Approaches to citizen science – an indispensable means of combining ecological research with environmental education and natural history observation – range from community‐based monitoring to the use of the internet to “crowd‐source” various scientific tasks, from data collection to discovery. With new tools and mechanisms for engaging learners, citizen science pushes the envelope of what ecologists can achieve, both in expanding the potential for spatial ecology research and in supplementing existing, but localized, research programs. The primary impacts of citizen science are seen in biological studies of global climate change, including analyses of phenology, landscape ecology, and macro‐ecology, as well as in sub‐disciplines focused on species (rare and invasive), disease, populations, communities, and ecosystems. Citizen science and the resulting ecological data can be viewed as a public good that is generated through increasingly collaborative tools and resources, while supporting public participation in science and Earth stewardship.

In Drosophila, germ cells migrate in embryonic development from the lumen of the developing gut towards the overlying mesoderm, where they enter the gonads. The gene wunen is responsible for guiding the germ cells early in this process. Here we report that the protein Wunen has two properties that allow it to use repulsion to guide the germ cells. Wunen can transform a permissive cellular environment into a repulsive one, and is expressed in the gut in a pattern that guides germ cells towards the mesoderm. Wunen shows strong similarity to the enzyme type 2 phosphatidic acid phophatase (PAP2)4, suggesting that it is involved in lipid metabolism.

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