Very excited to welcome 2 (!!) new postdocs to the lab this month: www.econet.works/people
ecoNetworks - People
Meet the ecoNetworks Lab
econet.works
Ashkaan K. Fahimipour
@akfbio.bsky.social
Theoretical ecologist, Asst. Professor running the www.ecoNet.works Lab 🌊 Florida Atlantic University
This paper looks impressive, also gives solid evidence for reactivity in real food webs: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Warming amplifies short-term responses to disturbance in lake food webs
Ecological communities can exhibit transient amplification after disturbance even if asymptotically stable, yet how environmental change reshapes these short-term responses in real food webs remains u...
biorxiv.org
Been wondering why NSF isn't spending most of its FY26 appropriation? A $1.5B tech initiative may be the reason. And big cuts to hundreds of research programs could be just the beginning of the bad news. www.science.org/content/arti...
Exclusive: NSF slashes research programs to support new tech initiative, insiders say
Unexpected shift in funds has meant sharp drop in grants this fiscal year
science.org
Our paper with @eplantec.bsky.social was accepted at @alifeconf.bsky.social How does criticality move from agents to populations? We study how near-critical dynamics inside individual agents shape collective dynamics at the population scale. arxiv.org/pdf/2605.01818
The National Science Foundation is terminating and suspending grants again, and at Grant Witness we need you to help to track them! 🧪 We can only identify research being suppressed by under-the-radar suspensions directly from researchers. Please report! grant-witness.us/posts/2026-0... #NSF
New Grant Disruptions at NSF - We Need Your Help to Report! – Grant Witness
grant-witness.us
Reptiles with longer Wikipedia pages tend to be bigger. The relationship is a power law with exponent = 0.85. I guess humans really like writing about big lizards? The longest article is the Komodo Dragon.
UC Berkeley Law creates new AI policy that bans AI for "conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit" or exams because "thinking remains the sine qua non of good lawyering (and of a quality legal education)." That's what I'm talking about.
New preprint: Whole-body 3D kinematics of freely behaving 𝐷𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑜𝑝ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑎 New tech from @blobology.bsky.social & others at @hhmijanelia.bsky.social, which @ispizua.bsky.social and @elliottabe.bsky.social used to gain insight into 3D structure of locomotion & courtship www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Super excited to share this new paper in Ecology, where we explore the bioenergetic trade-offs of mammalian trophic interactions and resulting selective pressures on size evolution across the Cenozoic 🦣🐅 esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
Bioenergetic trophic trade‐offs determine mass‐dependent extinction thresholds across the Cenozoic
Body size constrains trophic interactions, shaping the feasibility of species' populations. Over macroevolutionary timescales, these constraints feed back to shape selection on body size and diet. We...
esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
My friend Ben wrote this extremely cool paper that looks incredibly useful: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
The allometry of vertebrate pursuit predation | PNAS
Pursuit and evasion dynamics are a general phenomenon observed in predator–prey interactions across terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial domains. Diffe...
pnas.org
Sharing this screen grab from a friend at NIH (with permission). This is a checklist program officers have to complete before a grant can be awarded. The first question: "Is this grant All Clean/Clear in the NIH Text analysis Tool?" 🧵1/3
Yoooo new allometric food web parameters dropped: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
The Critical Role of Coefficients: Updating Allometric Normalisation Constants for Modern Ecology and Modelling
Allometry is central to a wide range of ecological research including dynamic food web modelling. Here we updated the often neglected allometric coefficients for metabolism and production, deriving n...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
That time of year again! If you'd like an example of job apps in academia or industry, here's a good resource. If you got a job in industry or academia in the last few years, please consider adding yours! github.com/RILAB/statem...
GitHub - RILAB/statements: Successful Job Applications and Grants
Successful Job Applications and Grants. Contribute to RILAB/statements development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
New paper led by my (now former!) PhD student, Dr. Stephen Hoover, showing some amazing applications of AI and reinforcement learning to food web ecology. A 🧵...
bioRxiv Ecology@biorxiv-ecology.bsky.social · 4mo agoCollective learning and manifold behaviors in predator groups https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.27.714769v1
It is one of the great joys in my life to share my lab's first successful PhD defense. Congratulations, Dr. Hoover!
My first PhD student is defending in 2 weeks and he just showed me his beamer slide deck 👉🏽😎👉🏽
If you like matrices + microbes, have I got the paper for you. Work with @janamassing.bsky.social, @jdyeakel.bsky.social, and @thilogross.bsky.social out today in @royalsocietypublishing.org! We study dynamics of cooperative bacteria without specifying a conventional model: doi.org/10.1098/rsif...
This should be an important result for ecology. Higher-order interactions are becoming increasingly popular to study, but that appears to be... not good
Tiago Peixoto@tiago.skewed.de · 6mo agoSince graphs *constrain* rather than define the interactions, it follows that graph-based models *generalize* those based on hypergraphs! For a simple reason: Hypergraphs impose structure on the interactions that graph-based models leave open, making hypergraph models the more restrictive class. 6/N
New on the arxiv: “Graphs are maximally expressive for higher-order interactions” arxiv.org/abs/2602.16937 We clarify central misconceptions in the recent literature on "higher-order networks". w/ @piratepeel.bsky.social , @manlius.bsky.social, and @thilogross.bsky.social Explainer 🧵: 1/N
Graphs are maximally expressive for higher-order interactions
We demonstrate that graph-based models are fully capable of representing higher-order interactions, and have a long history of being used for precisely this purpose. This stands in contrast to a commo...
arxiv.org
Bring together a group of researchers to collaborate at NITMB! Our Focused Research Group Awards program welcomes small groups from multiple institutions to gather at NITMB to focus intently on independent, ambitious joint research projects Learn more - www.nitmb.org/research/foc...
Paper alert! Our study about functional motifs is out in PNAS. We use food webs as an example to discuss how small subgraphs drive the dynamics in complex systems. While motifs that determine overall stability are rare, when it comes to reactivity, we show that small groups dominate system behavior.
Ashkaan K. Fahimipour@akfbio.bsky.social · 6mo agoNew paper with @mhab.bsky.social @jdyeakel.bsky.social and @thilogross.bsky.social out now in @pnas.org! We show when and why you can know something about an entire network, just by knowing the behavior of it's building blocks: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
New paper with @mhab.bsky.social @jdyeakel.bsky.social and @thilogross.bsky.social out now in @pnas.org! We show when and why you can know something about an entire network, just by knowing the behavior of it's building blocks: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
Functional motifs in food webs and networks | PNAS
When studying a complex system, it is often useful to think of the system as a network of interacting units. One can then ask if some properties of...
doi.org
NSF is open again! A few comments: *Please be patient. During a shutdown NSF employees cannot open computers or respond to emails. *Merit review will continue. However panels won’t resume until after Dec 8th. *POs remain excited and committed to advancing science and the scientific workforce.
We are doing spatial patterns in class tomorrow. So please enjoy my simulation of Pokemon battles on a lattice. Pokemon attack a random neighbor and winners are based on the game's hierarchy (water > fire > ice ...). Some amazing spatial patterns emerging from 7-way rock-paper-scissors!
Do you want to do a postdoc in animal behavior/ecology at the beach? Consider applying for our prestigious university postdoc fellowship together with me: www.fau.edu/science/post...
Jumpstart Postdoctoral Program
The Charles E. Schmidt College of Science Jumpstart Postdoctoral Program aims to stimulate synergy between faculty and postdoctoral associates interested in collaborating on multidisciplinary research...
fau.edu
Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching
You've heard of Bacon numbers, Erdos numbers. Who is it for ecology? I bet most have a Levin number < 3.