In keeping with our overall objective of communicating about the state of ecological science without publishing opinion papers that clutter up the journals, we have decided to set up this blog. The focus of our posts will be to address specific issues in ecology that affect ecologists, scientists in general, the public, politicians, and the planet. We do not feel infallible and we welcome dissenting opinions and clarifications to our comments.
Charles Krebs is a vertebrate ecologist who has studied small mammals for 50 years and has written several textbooks on ecology, the ecological world view, and rodent population dynamics. He is retired from teaching but not from science, and spends part of the year in Vancouver at the Biodiversity Institute of the University of British Columbia, part of the year in Canberra at the University of Canberra Institute for Applied Ecology, and part of the year doing field research in the Yukon.
Judy Myers is an insect ecologist who has worked extensively on biological control of insect pests and weeds, and the population dynamics of the western tent catepillar. She has investigated with her colleagues virus diseases of forest insect pests and their impacts on population dynamics. She is retired from teaching but continues to work actively in the Biodiversity Centre at the University of British Columbia.
More? More, please?
Keep up the rants, I think I might find it therapeutic. It is desperately needed.
Looking forward to reading more. In Canada, we desperately need to push back against the politics of our current government.
This is fantastic, thanks so much. I am co-teaching a new graduate course called “Foundations in Ecology, Evolution and Behavior” and one of the final assignments is to construct a poster on what we call a “big” question in one of the disciplines. The students (all the first-years are required to take the course) all then collaborate on a single poster with what they consider to be the 15 (last year) or 10 (this year) big questions overall. It was a really great exercise, in my opinion at least. This set of rants is exactly relevant to our goals, and I loved the entry on fundamental questions.
We’d like to invite your blog to join our Canadian science blog aggregator: Science Borealis (http://scienceborealis.ca). Please go to the site and follow the instructions under ‘Join Us’. I think you’d fit well into both the ‘Biology & Life Sciences’ and the ‘Science Policy’ categories. Look forward to seeing your submission!
Great to find you two blogging! Have you thought about ranting on Twitter? It would be great to find you there too.
Deb
Kudos!
Hi Dr Krebs,
Just reading over ch.2 of ecological methods 3rd ed. p.39 incorrectly labels graphs as small populations.
Regards
Daniel
Daniel – thanks for the correction, now fixed in new file on web. Charles Krebs