Finishing your PhD and entering the postdoctoral world? Congratulations! In an ode to “The First Year Experience of a Grad Student” I provide a narrative of my first-year experience as a postdoctoral fellow and lend a few tips for what I found made me successful.
Eco-evolutionary dynamics are well studied but the term is applied to a wide variety of effects and interactions. Yet comparing these different types of studies on eco-evolutionary dynamics will inform on how this field can move forward, which is precisely the aim of a recent British Ecological Society cross-journal Special Feature. Here I discuss a study published within this Special Feature that investigates how an eco-evolutionary feedback loop between population dynamics and fighter expression affects the evolution of alternative reproductive tactics.
The current generation of graduate students are poised to become the leaders of their respective fields by the middle of the century. It is their ideas that will be of greatest influence in advancing the field of ecology in the decades to. So, what are their ideas? How do they think long-term research will provide new insights in 10, 20, 30 years? Maybe in 30 years we’ll find out our projections were wrong, but reflection won’t be possible if we don’t first scan the horizon.
“Improv helped us realize that virtually every profession can benefit from being viewed as a type of performance. And as with any performance, your ability to reach and hold the audience’s attention rests on your performance skills.”
I provide here examples of situations when it is understandable or acceptable to decline peer reviewing a manuscript.
“Where do I go from here?” is one of the hardest, but most frequent, questions a graduate student faces during their PhD program and many of us turn to our mentors to determine the right direction. Unfortunately, as many students know either from personal experience or online reading, mentors come in a variety of competencies (and even with the best of mentors, one person can only provide one perspective). It is critical for students to learn the art of mentoring themselves. So where do we begin with DIY mentoring?
Our experiences of the natural world are increasingly mediated, which is why I use citizen science to bring ecology students outside and learn naturalist skills
: All quantitative research methods are based on models. All statistical tests, all summary statistics, all raw data, and even our ideas are models. Failing to appreciate the ubiquity of models leads to misunderstanding the epistemology of science itself. Conversely, realizing that all science is an act in model building leads to more creative and robust inquiries, and, ultimately, better inference.
Meditations and discoveries on cleaning one’s desk
Latest “Reflections of the Past” post. This is a series by Hari Sridhar who interviews authors of well-known papers in ecology. Posts in this series are archived at reflectionsonpaperspast.wordpress.com.
Over the last century, a predominant number of biological investigations utilized either model systems or laboratory populations for experimentation. While model organisms are extensively studied from diverse perspectives (genetics, behaviour, life-history, etc.) it would be imprudent to assume new organism-oriented discoveries are behind us. Most recently, Stewart et al. (2018) revealed the existence of a new male type in the laboratory model organism, the bulb mite Rhizoglyphus robini.
This is a series of posts entitled “Reflections on the Past”, a series by Hari Sridhar. Hari interviews authors of well-known papers in ecology for first-hand accounts of the ins-and-outs of high-impact research. Posts in this series are archived at reflectionsonpaperspast.wordpress.com.
We are in great need of an integrative framework that allows ecologists to predict life history strategies from functional traits that inform on population performance. The aim of a recent British Ecological Society cross-journal Special Feature is to link organismal functions, life history strategies and population performance. Here I discuss a test published within this Special Feature that shows how a recently developed dynamic energy budget population model can be used to infer from life history traits the population performance of bulb mites (Rhizoglyphus robini) in the lab.
Are you about to embark on your graduate school journey? Exciting times indeed! Here’s a few tips on what I found made me feel successful during my first year.
The bright spots approach aims to assess the performance of managed ecosystems by comparing certain ecological outcomes, while controlling for other known drivers of the outcome via a statistical model; in effect, ranking sites based on their residuals from the fitted model. While the method has the potential to reduce bias in comparing different sites, the resulting assessment may come with high variance.
This is a series of posts entitled “Reflections on the Past”, a series by Hari Sridhar.
“In 1998, James Estes, Tim Tinker, Terrie Williams and Dan Doak published a paper in Science providing evidence to suggest that killer whales were behind the sudden declines in sea otter populations in western Alaska in the 1990s. Estes and colleagues also showed in this paper that the otter decline had, in turn, led to an increase in sea urchin numbers and consequent deforestation of kelp forests. Eighteen years after the paper was published, I spoke to James Estes about the observations that motivated this study and what we have learnt since about the killer whale’s role in this system.”
Posts in this series are archived at reflectionsonpaperspast.wordpress.com.
Migration bottlenecks provide researchers with fascinating opportunities to study animal movement ecology. Advances in technology enable the dissemination of migratory ground-speed data in relation to independent variables such as weather conditions and time of day. I spent a week in the region of Calabria, Italy monitoring raptor migrations over the Strait of Messina bottleneck. In a single field day over 1,382 migratory raptors were counted; approximately 80% of these were European Honey Buzzards (Pernis apivorus). This post identifies Europe’s most important migratory raptor bottlenecks and highlights the threats facing migratory avifauna.
I teach only half of the course material on theoretical ecology, and allow the other half to be discovered and learnt by students on their own via various group activities.
If you’re a grad student who has wondered if your ecology Ph.D. will be useful outside of academia, check out these lessons learned after a summer in Washington, D.C.! Ecologists interested in the types of science policy opportunities for our field will want to check out these lessons as well.
The paradigm in fieldwork of travelling to remote locations, extracting data, and leaving to publish findings without engaging with local communities – particularly Indigenous ones – must be challenged. As students on a long term research project, we distributed a survey to better understand what local people wanted from us. Community engagement needs to be more than purely research-focused initiatives, and engagement with Indigenous peoples can require specific and separate efforts.
No spoilers here. The villain in The Avengers: Infinity War understands ecology pretty well and we should consider his motivation as an ecologist. We need to talk a lot more about how to slow population growth.
The lag that many graduate students experience between gathering feedback on their ideas and publishing leaves them vulnerable the unethical tactics of scooping “hawks”. How much do we need to worry about this? Game theory can help us decide.
This is a series of posts entitled “Reflections on the Past”, a series by Hari Sridhar. Hari interviews authors of well-known papers in ecology for first-hand accounts of the ins-and-outs of high-impact research. Posts in this series are archived at reflectionsonpaperspast.wordpress.com.
Simple “comparison of means” experiments … train our brains to think that this is the goal of science – to discover if an effect exists.
The process of putting together a conference session is strange at first, but what you soon realize is that what you are actually doing is making a science mixtape for all your closest friends. And if you want that mixtape to shine, you need to make sure your session is diverse, inclusive, and focused.
Rapid Ecology 