Blogging the ESA: Friday highlights

Colin Kremer did not disappoint, giving a very nice talk in which he compiled a massive dataset on the thermal optima and tolerance ranges of different marine phytoplankton, showed that species that like it warmer live in warmer places and that species with wider tolerance live in more variable places, and just to show off built a theoretical eco-evolutionary model to predict these patterns and others. He also had the funniest joke I've heard this week about how hot it is in Austin.

Amanda Caskenette showed how stage-structured life history omnivory leads to stable food webs. Lots of ways this could be modified/extended.

It was a great meeting, scientifically and otherwise. Afraid I don't have any grand summary to offer, if only because I need to quickly check out of my hotel and move on. And the ESA meeting isn't the sort of thing that really lends itself to easy summary anyway. Hope these posts have proven useful.

I'm going on holiday now, so I probably won't be posting regularly for a couple of weeks at least. And in the fall I start teaching, so I doubt I'll ever recover the heady posting pace I was maintaining earlier this summer. But I will do the best I can.