A Shiny app to help understand why some treatment levels matter more than others for common nonlinear functions in biology. I found that this helped me develop better intuition about experimental design. bsky.app/profile/mrid...

A Shiny app to visualise and define Bayesian priors for common nonlinear functions in biology: growth responses to nutrients, light, temperature, and toxins. Lognormal priors are often a good choice but are horribly unintuitive. So I made this to visualise them and the curves that arise from them.

We can help make your experiments better! 🌊🧪🌎 🧮➕📏 @raviranjan.bsky.social and I have been thinking about how to improve experimental design. We have a preprint with maths, simple rules-of-thumb, and R code and Shiny apps ready to help you. 

 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... (1)

For all you birdwatchers, here's an interactive plot showing species whose colours cannot be accurately shown on screens. Courtesy @moultano.bsky.social , who very kindly shared his data compilation. www.mridulkthomas.com/undisplayabl...

It's either going to be +36 or -12 °C today. (Interesting visualisation problem - wide gradient with fine resolution needed for a part of it)

Look, if you accidentally mislay your giraffe, maybe you should consider a different line of work. Something that doesn't rely on attention to fine detail. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

This is a gorgeous piece. There is simple beauty around you that we cannot yet show. One of my most vivid childhood memories is of seeing flameback woodpeckers for the first time. They are an intense, luminous gold - framed in red, black and white - that I couldn't believe existed in real life.

Do better, French and German birds. Czech birds have left sexism in the past, learn from them. besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Universities need to teach students practical subjects like phytoplankton ecology. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

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...