Dynamic Ecology

There’s a lot of discussion right now in ecology about replicability/reproducibility (call it what you will). See for instance this recent (and awesome!) interview with Kate Laskowski. One question is whether, or to what extent, we should expect ecological field … Continue reading →

Tao et al. 2024, on microbially-mediated interactions between native and non-native plants, has just been retracted by Ecology Letters. And…wow. I’ve never seen a retraction notice like this in ecology. According to the notice, an EcoLetts editor identified “unusual repetitive … Continue reading →

Welcome to our latest author interview! Recently I interviewed Scott Peacor on Peacor et al. (2025 Ecology), “Ecological meta-analyses often produce unwarranted results”. It shows that ecological meta-analyses frequently fail to correct for non-independence of effect sizes reported in the … Continue reading →

This week: Alejandro Arteaga profile, choose your own adventure replication metric, the first nature photographer, and more. This week’s Science has a profile of prominent–and controversial–Ecuadoran herpetologist Alejandro Arteaga. Evolutionary ecologist Shikhara Bhat maintains a useful list of readings that … Continue reading →

When I was a new grad student, I was feeling pretty dejected after receiving multiple rejections in short order.* In a conversation with my advisor, he told me something that I still think of often, and that I’ve said to … Continue reading →

Tyler Cowen asks a good question about papers in microeconomics and macroeconomics, that generalizes to ecology papers: Imagine adding [a] button, to either micro or macro papers “Please rerun these results using what the AI thinks might be five other … Continue reading →

This week: 2026 ESA award winners, a retraction from Journal of Ecology, life lessons from mathematicians, the Amish, and Ethiopian distance runners, HyperCard vs. ChatGPT, game theory vs. airlines, tell me again what caused the Challenger disaster, the best version … Continue reading →

I recently had a conversation with someone during which that person indicated an area in which they felt they were lacking knowledge. This sort of introspection is helpful — it’s definitely important to recognize gaps in our knowledge and think … Continue reading →

This week: Peter Raven passes away, overestimating (one source of) biodiversity loss, LLMs vs. peer review, zombie ideas are cringe, the Trump administration vs. science, proof that I’m old, and more. Botanist Peter Raven passed away on April 25 at … Continue reading →

In Star Wars: A New Hope, Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Darth Vader “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” Vader strikes Kenobi down anyway, and Kenobi ascends to a higher plane of existence … Continue reading →

Recently, I saw a post on LinkedIn in which the author, Kevin Sanders, noted that there is a tendency for people in leadership roles to immediately change course in response to a complaint. Doing so feels like responsive leadership, but … Continue reading →

This week: RIP Desmond Morris, optimal replication, authentic vs. ‘authentic’, extreme heat waves vs. GDP vs. pseudoreplication, and more Zookeeper and zoologist Desmond Morris, author of the hugely popular 1967 book The Naked Ape, has passed away at the age … Continue reading →

Recently, I used data from ecoevojobs.net to study the geography of EEB faculty job applications in the US. In passing, I noted that all 3,409 TT EEB faculty positions advertised in the continental US + Alaska on ecoevojobs.net over the … Continue reading →

When I was an assistant professor, there was a point where I was trying to figure out how to best mentor someone in the lab and reached out to a senior colleague. That colleague had a suggestion that seemed like … Continue reading →

This week: Martin Nowak placed on leave again, is computational reproducibility overrated, LLMs vs. number theory, parenthood vs. grad school, The Sound of Music Nominalism, and more. I’m a bit late to this: earlier this year, Harvard University placed evolutionary … Continue reading →

Way back in 2013, I wrote advice on how to decide which journal to submit to. Now I want someone else to give me advice on that! It used to be that I was always quite sure about where to … Continue reading →

When I was first starting out in research as an undergrad, I worked with a grad student on a study on pupfish morphology. When I first started on the project, she explained the goal of the project to me and … Continue reading →

This week: the first review of The Ecology of Ecologists in a scientific journal, linguistics vs. prediction markets, “Poisson distribution”, great acknowledgements, a preview of upcoming posts, and more. Here’s the first review of my new book The Ecology of … Continue reading →

A while back, I showed that the typical TT ecologist recently hired in N. America moves at least 3-4 times in between obtaining a bachelor’s degree and obtaining their first TT job.* Recently, I procrastinated a bit by compiling some … Continue reading →

As I walked down the hall recently wearing corduroy pants, the swish swish swish made me think “Good thing I’m not proctoring an exam today!” That reminded me that I have thought it could be fun to assemble a list of highly specific teaching tips — not important big picture stuff, but things that are still useful to know. I’ll start with three of mine: - Don’t wear corduroys if you’ll be proctori…