I work in protist microcosms. A typical experimental unit is a glass jar with 80 ml of nutrient medium, which I inoculate with bacteria, protists, and perhaps other microbes. Then I (actually my research assistants) follow the resulting population dynamics. Several...
I published my very first paper in Oikos ( Fox and Smith 1997 ). It was part of my undergraduate honors thesis. I spent the summer before my senior year working with David Smith , Josh Van Buskirk , and another undergraduate at David's field site off of Isle Royale in...
Sometimes, scientific debates get resolved in favor of one side or the other. Modern birds are descended from dinosaurs, and those who thought otherwise were incorrect. Sometimes, debates get resolved in favor of some intermediate or synthetic position. The neutralist-...
Over the past couple of years Oikos has published a bunch of really thoughtful and interesting papers on the use of maximum entropy ('MaxEnt') in ecology; see the special feature in the April 2010 issue and references therein. The debate over MaxEnt, both in Oikos and...
Ecologists (and lots of other people) often say that the world, or some feature of it, is 'random' or 'stochastic'. But what exactly does that mean? One view is that randomness is real; some features of the world are inherently probabilistic. Quantum mechanics is the...
Species' phenotypic traits are widely thought to (and often do) predict their abundances (e.g. Harpole & Tilman 2006 ). The most abundant species at a given site should be those with traits that make them well-adapted to the biotic and abiotic conditions at that...
Ecological and evolutionary systems--populations, communities, ecosystems, species, food webs, whatever--only occupy certain regions of parameter space. That is, the systems we observe are only a small subset of those which could possibly exist. Individuals organisms...
Basic research grants, awarded to individual investigators or small teams of investigators in order to pursue specific projects, are increasingly difficult to obtain. Applications have been increasing and success rates decreasing for years at the US National Science...
As I've discussed elsewhere , the level of generality with which we conduct ecological research is up to us (well, usually ). We can choose to focus on the forest, or the trees. And studies of different levels of generality complement one another-- you don't fully...
Disclaimer: This post is about something I've been struggling with for a while, and I was so pleased when I finally figured it out that I decided to post on it. Plus, I haven't posted in a while so I figured I'd better post something . Whether these motivations are...
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