

doi.org/10.32942/X20...
August 7, 2026 at 12:17 PM
alexsmithants.bsky.social
Could also be a nascent administrator’s cover letter. 🤔
October 8, 2026 at 4:29 PM
Reposted by 🍁 Alex Smith 🍁
catelli.bsky.social
"I don't understand how anything works, I refuse to accept the explanations, and I know how to fix it all."

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
ANALYSIS | How anti-COVID activism injected life into Alberta's separatist movement | CBC News
They fought vaccines and public health restrictions. Over time, their push for freedom shifted to independence.
www.cbc.ca
October 8, 2026 at 4:23 PM
Reposted by 🍁 Alex Smith 🍁
davidelfstrom.bsky.social
Yeah, that coughing and "something going around" discussions is COVID. That nice low summer is over.

Toronto's wastewater viral load is showing a consistent upward trend in COVID-19 and nearly zero levels of influenza A & B and RSV.
wwater.ca/Ontario/Toro...
Most recent wastewater virus levels for Toronto, with date ending week ending September 27, 2026, showing a clear upward trend in COVID-19 and minimal for influenza and RSV.
October 7, 2026 at 8:27 PM
Reposted by 🍁 Alex Smith 🍁
zo-e.xyz
okay so this anecdote in Margaret's obituary has me crying because this is exactly what it's like being in tech and trying to anticipate failures and having men basically tell you you're being hysterical and then you have to fix it later
"the Lauren error": One day, her daughter Lauren, then four years old, was playing with the command module simulator at the Instrumentation Lab when she somehow activated a pre-launch program, called P01, while the simulator was in midflight - which crashed the simulator altogether. Hamilton created a program add-on in the technical documentation warning users not to launch P01 during flight. She also proposed a software fix to prevent the error happening during a real mission, but she was overruled on the grounds that the highly trained astronauts were never going to make that same mistake. Yet during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, that's exactly what happened: Jim Lovell inadvertently launched P01 during the flight, causing the on-flight navigational data to vanish. Hamilton and her team were called in to solve the error, and after that her proposed changes were integrated into the program. This was an early example of "defensive" programming, the
October 7, 2026 at 10:16 PM
Reposted by 🍁 Alex Smith 🍁
jonathanmladd.com
RIP Margaret Hamilton. Lead software engineer for the Apollo program. Here she is standing next to the code she wrote to send humans to the moon. Barack Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.
news.mit.edu/2026/margare...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margare...
Margaret Hamilton. Lead software engineer for the Apollo program. Here she is standing next to the code she wrote to send humans to the moon.
October 7, 2026 at 11:52 PM
Reposted by 🍁 Alex Smith 🍁
jamespirruccello.com
news.mit.edu/2026/margare...
Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development for the Apollo program, dies at 90
Margaret H. Hamilton, a profoundly influential computer scientist best known for leading the software engineering team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab during NASA’s Apollo program, died at age 90.
news.mit.edu
October 7, 2026 at 11:52 PM
Reposted by 🍁 Alex Smith 🍁
snoopy44.bsky.social
The Woman Whose Software Guided the Apollo Missions Has Died www.nytimes.com/2026/10/07/o...
Margaret Hamilton, Whose Software Guided the Apollo Missions, Has Died
Margaret Hamilton, the first female programmer hired to work on the space project at M.I.T., was 90.
www.nytimes.com
October 7, 2026 at 11:53 PM
Reposted by 🍁 Alex Smith 🍁
bnewbold.net
ah damn, RIP Margaret Hamilton.

she took safety-critical software engineering seriously, and got people to the moon and back.

news.mit.edu/2026/margare...
old photos of a woman (Margaret Hamilton) standing next to a tall stack of books (printouts of Apollo space mission software source code)
October 7, 2026 at 9:09 PM
Reposted by 🍁 Alex Smith 🍁
nytimes.com
Margaret Hamilton, who led the 100-person team that wrote the onboard software for the Apollo missions, has died.
Margaret Hamilton, Whose Software Guided the Apollo Missions, Has Died
Margaret Hamilton, the first female programmer hired to work on the space project at M.I.T., was 90.
nyti.ms
October 7, 2026 at 11:30 PM
Reposted by 🍁 Alex Smith 🍁
jenteo.bsky.social
New story on the Avian Hybrids blog!

How convincing is the evidence to split the Gentoo Penguin into four species? (bis)
avianhybrids.wordpress.com/2026/10/07/h...

Based on the Communications Biology paper by Daly Noll and her colleagues | #ornithology
How convincing is the evidence to split the Gentoo Penguin into four species? (bis)
New evidence to support a taxonomic change.
avianhybrids.wordpress.com
October 7, 2026 at 9:42 AM
Reposted by 🍁 Alex Smith 🍁
gorizaola.bsky.social
Our recent @currentbiology.bsky.social paper (www.cell.com/current-biol... on how beauty bias in butterflies can affect public attention and alter conservation priorities, featured @environment.theguardian.com
October 7, 2026 at 6:45 AM
Reposted by 🍁 Alex Smith 🍁
jhancsalazar.bsky.social
Happy to share that the last chapter of my dissertation is finally out in Evolution! 🦎⛰️ I'll share a longer thread soon about what we did and found.

Huge thanks to all my coauthors: @jblosos.bsky.social, @juvelas.bsky.social, Steven Poe and Adam Algar
doi.org/10.1093/evol...
Repeated evolution of high-elevation occupation in tropical lizards
Abstract. Since Darwin and Humboldt, researchers have sought to understand how species adapt to elevation. Although tropical reptiles are typically most di
doi.org
October 6, 2026 at 6:07 PM
Reposted by 🍁 Alex Smith 🍁
caseywdunn.bsky.social
Our new tool corpus makes biodiversity literature searchable by AI agents via MCP, with provenance to source text and figures. With @shchurch.bsky.social , Felipe Zapata, and Maciej Mańko. In @currentbiology.bsky.social - www.cell.com/current-biol... Code: github.com/caseywdunn/c...
Extracting AI agent-accessible data from biodiversity literature with corpus
Church et al. present corpus, a tool that converts a library of biodiversity literature PDFs into a searchable knowledge base of text, figures, and references. It connects to an AI agent through a Mod...
www.cell.com
October 6, 2026 at 4:39 PM
alexsmithants.bsky.social
🧪

🪰 🐜🪲🐞🦗🐛🦋🪳🦟

Some correspondence this week in @pnas.org about assumptions underlying how many species of insect.

Here's our reply to Fattorini and Borges "Conditional CIs and sensitivity analysis characterize uncertainty in global insect richness estimates"

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
three panel image of fig tree at 1000m on Volcan Cacao at the top, on the bottom right a Malaise trap at 1300m on Volcan Cacao and on the bottom left the microgastrinae parasitoid wasp Snellenius robertoespinozai named for much missed parataxonomist Roberto Espinoza. last paragraph of the response reading: In summary, because we were aware of the problem of propagated uncertainty in multistep estimation, we designed the study to rely on the absolute minimum number of inferential steps, capped by a sensitivity analysis across upscaling reference groups where quantitative uncertainty could not be estimated. The range of our estimates of global insect richness is wide, but even the lowest estimate—14 million species—is more than twice the previous consensus estimate. Moreover, our assumptions about collection methods, DNA barcode-based species delimitation, and biogeographical comparisons were—at every turn—far more likely to bias our estimates downward than upward.
October 6, 2026 at 1:59 PM
alexsmithants.bsky.social
Here’s #DougTheDog loving his frisbee. A very good boy!
October 6, 2026 at 1:19 PM
Reposted by 🍁 Alex Smith 🍁
walks30.bsky.social
34 years ago the Hip released Fully Completely, one of their best

The Tragically Hip
“At The Hundredth Meridian”
The Tragically Hip - At The Hundredth Meridian (Official Video)
YouTube video by TheTragicallyHipVEVO
youtu.be
October 6, 2026 at 12:41 PM
Reposted by 🍁 Alex Smith 🍁
cdnhistoryehx.bsky.social
On this day in 1992, The Tragically Hip released their third studio album Fully Completely.
One of the greatest Canadian albums ever made, it sold 200,000 copies within three months. It reached #1 in Canada, eventually selling over one million copies for Diamond Status.
The image is the album cover for "Fully Completely" by The Tragically Hip. It features a vibrant, surreal artwork with multiple figures in dynamic poses, surrounded by musical instruments and abstract elements. The background includes a mix of red, purple, and green hues, with the band name "The Tragically Hip" at the top and the album title "Fully Completely" below it.
October 6, 2026 at 11:15 AM
alexsmithants.bsky.social
Fantastic weather, fantastic people and a fantastic time last week with #invertebrate students in #ZOO3700 last week in the #Guelph #DairyBush #highered 🐞🐛🐜🦟

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Three panoramas of students sampling in the dairy bush forest Infrequently cut field and frequently cut field Images four sessions of invert class around a maple tree That germinated in 1785 in the guelph dairy bush forest Photo of four insects Found in the dairy bush field
October 5, 2026 at 7:14 PM
Reposted by 🍁 Alex Smith 🍁
notincleveland.bsky.social
And stop calling the Epstein survivors "young women," too! Some of them are young women now, but they were girls then!
October 3, 2026 at 8:05 PM
Reposted by 🍁 Alex Smith 🍁
shoshanahjacobs.ca
Stop calling them boys
October 3, 2026 at 7:11 PM
alexsmithants.bsky.social
It’s #DougTheDog enjoying his frisbee!
October 3, 2026 at 10:41 PM