From the archives: all the reasons why coexisting species should be similar rather than different

No time for any substantive posts for a little while, as I'm swamped with grant writing and teaching. So here's one of my favorite posts from the archives. It's about all the reasons why coexisting species should be similar to one another rather than (or in addition to) different. If you think that niche differences are all that matter for coexistence, or that the only reason coexisting species might be similar to one another is "habitat filtering", you're wrong, and you ought to read this post.

I suggest in the post that someone (not me) ought to expand the post into a provocative review paper on this topic. I'm dead serious about that, I think it would become a very widely-cited paper. And I don't even need any credit, though if you decide to write the paper I do hope you'll submit it to Oikos as a "Forum" article (again, seriously).

Okay, back to work.