The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Science

Dynamic Ecology

dynamicecology.wordpress.com

Multa novit vulpes

Science

’15’20’25
Posts
2,817 from 20 Mar 2011 to 30 Oct 2026
Posting
weekly (147 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/feed/

Latest

October 2026

  1. I have a backlog of stupid Friday linkfests that should comfortably outlast civilization
  2. Do you want me to compile data on last year’s N. American ecology faculty job market? Take the poll!
  3. No true Scotsman, doing ANOVA by hand, the hippopotamus major, and AI
  4. Dynamic Ecology, an experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern blogging industry, makes this Friday linkfest
  5. Ecology is now ready for “Big Code” and the errors it hides
  6. “[T]hrowing people into the deep end is a great way to find out if they can swim, but a poor way to teach them to swim”: Bethann Garramon Merkle and Stephen Heard on teaching scientific writing
  7. This Friday linkfest is built with next-gen adherence to our industry-leading ethical principles
  8. As a journal editor, I’ve started using Claude to help find reviewers
  9. It’s time to do away with minor revisions, major revisions, and rejection with resubmission permitted
  10. Friday linkfests apparently cause cancer
  11. Go east, young ecologist
  12. Stop publishing lists of important ecological questions
  13. When are Friday linkfests needed to answer causal questions?

September 2026

  1. Ecology vs. phonics (or, what if your entire field studies nothing but small effects?)
  2. New journal: Systems Ecology
  3. Friday linkfests come by their obnoxiousness honestly
  4. Great moments in overthinking it, blog commenting edition
  5. Is there negative frequency dependence in science?
  6. Zombie ideas about hypoxia thresholds in ecology?
  7. Stop trying to rehabilitate the reputation of Friday linkfests
  8. More data on how far N. American TT ecology hires move to take up their TT jobs
  9. Did you start your PhD by reading and thinking widely and exhaustively for a year?
  10. This is the most bullshit Friday linkfest you’ve ever seen. You’ll be actively angry it exists.
  11. The political geography of TT ecology faculty hires in the US post-Trump
  12. Diversity is variance, and Friday linkfests are built to minimize variance

August 2026

  1. Poll results on sending revised mss back out for review
  2. Friday linkfests are mostly fine
  3. The corporatization of universities in both mission and governance
  4. What if publication bias isn’t that? At least not always?
  5. One of the most prominent Friday linkfest items might be wrong
  6. As an editor, do you send revised mss back to the reviewers? (includes short poll)
  7. Spoiler: the Easter egg in my new book
  8. A wind-powered herd of beach animals merge into a Friday linkfest (UPDATED)
  9. Neither the publisher nor the editor has confidence in this Friday linkfest
  10. Jeremy decided normal Friday linkfests would not cut it
  11. Poll results on up front reference letters for faculty positions: almost everybody dislikes them, but the people who dislike them most are the people who don’t have to write them
  12. ESA 2026 reflections

July 2026

  1. Come find me at the ESA meeting to tell me what you thought of my book, and I’ll give you a signed bookplate!
  2. This is a very normal Friday linkfest which is not drawing any special attention to itself whatsoever
  3. On unrealistic extreme scenarios in ecology
  4. Poll on up front reference letters for faculty positions
  5. The decline of Friday linkfests (UPDATED)
  6. Friday linkfests look bad every 50 years or so
  7. Where to eat and drink (and run and bike) in Salt Lake City for the 2026 ESA meeting
  8. ‘Then a miracle occurs’: share your creative ways to relieve student anxiety about exams and other assignments
  9. Where to find the Friday linkfests your screen can’t show you

June 2026

  1. Rachel Germain reviews The Ecology of Ecologists in BioScience
  2. Poll results: acknowledgements in scientific papers are the least controversial topic in the world
  3. I beg you to read this Friday linkfest, even if you will be rude to me in the comments
  4. How many recent TT ecology hires in N. America got their bachelor’s and PhD degrees at the same place?
  5. The first citation of The Ecology of Ecologists! And some new reviews!
  6. Friday links: RIP Stephen Fretwell, and more
  7. When is it inappropriate to acknowledge people and organizations in a scientific paper, if ever? Take our poll!
  8. How I use Claude
  9. Friday links: RIP Peter Klopfer, and more
  10. Robert Ricklefs – in memoriam
  11. “I’ve come to see the lack of model validation in ecology as shocking and embarrassing”: interview with Peter Adler on applying modern coexistence theory
  12. Scientific answers vs. doing science
  13. Defining preregistration down
  14. Friday linkfests are 15% straight-up entertainment, and that’s OK
  15. I used to think that I could tell which TT jobs I had a really good shot at, and which TT jobs were longshots for me. I was wrong every time.
  16. Is there any such (one) thing as disturbance ecology any more?

May 2026

  1. The fall of the Friday linkfest economy
  2. Are academic labs kind of like baseball teams?
  3. It’s hard to see how all the social structures that support Friday linkfests will avoid major disruption over the next few years
  4. Even microcosm experiments can be difficult to replicate
  5. A striking retraction from Ecology Letters
  6. “Designing a statistics project to show that we ecologists are doing something wrong is not my idea of fun”: interview with Scott Peacor on meta-analysis in ecology
  7. Why did it take so long to invent Friday linkfests?
  8. On rejection and ways academia is like baseball
  9. AI and robustness checks
  10. The greatest lie that textbooks teach is that the hard part is coming up with a Friday linkfest. No, the hard part is usually coming up with a worthwhile title.
  11. On Venn diagrams of knowledge
  12. Friday linkfests never die. They merely become embarrassing.

April 2026

  1. Evolutionary biology vs. Obi-Wan Kenobi
  2. Hot potatoes
  3. I have seen the future of science. It is ruled by Friday linkfests.
  4. Which US colleges and universities hire the most ecologists and evolutionary biologists? Which hire the most relative to their enrollment? (UPDATED with additional results)
  5. You’re not being unfair if you treat mentees differently
  6. Laziness, impatience, and hubris, the basis of good Friday linkfests
  7. I’m much less sure about where to submit my papers than I used to be
  8. Backing in to experimental design: how to design experiments (and other studies) in the face of constraints
  9. Confusing the normal Friday linkfest for the exceptional
  10. How often, and how far, do N. American ecologists typically move before landing a TT job? (UPDATED with new data and analyses)
  11. Just for fun: share your highly specific teaching tips
  12. Friday linkfests are hard, and people, scientists or not, like to avoid hard things

March 2026

  1. The art of teaching is learning how to selectively lie
  2. Friday linkfests are akin to life forms from another planet
  3. The geography of US EEB faculty job applications, take 4: everyone wants to work at my alma mater, apparently. And also hates crab cakes and cheese steaks, apparently. (UPDATEDx2 with additional analysis and a very minor correction)
  4. It’s okay to try things again that have failed in the past
  5. Friday links: RIP Paul Ehrlich and Robert Trivers (UPDATEDx2)
  6. The majority of new TT ecology hires in N. America have master’s degrees–with one exception
  7. On re-evaluating sabbatical goals and doing sabbatical wrong
  8. This Friday linkfest is not LLM-friendly, but arguably it should be
  9. “If you keep your mind too open, your brain falls out”: interview with theoretical ecologist Chuliang Song
  10. What’s the best example of ecological research that’s of both great fundamental interest AND has direct applications?
  11. Large parts of the surviving Friday linkfest corpus are neglected
  12. Posts I haven’t written (yet), and posts I never will
  13. Is the peer review system going to melt down? If so, when?

February 2026

  1. What shape do you think of when you think of Friday linkfests?
  2. The geography of North American EEB faculty job applications (take 3)
  3. How to make a living writing Friday linkfests
  4. The reviews are in on The Ecology of Ecologists! (well, one review anyway)
  5. The value of close replications and how to get more of them: interview with Kate Laskowski
  6. You can get an extension on reading this Friday linkfest if you’re competing in the Olympics
  7. Visiting assistant professor positions in the US and Canada hardly ever convert into tenure-track positions
  8. Introduction section hot takes
  9. A Friday linkfest is not a thing but an aggregation of billions of decisions, each made on the basis of incentives, opportunities and desires
  10. How often should scientific results to be ‘marked to market’?

January 2026

  1. How the Friday linkfest became list slop
  2. How to make your sample size sound more impressive than it actually is
  3. Friday linkfests will eat themselves
  4. Survey on number of applicants to tenure-track ecology faculty positions advertised in N. America over the last five years
  5. A great conference to go to this summer – who could oppose unifying ecology on multiple scales?
  6. The long slow decline of this blog (which can’t be blamed on the pandemic)
  7. Friday linkfests are tools with collaborator-like affordances
  8. Confirmed: science (all of it) really did peak in 2021
  9. Science (all of it) peaked in 2021
  10. Do you use generative AI to help identify literature you missed? If so, how?
  11. This Friday linkfest will teach you how much you should suffer
  12. There’s an Easter egg in my new book
  13. A statistical summary of the teaching experience of ecologists hired into TT faculty positions in N. America during the 2024-25 job season
  14. Spread the word about The Ecology of Ecologists and get a free signed bookplate! (UPDATED)
  15. The man who mistook his Friday linkfest for the truth

December 2025

  1. Happy Hogswatch!
  2. In case you didn’t know: tenure-track faculty positions in North America ordinarily start with an initial fixed-term contract
  3. Everything I need to know I learned in Friday linkfests
  4. Is it true that you can’t get hired as a TT prof at a purely teaching-focused undergraduate college if you’ve published too much research? (UPDATED)
  5. Data on the career paths of newly hired TT ecologists who took more than six years post-PhD before landing a TT job in N. America
  6. It’s hard for tenured profs to move to a different TT job. But if you want to try, here’s some advice.
  7. This Friday linkfest is a Christmas movie
  8. I just got my copy of The Ecology of Ecologists, now get yours–for 30% off!
  9. Weird PhD defense rules are fine
  10. People believe in Friday linkfests and are willing to pay for them
  11. Students: here are protips for meeting one-on-one with visiting speakers

November 2025

  1. Black Friday linkfest
  2. Long-term trends in the number of ecology PhDs awarded in the US (UPDATED)
  3. No need to publish this Friday linkfest
  4. Should scientific papers be written more like blog posts?
  5. Are R^2 values declining in every scholarly field? And if so, what could or should be done about that? (UPDATE: link fixed)
  6. Would 2004 me get hired in today’s ecology faculty job market?
  7. This is where Friday linkfests are produced and sustained
  8. How many people are on the North American ecology faculty job market at any one time?
  9. The 2024-25 North American ecology faculty job market: same as it ever was
  10. What in the actual hell is going on with this Friday linkfest?
  11. Don’t try to follow up a faculty interview by providing a better answer to a question you flubbed
  12. Did I just make one of the most impressive forecasts in ecological history, only to bury that fact in a paper that’s not even about forecasting? (includes poll)

October 2025

  1. Friday linkfests are more important than ever
  2. Who would you nominate for the 2027 Crafoord Prize? (UPDATED)
  3. Your carefully crafted Friday linkfest? The primary reviewer read it thoroughly. The other two panelists skimmed it. Everyone else glanced at the summary.

Every year

2026 1242025 1462024 1502023 32022 112021 1152020 2002019 1972018 1992017 2242016 2122015 2422014 2292013 2702012 3302011 165