Just presented at #EntSoc25! All about the benefits and challenges of using autonomous camera sampling and machine learning to study plant/pollinator interactions.

Also, my reading this morning brought me to this paper which has this spooky (cute) figure that I wish I had found before Halloween

Reading a really nice paper on equilibrium (or lack thereof) in ecology and it has one of the most ecology coded passages I've read in a while:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

…is ESA doing a course on vibe coding for ecology?

Also, CUDA is incredible. 15x speedup on object detection inference tasks, 90 minutes to 6 minutes to churn through 3,500 images. I strongly suspect that the bottleneck is now reading the images from a usb thumb drive. Look at this Bombus x Delphinium interaction I was able to find as a result!

Hooray! Finally got some some object detection up and running on my dataset from RMBL this summer. Still a lot of work to do to clean this up but soon, all of the pollinators shall be detected!

#ecology #openscience #pollination

This project was a major milestone for me after years of not thinking I had what it took to be a scientist. Huge thank you to all of my collaborators and everyone in the Brosi Lab for helping make this paper a reality. This paper would not exist without all of their help.

In conclusion, we offer two new theories to explain why nestedness is seen so often in mutualistic networks in nature. Directly tying theory to empirical observations remains difficult, though there are some admirable attempts (see Valdovinos et al. 2016).

Consider the case where a single pollinator starts to visit a new plant. This represents one new mutualistic interaction but will introduce several new competitive interactions (one for each other pollinator that visits that plant).

When competition is included, however, the most stable configurations end up being those in which species double down on the species that they share with the most competitors.

This makes intuitive ecological sense as species want to maximize their resource gain and avoid spreading their efforts too thin. We have seen some evidence for this in bumble bees at RMBL.

In the absence of intraguild competition (i.e., competition between plants and competition between pollinators), the most stable configurations are those in which generalist species focus their efforts on their partners that they share with the fewest competitors.

Fuzzy

#mycology #mushrooms

One of my favorites to find in Colorado. Hawks’s Wing! Or, Sarcodon imbricatus. Some people report the taste is bitter apparently but I’ve never found that to be true. I like to fry it with soy and put it on top of soups/ramen.

#mycology #mushrooms

Just found one of the first resumes I ever put together in 2013. I don't think I actually sent it out to any companies, but I should have. It would have probably been more effective than the actual, qualification-less nonsense in my actual resume...

#resume #hiringadvice

Some mycological wonders to brighten up everyone’s Wednesday. All of these were found in western WA #mycology #mushrooms #ecology