Out today in @cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social our paper “Second Thoughts about First Principles in Biology.” www.cell.com/trends/ecolo... . We are in favour of first principles approaches in biology but we think that we need to do better in how we use them.

1 week left to apply for scholarships ! If you are based at an institution in an ODA recipient country (e.g. Brazil, South Africa, India, Mexico; full list: tinyurl.com/5dv7vvs8), you can get all expenses covered to attend the summer school in Lausanne for a week.

Our new review article “Calibration, Sensitivity and Uncertainty Analysis of Complex Ecological Models—A Review” now online and freely available in #EcologyLetters dx.doi.org/10.1111/ele.... #Ecology #EcologicalModelling #SensitivityAnalysis #UncertaintyQuantification 🌐

R 4.6.0 has implemented a %notin% operator - it's the opposite of %in%. So our code need no longer be blighted by !(x %in% y) Thank you #R devs!

We need more long-format journals. Brevity is good. But there are topics that would benefit from more space than tight word limits allow. And there's a cost to summarising methods or shunting them to appendices. For science to be reproducible, we need to be able to clearly describe what was done.

Claude seems fantastic at writing Shiny apps. You can in principle go from knowing nothing about how to create one to having one online in minutes (obviously, best to spent more time checking it!). Fabulous for sharing ideas quickly and an excellent accompaniment to papers and lectures.

Our colleague needs your help keeping a 1,200-year dataset alive! If you have botanical expertise or are based near Arashiyama, Kyoto — DM her or email [email protected].

It has been brought to my attention that not everyone has seen every birdwatcher's favourite video. (Sound on) www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY43...

Paul Ehrlich is remembered for a bet that he lost, and a population prediction that went wrong. Many environmental scientists seem to remember him warmly for 'raising awareness'. They should not. His legacy is both stupid and vile beyond imagination. (1)

Big effort, exciting results - our paper on the constraints of thermal limits in tropical insects is now out in @nature.com! 🦋🐝🪰🪲🦗 @ecoresearchzoo3.bsky.social @biologie-uniwue.bsky.social @uni-wuerzburg.de

One of the few paternalistic opinions I hold is that gambling should be banned in most places and times. Instead, it's taken over US sports. Prediction markets are now turning every aspect of life into a gambling opportunity. I hope societies are able to resist. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

I have written my first R-package for feeding experiments! BayesFR allows fitting functional responses by providing dynamical prediction models for use in #brms. Includes models for classical type 2 and type 3 responses, and also prey mortality or predator interference (more to come) #Rstats (1/3)

I was once asked by a US immigration officer what I worked on. He tried to stop me soon after but that was clearly just him being polite. He really wanted to know about phytoplankton, I wasn't going to deny him.

Referendum proposal: governments must publish the DAGs underpinning all policy proposals.

How does salinity affect growth? @fryderheim.bsky.social & I developed a model to describe this, and he's parameterised it for >100 species. We can now model how salinity changes should affect population & community dynamics! Check out his poster on Monday afternoon at #OSM26

New preprint out! 🌊🧪🌎 🧮➕📏 Temperature preferences estimated from lab experiments and species distribution models agree reasonably well! This increases my confidence in our ability to forecast range shifts. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/n

Sian Henley and I have just had a NERC grant funded, looking at variation in Souther Ocean diatom traits under fluctuating light regimes. If you are a fearless experimentalist interested in working with us as a postdoc on this 3 year project, come chat with me at Ocean Sciences in Glasgow next week!

Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Bergen has a vacancy for a postdoctoral research fellow position within climate change ecology. Work with @vvandvik.bsky.social and the @ipcc.bsky.social. www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

A paper on temperature effects on fish, written by Bass Dye. Nominative determinism strikes again! (Interesting-looking paper too!)

"Flying squids [...] cover distances as long as 30 m above the surface of the water" How have I never heard of these things?! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanes...

Phytoplankton empiricists: anyone have a good protocol (or reference) for treating fungal contamination in stock cultures without re-isolating? 2026 continues bringing all the icks...

My time in academia is at an end. I'm not sure what comes next, but what a privilege it's been getting to work with smart, idealistic, and kind people every day to understand our world a little better.

Happy to see our analysis on scaling up temperature x nutrient interactions from populations to communities published in Ecological Monographs @esajournals.bsky.social! 📈

How do temperature and resources interact to shape both population and community growth rates? We have a model that makes predictions at both levels! And we test them with experimental data from the lab & field. This one has been gestating for years and we're rather proud of it. Give it a read.

Looks like an exciting network! There are so many interesting, important questions that we could address well with some more co-ordination.

Our data analysis guides for multiple stressor/driver research 🌊 @christinamcgraw.bsky.social @sineadcollins.bsky.social @mridulkthomas.bsky.social @chrisecornwall.bsky.social + Peter Dillingham, Steeve Comeau, Sam Dupont aslopubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Hi everyone! I'm co-organizing this retreat/workshop June 15-19 for those looking to get started in mathematical/computational modeling of biological processes. Location is a beautiful farm in NC. Please share with students and others who want to build modeling skills. Interdisciplinarity welcome!

The genus Paulinella is apparently the only known case of a photosynthetic eukaryote that did NOT receive its chloroplast from a primary endosymbiosis more than a billion years ago. It repeated the trick independently ~100 million years ago! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline...

Tree-climbing crocs that prey from above? Of course it's Australia. phys.org/news/2025-11...

Thank you @ecologicalsociety.bsky.social's Theoretical Ecology Section for the Best Theory paper award for our @science.org paper on eco-evo emergence of macroecological scaling! esa.org/theory/award...

Need to think more about the headline claim, but this proposes a very nice new thermal performance curve (TPC) function with appealing properties. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

🌊 New paper out today: Assessing the interaction between ocean alkalinity enhancement 🚢 and phytoplankton🦠 in an Earth System Model 🌐 #mCDR #OAE #ESM bg.copernicus.org/articles/22/...

Interested in resource competition theory, mutualism, spatial patterns or temporal dynamics? I'll be giving a talk in the IITE online seminar series tomorrow summarizing our recent work on microbial cross-feeding that includes all these ingredients.

A beautiful piece about bird migration. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Our experimental design workshop had ~40 participants from >15 countries! @raviranjan.bsky.social and I focused on refining ideas, estimating parameters precisely, leverage in linear & nonlinear regression, and using simulations to compare designs. Presentation & R scripts in next post:

I'm developing a grad course on experimental design (study design generally) & data analysis in biology. What topics, papers, etc. do you think are most important? If you teach something similar, I would love to hear what/how you teach (if you are willing to share a syllabus that would amazing!).

@raviranjan.bsky.social & I are teaching a free online workshop with on experimental design for environmental scientists on the 23rd. We'll focus on using simulations to evaluate how well different experimental designs help achieve your goals. Please sign up & share! forms.gle/MZTxeQs4UpMr...

Timely as always, @xkcd.com xkcd.com/3140/

Discovered that SAR11 has proteorhodopsin and wanted to declare it an honorary phytoplankton. It produces ATP in light! But this only slows death in the absence of carbon and does not increase growth otherwise. Is it a photoheterotroph? Chemoheterotroph? Is photomixotroph a word? I'm baffled.

Lunar eclipse over the waters

I don't really understand this yet but it's some of the most interesting and bizarre biology I've ever encountered. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The call for our 2026 Postdoc Cohort is now open. We offer 4 full-time positions. Apply until August 24th. hifmb.de/jobs Please spread the word. #postdoc #jobsinscience #marinebiodiversity #antarctica @awi.de @hillebr1.bsky.social @ibaums.bsky.social @thilogross.bsky.social @merenbey.bsky.social 🦑

My first Amanita muscaria! Spotted this weekend by @joelyndelima.bsky.social

A good day to celebrate the bitingly hilarious lyrical genius of Tom Lehrer. Retired from his relatively short musical career...to teach maths at Harvard, MIT, and UCSC. Worked briefly at Los Alamos and the NSA. And mercilessly satirised every system he encountered. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvhY...

I will never understand how this became so influential. Instead of using either evidence-based teaching or tried-and-tested methods (both defensible), we somehow ended up with fad-based education.

Just learned about the existence of shape-constrained GAMs and they seem rather useful! In species distribution modelling: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Code: fundacion-azti.github.io/gam-niche/sh... Original paper: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

A couple of forthcoming workshops on experimental design and data analysis, taught by @christinamcgraw.bsky.social, Peter Dillingham, @sineadcollins.bsky.social, Sam Dupont, and me.

Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement (OAE) is a marine CO2 removal method that uses alkaline material to increase the storage capacity for anthropogenic CO2 in seawater. Kiyas investigated how hydroxide (NaOH) induces taxonomic shifts in plankton. She found: 👇 🌊 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

For what it's worth, I've added myself to this list for now. In part because I'd need a visa and I'm not sure I'd be granted one. It's a complicated story related to having short-term contracts and work permits.

Breaking news in Switzerland www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...