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I still think that trait-based ecology needs population ecology | Dynamic Ecology
Eight years ago, I confessed--to my own embarrassment--that I was just not that into trait-based ecology, and tried to articulate why not. It came down to my sense that trait-based ecology had, up to that point, mostly tried (consciously?) to bypass population ecology. Trait-based ecology seemed to me like an attempt to go straight from…
Imagine spending a couple of years on a mountaintop with this Friday linkfest | Dynamic Ecology
This week: prehistoric psychopaths, book ban backfire, the light of an older heaven, whatever happened to genetic algorithms, the pros and cons of poaching, and more. Lots of good stuff this week, even though some of it is good stuff about bad stuff. A (pre)history of violence. Long, deeply researched, very interesting, but necessarily speculative.…
The best time to integrate mathematical modeling into ecology was a century ago. The second best time is right now. (updated) | Dynamic Ecology
AJ Lotka published Elements of Physical Biology in 1925. In it, he introduced what's now known as the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey model into ecology. It's known as the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey model, rather than the Lotka model, because Vito Volterra independently published the same model in 1926. Sharon Kingsland's Modeling Nature is a wonderful, readable history of…
Is the storage effect overrated? Interview with Simon Stump and David Vasseur | Dynamic Ecology
Welcome to our latest interview with authors of really interesting recent(ish) papers. Today, I'm talking with Simon Stump and David Vasseur, the authors of Stump & Vasseur 2023 Ecol Monogr. Their paper is about the storage effect--a famous, widely-studied mechanism by which fluctuations in abiotic environmental conditions over time can promote coexistence of competing species.…
One has to have more courage than Hamlet to always be guided by a Friday linkfest | Dynamic Ecology
This week: major new reporting on the accusations against star ecologist Thomas Crowther, zombie social science, unusual combinations of datasets = impact (?), how to prevent AI from taking your job, and more. A Swiss newspaper has published a major investigation into the misconduct accusations against star ecologist Thomas Crowther. I've read the linked report,…
Forget about whether ecologists argue with each other about ecology any more. Do they even talk about ecology with each other any more? | Dynamic Ecology
A little while back, I shared my casual impression that ecologists have stopped arguing with one another publicly about ecology. Recently, prompted by a conversation with a visiting speaker, I began wondering if that post was missing the bigger picture. Maybe that it's not that ecologists have stopped arguing per se. Rather, it's that they've…
This Friday linkfest is a pretty flower that smells bad | Dynamic Ecology
This week: seven centuries of pandemics, inside arXiv, all bets are off, is administrative bloat actually a thing, whales vs. LLMs vs. global warming, the funeral Claude Shannon didn't get, and more. An architectural walk down Victoria Street. As a former resident of London, I enjoyed this. Deeply informed multi-paragraph comment from Shan Kothari coming…
Don’t hate the player, hate the game (faculty job ad edition) | Dynamic Ecology
Attention conservation notice: this post is addressed at an imagined audience that might well be pretty small, if not entirely non-existent. I dunno. As a blogger, sometimes you just write a post to get it out of your head, so you can think about other things. As a faculty job seeker, you will sometimes read…
The question isn’t the quality of this Friday linkfest, it’s what depending on this Friday linkfest does to us (UPDATEDx2) | Dynamic Ecology
This week: crafts vs. LLMs, waiting your turn for the Nobel Prize, and more. The age at which Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry, and medicine did their prize-winning work hasn't budged over time, but the age at which winners are awarded the Prize has been climbing slowly but steadily. Does that tell us something…
Should I include “in prep” manuscripts on my CV? | Dynamic Ecology
Academics world-wide use a fairly standardized CV format. Note that a CV includes *everything* which is the opposite of a resume (that summarizes and highlights). If you're applying for government or industry jobs, you may need to know the difference and prepare an actual shorter resume as well. For a CV, the sections in a…
How many pop artists’ careers did this Friday linkfest kill? | Dynamic Ecology
This week: 2025 ASN awards, "conceptual purity" vs. computer science, Daniel Kahneman's last decision, self-citations (but not in the way you're thinking of), "stealth advocacy" in conservation biology, and more. Congratulations to all 2025 American Society of Naturalists award winners! Paleontologist Elisabeth Vrba has passed away at the age of 82. She did hugely influential…
Here are some of the best lines from my forthcoming book, The Ecology of Ecologists, in my totally biased opinion :-) | Dynamic Ecology
You can, and totally should, pre-order my forthcoming book, The Ecology of Ecologists: Harnessing Diverse Approaches for a Stronger Science. You should do so for many reasons, one of which is that it is chock full of good lines. Here are some of my favorites: The first sentence of the Introduction: Ecology has long been…
Friday linkfests are cultural and social technologies | Dynamic Ecology
This week: survey on EEB researchers' attitudes about scientific publishing, feminism vs. animal behavior, microplastics research needs to raise its game, a new era for bioRxiv, and more. The ESA, ASN, and I believe other scientific societies in EEB, are collaborating to survey EEB researchers' attitudes about publishing. The survey topics include but aren't limited…
Which cities originate the most Dynamic Ecology traffic? (UPDATED) | Dynamic Ecology
WordPress recently started showing blog owners data on the cities from which their pageviews originate. I had some fun looking at the numbers. Before I show them to you, take a guess: which city has been the #1 source of pageviews for us over the past year? Answer below the fold... If you guess Ashburn,…
Boring Friday linkfests are flying with big tech in the AI boom | Dynamic Ecology
This week: Carl Zimmer interview, communication vs. debate, baking vs. AI, cybernetics vs. Marvel movies, the latest on the "hot hand," Mesopotamian jokes, humans vs. Microsoft Word (but not how you're probably thinking), nerd sniping Stephen Heard, and MOAR. This might be a record-long Friday linkfest, which is funny because two days ago I thought…
You can now pre-order The Ecology of Ecologists! | Dynamic Ecology
Exciting news: you can now pre-order my forthcoming book, The Ecology of Ecologists: Harnessing Diverse Approaches for a Stronger Science, from the publisher. You'll get it in December 2025, just in time for all your Spring 2026 graduate seminar and pleasure reading needs. It would also make a great Christmas gift for every ecologist in…
On which ecological topics is the consensus opinion most likely to be dubious, overstated, or just plain wrong? | Dynamic Ecology
Recently, I interviewed Tanya Rogers and Stephen Munch about their work questioning the longstanding consensus that chaotic population dynamics are rare. Also recently, I've been thinking about work from Lenore Fahrig and her group, showing that habitat fragmentation per se (i.e. breaking up a contiguous habitat into smaller patches of equal total size, as opposed…
But how is this Friday linkfest – which so far must seem to you more like a curious sort of “literary” journal – used in intellectual production? | Dynamic Ecology
This week: CW Mills vs. blogging, game theory vs. Conclave, undergraduates as beavers, code/software availability is overrated, contrarian movie review, and more. CW Mills (and Kieran Healy) on intellectual craftsmanship. This is old, but it's so, so good. (update: link text corrected. Thank you to a commenter for pointing out that I'd somehow mixed up…
Hoisted from the comments: the ESA meeting vs. the AGU meeting | Dynamic Ecology
Following up on yesterday's post, here's another substantial, thoughtful comment we got on our recent poll about ESA meeting attendance. It's from a US-based professor who last attended the ESA meeting in 2023. It suggests that some subfields of ecology are migrating to the AGU meeting, and also that there may be trade-offs between different…
Hoisted from the comments: what the ESA annual meeting could learn from ASM meetings | Dynamic Ecology
Recently I polled y'all on whether you're going to the 2025 ESA meeting in Baltimore, and if not, why not. A couple of poll respondents provided exceptionally lengthy and thoughtful comments. They're basically blog posts, so I thought, why not turn them into blog posts? So here's an interesting suggestion from an asst. prof in…
Poll results: Are you going to ESA 2025? If not, why not? | Dynamic Ecology
Recently, we polled our readers on whether they're going to the 2025 ESA meeting. We also asked readers who aren't going why they're not going. Here are the results! tl;dr: our readers have various reasons for not attending, some of which are associated with geography and career stage. Sample size and demographics We interrupt your…
Are chaotic population dynamics common after all? Interview with Tanya Rogers and Stephen Munch | Dynamic Ecology
Welcome to our latest author interview post! Today's interview is with NOAA/UC Santa Cruz ecologists Tanya Rogers and Stephen Munch, about their recent work applying various analytic methods to big compilations of long-term population dynamic data, and concluding that chaotic population dynamics are not rare (Rogers et al. 2022, Munch et al. 2022). If that's…
The problem, for detractors, is that this Friday linkfest is not analytic or detached or cynical or knowing. | Dynamic Ecology
This week: a bird made of birds, unsuccessful successes, questioning the 6th mass extinction, modern myths, life lessons from backgammon, and more. I'm slightly late to this: Gould et al. 2025 has now been published in BMC Biology. This is the big "many analysts, one dataset" study of "researcher degrees of freedom" in ecology. I…
Are you planning to attend the 2025 ESA meeting in Baltimore? If not, why not? Take our short poll! | Dynamic Ecology
At last year's ESA meeting, I wondered "Where is everybody?" We had a good discussion in the comments of some people's reasons for no longer attending the ESA meeting. But it'd be nice to have a bigger sample. With the abstract deadline for ESA 2025 fast approaching, I thought I'd do a quick poll. Are…
This Friday linkfest is returning to orality | Dynamic Ecology
This week: David Houle vs. the "extended evolutionary synthesis," AI vs. p(research), social media vs. writing, beaches vs "beaches," and more. Writing in Oikos, Heger et al. provide an overview of philosophy of science aimed at ecologists. I liked that they provide a list of philosophers of science interested in ecology, who are willing to…
Yet another sign that I’ve gotten old: I don’t get invited to give seminars any more | Dynamic Ecology
I really enjoy giving invited seminars, for all the usual reasons. It's very flattering to be invited, even if it's a friend inviting you. You get to meet new people and see a new place. You get to spend a couple of days basically doing nothing but talking about science and academia. You get taken…
Many profs who give good talks are nervous about giving talks | Dynamic Ecology
It's all down to what they do about--and with--their nervousness. Public speaking makes many people nervous.* In my admittedly anecdotal experience, graduate students who are nervous about public speaking tend to assume that profs aren't. In fact, plenty of profs, including very experienced ones who give good talks, are nervous about public speaking!** That's because…
The post-book doldrums | Dynamic Ecology
Attention conservation notice: navel gazing. Slightly self-pitying. Also overthinking it, probably. A little while back, Brian described the 13 emotional stages of being an academic. Stage 12, kicking in sometime around 25 years in a tenure-track faculty position, was "I'm old." Quoting part of Brian's description of stage 12: I feel out of touch with…
How to earn authorship on many authored papers? | Dynamic Ecology
The existence of what I jokingly call MAPs (Massively-Authored-Papers) has been a reality in ecology for a few decades now. They are primarily the results of working and synthesis groups. A group of 10-30 people meet up a few times, build consensus, and produce a paper often with 10-30 authors. Love it or hate, this…
There’s no such thing as a Friday linkfest | Dynamic Ecology
This week: against overfitting (but probably not in the way you're thinking), new ecology group blog, absurd trolley problems, museum of internet artifacts, and more. The Aggregate is a new agroecology group blog to which anyone is welcome to submit a post. The mini-revival of the ecology blogosphere continues apace. The British Ecological Society is…
People claim to care about this Friday linkfest. But people claim to care about a lot of things. | Dynamic Ecology
This week: star ecologist loses his job over misconduct allegations, new ecology blog, science vs. cacio e pepe, climate change vs. homeowner's insurance (?), predicting baby names, pleas from symposium goers, and more. Star ecologist Thomas Crowther's tenure-track assistant professor contract will not be renewed by ETH Zurich when it expires in September, due to…
Scientific talks should be entertaining | Dynamic Ecology
Got a bit of a hot take that I'm trying on for size: scientific talks (conference talks, visiting seminars, etc.) are entertainment. Or at least, the really good ones are. Now that I've upset many of you :-) , let me clarify what I mean: Here's what I don't mean. I don't mean that all…
Reminder: No one will ever look back at your lab notebook and think you wrote too much! | Dynamic Ecology
Recently, while working on revisions on a manuscript, I wanted to check some very specific details, so I went to the folder where we have all the digitized lab notebooks, found the relevant one, and then started scrolling. I was trying to make sure of the timings of some key steps of the experiment. In…
This Friday linkfest is a hidden gem | Dynamic Ecology
This week: YouTube vs. science, answering the question vs. changing the question, congratulations to David Tilman, and more. Old-but-still-great science lectures and explainers on YouTube. Mostly to do with geology and paleontology. Surely there must be some ecological hidden gems on YouTube? Looking forward to your suggestions on this! I'm a bit late to this:…
Is sublinear growth the skeleton key to all of ecology? Or even all of biology? Interview with Ian Hatton. | Dynamic Ecology
Welcome to our latest author interview post! Today's interview is with Ian Hatton, first author of Hatton et al. (2024) Science, "Diversity begets stability: sublinear growth and competitive coexistence across ecosystems." Hatton et al. (2024) first analyze time series data on the abundances of many different species, to show that estimated density-dependence is almost always…
We should be taught what Friday linkfests sound like | Dynamic Ecology
This week: science in children's books, in praise of bureaucratic statistics, de-extinction, banshee murder, comment of the year (so far), and more. Why skyscrapers became glass boxes, the latest in what's become a little series of links around here. This link courtesy of ace commenter Shan Kothari. Seriously--click through and read Shan's comment! I love…
The mighty pomodoro | Dynamic Ecology
I was recently struggling to get my brain to come back online after a much needed break between semesters. There were things I needed to work on that were time sensitive, but my brain wanted to still be on vacation. After floundering for a bit, I realized what I needed to do: a pomodoro. For…
ASN Asilomar 2025 review | Dynamic Ecology
I attended the ASN Asilomar 2025 meeting earlier this month. It was great! Here are a few personal highlights, plus a few bigger-picture thoughts. Personal highlights I'm still thinking about Chuliang Song's interesting talk on 'observer independence' as an essential 'logical' feature of ecological models, rather like how it's essential for any model to obey…
It’s hard to explain why this Friday linkfest is wrong | Dynamic Ecology
This week: 10 years worth of squirrels, industrialized HARKing, conservation vs. wilderness, disability in ecology and evolution, Canada eats the future, and more. Plus a preview of upcoming posts! Stephen Heard reflects on 10 years of blogging. Apparently we should all get him something made of...tin? :-) AI-powered (finance) scholarship. "This experiment illustrates AI's potential…