These days, so many men concerned about climate change want to correct what I say and how I say it. They tell me that having conversations doesn't work, accurately communicating the science isn't effective, and loading up on fear is the only way to spur action.

My people -- truth matters; the neuroscience is clear that fear paralyzes and our brains are wired to move forward towards something positive rather than negative; and the only way for humans to work together to fix anything begins with a conversation.

Having that conversation is the essential first step to helping people overcome the barriers in their mind preventing them from acting. And when we do so, honesty, authenticity and compassion are absolutely key: we must come from and help the people we're speaking with connect with the love for the people, places, and things we care for.

Why? Because love - not fear or hate - is the only long-term reason why any of us will be able to keep fighting for a better future.

https://www.ted.com/talks/katharine_hayhoe_the_most_important_thing_you_can_do_to_fight_climate_change_talk_about_it?language=en

The first paper from our Ocean Genomes lab!!!

Toward genome assemblies for all marine vertebrates: current landscape and challenges

https://academic.oup.com/gigascience/article/doi/10.1093/gigascience/giad119/7590551

Here's my poster for #ABACBS2023!

We compared different #eDNA taxonomic classifiers across different simulated datasets of 12S and 16S metabarcoding data.

MMSeqs2 generally 'wins' closely followed by BLAST.
With exclusion databases it becomes apparent that standard Kraken2 produces many, many false positives. With some families like snappers, all classifiers can't assign more than ~30% of sequences.

(not shown is COI, where MMSeqs2 and Mothur are working best)