Matt Rockman

@wormsrock.bsky.social

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Evolutionary zoology & quantitative genetics Biology Professor, New York University

Still from 30 Rock: Frank explains the rule of threes to Trace. Text says THE RULE OF THREES
Worm biologists performing karaoke exactly as you would expect
Norwegian flag at the back of a ferry traveling in Sognefjord; snowy mountains in the distance. Fjord is 1000m deep here!
Huge crowds marching for democracy, 7th Avenue at 55th Street
Looking down at the street from the ninth floor.
A view of an assembly memorializing the 115th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. The building in the center was the site of the fire
A one story L-shaped building in San Antonio Texas. The right side is 1950s International Style including signage reading Rico’s Products Co., but the left side is clad in preposterous fake white stone and somehow the whole thing is impossibly beautiful? The Tower of the Americas sticks up from behind the building, and power lines cross from middle left side to top right corner.
Google streetview image of a UPS truck, with images stitched together badly so that it reads “worldwiddwide services” and synchronizirhonizing the world of commerce”
New York City “I Voted” sticker
James Turrell sky space at the friends’ school on East 16th St. a glowing blue square in a glowing pink ceiling
Crowd with flags and signs in Times Square, looking North
A view of Sokehs Ridge from the northwest edge of Kolonia. A thatched-roof shelter is at right. From the foreground the land drops down, over some banana plants, toward the lagoon. Sokehs Rock, a basalt monolith 200m high, looms in the distance. The picture doesn't show the endemic serehd lorikeets or pwehk flying foxes, but they're in there.
Biogeographic ancestral area reconstruction, with pie-charts at the nodes of a phylogeny indicating estimated marginal probabilities for each region. This phylogeny excludes a bunch of species whose distributions reflect human activity and whose pre-anthropogenic-movement distributions are unknown. The main result is that there's a lot of red (Oceania) in the deeper nodes of the Elegans Supergroup. There's other colors too, to be sure.
A phylogeny of 70 Caenorhabditis species, based on protein sequences for 2955 genes. Adjacent to each species name is a set of colored circles indicating which continents each species is known from, with Remote Oceania included as its own region. Names of the nine species found in Pohnpei are bolded.
Figure 4 from the preprint. At left, pictures of six different kinds of rotting thing that we extracted worms from, with their Pohnpeian and scientific names. At right, two graphs related to estimates of the number of worms that colonize each rotting thing.
Cloudforest on top of Kupwuriso; tall kotop palms (Clinostigma ponapensis) covered in epiphytes.
A view toward the ocean across forested mountain scenery, with palms in the foreground. This is on the slopes of Kupwuriso.
A view of Nan Madol, the temple precinct and seat of government of Pohnpei under the Saudeleur dynasty. The city was built about 700 years ago from massive columns of basalt. The image shows one corner of the Nandauwas, with 25-foot high walls built Lincoln-log-style from the basalt columns. In the foreground is one of the canals that form the streets of Nan Madol.
Gorges. Here’s Lucifer Falls in Treman State Park. Water flows over layers of shale, tree-topped cliffs on each side.
The Statue of Liberty!
Protesters marching south on 5th Avenue, Empire State Building in the background
A two-panel figure. Each plots worm phenotypes for four different genotypes, the four combinations of two mitochondrial and two nuclear genomes, presented as norm-of-reaction plots. In the set of four genotypes at left, the matched pairs (mitochondrial and nuclear genomes found together in nature) fare worse than the mismatched pairs. At right, the two matched pairs fare better. In each case, there's really dramatic mitonuclear epistasis.
A two-panel figure. At left, the size of worms grown at 20 degrees is plotted as a function of the specific combination of nuclear genome (color) and mitochondrial genome (x-axis). The nculear genome explains most of the variation but the mitochondrial genomes also matter, in a kind of idiosyncratic pattern. In the right panel, it's the same thing for worms grown at 25 degrees. The patterns are different, in a way that implies a three-way interaction between temperature, nuclear genome, and mitochondrial genome. In the manuscript, Tuc shows that yeah, p < 10^-16.
A two-panel figure. At left, an unrooted mitochondrial gene tree, highlighting the 8 haplogroups of C. elegans. Strain ECA1298 is off on its own long branch-- a distinctive mt genome found only in one spot in Hawaii. At right is a principal components plot of the nuclear genome, each strain's point colored by mitochondrial haplogroup, showing that the nuclear genome population structure echoes the mitochondrial pattern.
Orange purple sunset behind the west village
Protesters marching north with diverse signs demanding due process
100s of people at the Stand up for Science rally in Washington Square Park. They’re holding signs in front of the Wash Square arch
Kyiv Maidan, people walking around on Ukrainian Independence Day, 2019.
A stack of 30-year-old file folders full of handouts from Elisabeth Vrba's course, Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory. On top of the stack is part of page 1 of the syllabus, printed on blue card stock for some reason.
A view of the tip of a gill structure, showing multiple lamellae from the side. The whole structure tapers to a point, where we see lots of extra-long cilia.
a close up of the back of a chiton, showing parts of four valves-- the shell plates that cover the animal's dorsal side.
Two round tardigrade embryos inside the ghostly outline of a tardigrade -- the shed skin of their mother
A tardigrade compressed under a coverslip on a microscope slide. It paws at some algae, each movement causing coelomocytes to bounce around like beach balls.
View of the FDR in lower Manhattan with sign announcing the imminent start of congestion pricing
A glass bowl containing seawater, a few broken barnacle pieces, and a very long nemertean worm, which looks like a thread. A red sharpie marker at top gives a sense of scale.
A cream-colored worm with a pair of brown longitudinal stripes, seen from above, crawling through the field of view. It starts at the top, turns to its left, and then its front end heads out of view. But the rest of the body keeps trailing behind.
video shows a busy scene, with a complicated branching structure -- a hydrozoan cnidarian colony -- as the backdrop for two small worms swimming in the foreground. These are the gastrotrichs.
Head end of a gastrotrich. It looks like a small gray worm.
Acoel flatworm crawling over a barnacle and rock.
A few seconds of video of the shimmering surface of a flatworm.
A gray half-circle entering the frame from the left: this is the front end of a flatworm. There are a few dozen golden circles scattered across it, each a unicellular alga. For this image the animal is on a microscope slide, compressed by a coverslip.
Title page of David L Stern’s perspective paper from 2000, “Evolutionary developmental biology and the problem of variation.”
A barnacle-encrusted bottle of cognac
An oblong, sausage-shaped sac inside the body wall of the tunicate contains irregular dark orange inclusions - these are the calcium oxalate and uric acid concretions inside the renal sac. The whole thing pulses as the adjacent heart tube pushes a wave of contraction along its length.
Close up of the bottom of the bowl, showing crustacean larvae (nauplii) flitting about, each with a red eye spot.
The interior of a tunicate, flayed open to reveal the pharynx. But also there are a bunch of wriggling bugs, most of them densely studded with black embryos on their backs-- these are the copepods.
A tunicate, with its dirty tunic
A brown shape fills the image-- the tunicate. A small also-brown thing glides across it-- the flatworm.
A rotting wood structure exposed at low tide. The tunicate Molgula manhattensis is visible as brown lumps on the wood. In the background, residential buildings. At right, a student's hand holding a collection bag.
Microscopic image of lots of cells-- some round, some oblong, some squiggly, all different life stages of a unicellular eukaryote closely related to the malaria parasite, living in harmony with its tunicate host
Lots of wriggling trematodes. Most are cercaria, a life stage with a tail attached to a flexible head with two eyes. They're stretching their heads weirdly. There's also a redia, another life stage, which is a big bag of developing cercaria. The cercaria will leave their snail host to infect a fish or bird, where they will develop into flukes.
Looking north at the Washington Square Arch, with 1 Fifth avenue behind it and a fountain in front of it. NYU Biology is a block to the right from this scene, on Washington Square East.
closeup view of the apical organ. A dome of cilia enclose a cluster of tiny round calcium carbonate stones, the statolith, which is held in place by other cilia. To the right, out of focus we see four of the eight developing comb rows.
Video of a cydippid stage of Mnemiopsis leidyi, about one day old. The animal is heart-shaped and has flappy bits (developing comb rows), two developing tentacles covered in sticky colloblasts, and a dome-shaped thing at its aboral end -- the apical organ -- that contains some tiny round calcium carbonate bits (the statolith).
Panel of buttons in an elevator. Press the number for your floor. Or, press the mysterious buttons that just say YES or NO.
A very busy plot showing positive-frequency-dependent genotype-frequency trajectories for Medea elements under C. elegans-type androdioecy. There are separate trajectories for males and hermaphrodites because males arise only from crosses and are therefore more heterozygous (Y axis) than hermaphrodites. This turns out to make paternal-effect peel elements much more effective gene drivers than maternal-effect Medeas.
Flowers jockeying for space and pollinators at the edge of a vernal pool.
A picture of the paper "An estimate of the mutational damage in man from data on consanguineous marriages." Photos of the authors, Morton, Crow, and Muller, below. I have this image handy because I sometimes teach this paper.
Photo of a decrepit ship in a tropical lagoon, a rainbow above and a dramatic cliff behind. The ship is the Microglory, the cliff is Sokehs Ridge, and the rainbow is overkill but the picture is not edited- that's just what it looked like.