About

Welcome to Dynamic Ecology! Below are some answers to questions you may have about this blog.

Whose blog is this?

I’m Jeremy Fox, an Associate Professor of Population Ecology at the University of Calgary. Previously, I did a B.A. (not B.Sc.!) at Williams College, a Ph.D. under Peter Morin at Rutgers University, and a postdoc at the NERC Centre for Population Biology at Imperial College London.

I’m broadly interested in population, community, and evolutionary ecology–those bits of ecology that–in my view, anyway!–have population dynamics at their core (hence the name of this blog). For information on my research, please visit my lab homepage.

What sort of posts do you write?

This blog is basically a “brain dump”. It’s where I post ideas, commentary, advice, and humor that I think might be of interest to my fellow academic ecologists and their students, but that for whatever reason I have no immediate plans to publish in a peer-reviewed paper (I have done posts that eventually developed into peer-reviewed papers)

Didn’t you used to have another blog?

Previously, I blogged for the journal Oikos. That blog was similar to this one, and most of my posts for that blog, along with the comments, are archived here. Here is a post explaining why I chose to set up my own shop.

Who else writes this blog?

Brian McGill and Meghan Duffy. They’re both awesome.

Why do you blog?

Here is a short video interview I did back when I was with the Oikos Blog, explaining why I blog.

Here is an interview I did with another ecology blogger, touching on how I got into ecology, why I do the sort of ecology I do, and more.

What’s the comment policy?

I don’t have one. Basically, I like freewheeling debate, so pretty much anything goes as long as it advances the discussion and isn’t personally insulting or patently offensive. Here’s a much longer discussion of what I think makes a good comment thread, and my approach to comment moderation.

What does the header tagline “Multa novit vulpes” mean?

It translates as “The fox knows many things”. I have a post about this, which asks whether I am a fox in name only.

Those header images are beautiful! Where are they from?

The header images are cribbed from various sources, and in many cases I can’t be confident that my source is the original, or be sure about copyright. The sources are ottawasun.com (red fox hunting mouse), fox-wallpapers.info (arctic fox hybrid), komodoempire.deviantart.com (arctic fox eyes), critical-gaming.com (Fantastic Mr. Fox), mangelsen.com (swift fox), caninest.com (grey fox), metro.co.uk (fox stalking beagle). I have a couple of sources still to add.

Are you speaking for your employer or anyone else?

No. All the views expressed on this blog are entirely my own, not those of any other person or organization, including my employer. The same goes for the other folks who blog here.