John M. Drake
@jdrakephd.bsky.social
Professor of Ecology at the University of Georgia. Views are my own. http://jdrakephd.substack.com
In eastern Ethiopia, zoonotic risk isn't only biological. Our new study finds conflict, displacement, and Saudi livestock bans push people, camels, and wildlife together in informal camel economies that sit almost entirely outside disease surveillance.
When did Congo's Ebola outbreak really start? A field study puts 500+ cases in Mongbwalu back to January, months before it was declared and earlier than any model places it. www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...
The Bundibugyo Ebola Outbreak Congo Declared In May Likely Began In January
A field study found more than 500 Bundibugyo Ebola cases in Mongbwalu from mid-January, months before Congo declared the outbreak and earlier than any model suggested.
forbes.com
A cancer usually dies with its host. Four times it hasn't, spreading between animals: in dogs, Tasmanian devils, clams, and now a catfish. www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...
Scientists Just Discovered A Contagious Cancer In A Catfish, The Fourth Known To Science. Meet The Other Three
Only four transmissible cancers are known, contagious cell lineages that spread between animals. Meet the dog, devil and shellfish cancers behind the catfish.
forbes.com
A contagious cancer is spreading through catfish in a Vermont lake, its tumor cells passing fish to fish. The fourth of its kind ever found, now tracked through a fishing app. www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...
Scientists Discover The Fourth Transmissible Cancer Known To Science
Scientists found the fourth type of transmissible cancer, and the first in a fish: a melanoma whose tumor cells spread between catfish in a Vermont lake.
forbes.com
Textbook coevolution: tightly matched species pairs. Real plant–pollinator networks: specialists visit generalists, and abundance predicts who meets whom better than trait matching does. New Big Biology ep with Diego Vázquez, hosted with Marty Martin. 🎧 bigbiology.substack.com/p/a-coevolut...
A coevolutionary conundrum (Ep 152)
When a bee visits a flower, what decides the match?
bigbiology.substack.com
What's the best way to lead a paper discussion so it doesn't die in silence? My answer, after years of getting it wrong: start with a summary, plan the discussion's life cycle, and make disagreement earn its place. New in BioScience. doi.org/10.1093/bios...
Three rules for leading a paper discussion
Silence is the sound of a seminar no one is steering, and for my first years as a professor, I was the one who should have been steering it. The course was
doi.org
This summer's cyclospora outbreak took two months to trace. Mastercard patented a tool to catch outbreaks like it in 2014. Shelved, never used. www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...
Mastercard Patented A Tool That Could Have Cracked This Summer's Cyclospora Outbreak. It Was Never Deployed
Finding the lettuce took days. Finding Taco Bell took two months. Mastercard patented a fix in 2014 and shelved it, chasing the wrong half of the problem.
forbes.com
What does living like the world's richest 10% cost the planet? Up to $5.7 trillion a year, the biggest share biodiversity loss, not carbon. www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...
A New Study Prices The Environmental Damage Of The Top 10%. For A Wealthy American It Could Be $63,000 A Year
A new study prices the environmental damage of the world's richest 10% at up to $5.7 trillion a year, and finds biodiversity loss, not carbon, is the biggest share.
forbes.com
I ended up somewhere I didn't expect: journals should scrap AI disclosure statements. Once a human answers for every claim, how the words were written is screened off. New dispatch, plus a keynote, a Long's Peak climb, and a paper well off my usual beat: jdrakephd.substack.com/p/meetings-a...
Meetings and Mountains
Dispatch #10
jdrakephd.substack.com
Dan Simberloff is perhaps best known for his work that is foundational to the field of invasion biology. He recently wrote the book “Ecological Explosions: The History of Biological Invasions and Invasion Science”, which explores the history and evolution of the field. 📖
A new study finds city lights suppress dormancy more powerfully than urban warming. In late-fall enclosures near porch lights, 41% of mosquitoes skipped dormancy and fed. www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...
City Lights Are Lengthening The North American Mosquito Season
A new field study finds that city lights suppress mosquito dormancy more powerfully than urban warming, extending biting season and West Nile virus risk into late fall.
forbes.com
Banded mongooses scent-mark to keep rival groups apart. Our new paper in #EcologyAndEvolution finds those same marks create indirect pathogen contacts 16x more frequent than direct contact. Social defenses become transmission highways. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
Networks of Indirect Contact Promote Spread of an Environmentally Transmitted Pathogen in a Highly Social Species
Using behavioral observations and network simulations, we evaluate direct and indirect transmission of the MTBC pathogen M. mungi in banded mongooses. Incorporating intergroup scent marking reveals t....
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Can ecosystems malfunction? Only when we co-opt them for our purposes. The anthropocentric commitment is ineliminable. New essay in Aeon on the hidden philosophy behind "ecosystem function." aeon.co/essays/why-w...
aeon.co
New AAM-AGU report on climate change and infectious diseases, from attribution science to public health preparedness. I was part of the colloquium behind it. A good roadmap for where this field goes next. asm.org/reports/role-of-climate-change-on-emerging-and-reemerging
New AAM-AGU report on climate change and infectious diseases, from attribution science to public health preparedness. I was part of the colloquium behind it. A good roadmap for where this field goes next. asm.org/reports/role-of-climate-change-on-emerging-and-reemerging
The test-negative design has real statistical limitations. It also recovers the right answer when checked against randomized trials. www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...
Acting CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya Called A Vaccine Study Design 'Crap.' What The Test-Negative Design Is And How We Know Whether Vaccines Measured With It Are Effective
Jay Bhattacharya dismissed the test-negative design as 'crap.' The biostatistics literature tells a different story.
forbes.com
COVID infected 17% of the Diamond Princess in a month. Hantavirus: 5% of the Hondius in five weeks. The biology explains why this outbreak won't scale. www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...
Why Hantavirus Will Not Be The Next Pandemic
An ecologist explains why the hantavirus cruise ship outbreak, while serious, will not become the next pandemic. The biology of Andes virus limits large-scale spread.
forbes.com
What if the biggest predictor of zoonotic disease isn't which species carries it, but how much we trade it? New Science paper quantifies pathogen sharing in traded species. www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...
"No Trade Is Safe." New Evidence Links Wildlife Trade To Human Disease
A new study in Science finds that the longer a mammal species is traded, the more pathogens it shares with humans. An ant ecologist's data reframe zoonotic risk.
forbes.com
Marine parasites are increasing but still vastly understudied. New book from Jeb Byers, @johnwares.bsky.social, and @blakeslee-lab.bsky.social covers coral disease to parasite evolution across 18 chapters. Out June 5 from Oxford UP in the EEID series.
How does a rodent-borne virus end up on a cruise ship? Three dead, six suspected cases of hantavirus aboard the MV Hondius. The ship left from Andes virus territory. www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...
Three Dead From Hantavirus On An Antarctic Cruise Ship. How Did They Get It?
Three dead from hantavirus on Antarctic cruise ship MV Hondius. An ecologist explains the three scenarios for how passengers contracted this rare rodent-borne disease.
forbes.com
What happens when publish-or-perish meets AI? A journal's editorial team measured it. Submissions up 42%, writing worse, and the editors had to double their staff to cope. www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...
AI Slop Is Flooding Academic Journals. A Top Journal Measured It
A top management journal measured AI’s impact on submissions and reviews. Submissions rose 42%, writing quality declined and AI reviews proved uninformative to editors.
forbes.com
New #Flu #Biotech. Airway organoids from ten wildlife species, two flu strains. All produced infectious virus — in one primate it acquired mutations shifting toward avian receptors. www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...
Miniature Airways Grown In A Lab Reveal Which Animals Flu Can Infect
Lab-grown miniature airways from wildlife reveal which species influenza can infect and how the virus adapts to new hosts.
forbes.com
Rich Sutton's much-cited essay "The Bitter Lesson" is usually read as a verdict on human cleverness: scale wins, our theories of thinking lose. Read it again. The corollary is that minds are richer than our models of them. That's not bitter at all. jdrakephd.substack.com/p/the-bitter...
The Bitter Lesson, Reconsidered
I find myself in conversation almost daily about how AI—especially large language models and agentic systems—is changing our lives.
jdrakephd.substack.com
The National Science Board has had staggered six-year terms since 1950, by design. On Friday all 24 members were fired by email. The next board meeting is May 5. www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...
Trump Fired The Entire National Science Board. Here's Why That Matters
Trump fired all 24 members of the National Science Board, the body that oversees NSF. The institutional design that built American science is at stake.
forbes.com
Add enough environmental noise to a mosquito-borne disease model and epidemics that R0 says should happen simply don't. But at intermediate noise, you get the biggest outbreaks. New paper in PLOS Comp Biol with Kyle Dahlin, Karin Ebey, and John Vinson. doi.org/10.1371/jour...
Nonlinear effects of noise on outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases
Author summary Climate change is expected to cause drastic changes in the spread of mosquito-borne disease outbreaks, both in where they occur and in their size. A key aspect of climate change is an i...
doi.org
How does a shrimp virus end up in human eyes? A new study in Nature Microbiology traces the path. www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...
A Virus From Farmed Seafood Is Causing A New Eye Disease In People
A shrimp virus called CMNV has jumped into humans, causing a new eye disease linked to handling and eating raw seafood. The virus is already global.
forbes.com
Complex epidemic models are hard to interpret. We used conditional SHAP + a neural network surrogate to identify what drives multi-strain dynamics and how those drivers interact. New paper in Scientific Reports. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Explaining complex dynamical systems using conditional SHAP analysis with application to multi-variant epidemic dynamics - Scientific Reports
Understanding and explaining the dynamics of complex systems is a critical yet challenging task. Such a challenge often arises from high dimensionality, nonlinearity, and randomness, which together ma...
nature.com
An AI agent replicated a landmark economics paper live for the Federal Reserve for $11. Then the economist behind the demo asked whether the same tool was quietly de-skilling him. My conversation with him: www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...
An Economist Lectures The Fed On AI And The Future Of Knowledge Work
Economist Scott Cunningham showed the Fed how AI agents can replicate studies for $11—and why the same tools could erode the expertise that makes research worth reading.
forbes.com
We tested 30 models for forecasting flu hospitalizations across 48 states. One auto-tuned model with a single covariate beat ensembles of 64. The key: forecast growth rates, not counts, and use national trends to predict state-level dynamics.
A single autoregressive integrated moving average with exogenous variable outperforms ensembles of autoregressive models for forecasting influenza hospitalizations in the contiguous United States
Abstract. Infectious disease forecasting is important to public health decision-making, particularly for mitigating the burden of seasonal influenza. We pr
doi.org
An AI system ran a full scientific study end-to-end, and one of its papers beat the median human submission at a major ML workshop. The economics are the real story — a draft paper for a few dollars in compute, landing on institutions that were not built for it. www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...
An AI System Passed Peer Review. The Scientific Community Isn’t Ready
An AI system automated the full arc of scientific research and passed peer review. Its creators say it could fix science's worst habits — but the risks are just as real.
forbes.com