Ashkaan K. Fahimipour

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...

Ah yes, the door to @esajournals.bsky.social headquarters obviously

How much of the tree of life did you eat? Phylodiet scores a meal by phylogenetic diversity: type what you ate and it builds the dated tree of the organisms in it, from ~3,300 edible eukaryotes, back 2 billion years. Last night's dinner, below. 🧵 mjhickerson.github.io/phylodiet/app/phylodiet.html

Editorial board is a stacked ecologist roster

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Penultimate? FY26 NSF grantmaking update One month ago (8/4) New grants: 4310/7761 — 55.5% of avg. Obligations: 4.10/5.08 billion — 80.7% of avg. Now (9/7) New grants: 6,144/10,857 — 67% of avg.* Obligations: 5.97/7.49 billion — 80% of avg. *avg. from 21–24 grantwitness.org/nsf/analyses...

Neat result, very consistent with some of our work in deep RL foraging: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Still time to apply!

NSF set to issue lowest number of new grants in four decades. $1 billion being withheld. So much for my grant application.🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Very cool looking preprint (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...)! And extra cool to me since it seems some of our earlier theoretical predictions are consistent with their experimental results (doi.org/10.1098/rsif...).

NSF releases some NOFOs for some directorates. Staff say they've been held up at OSTP for a while.

Looks interesting 👀

Theoretical ecology is awesome because you just have a dream one night and then wake up and do some calculations from like Calc 2, and then a paper kind of falls out of you.

I'd be grateful if you could circulate to good students: I'm recruiting PhD students for Fall '27 in the areas of species interactions and animal behavior. Ad here - jobs.rwfm.tamu.edu/view-job/?id...

Very excited to welcome 2 (!!) new postdocs to the lab this month: www.econet.works/people

This paper looks impressive, also gives solid evidence for reactivity in real food webs: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Oh

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...

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

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.

90% of grant progress reports

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/...

My friend Ben wrote this extremely cool paper that looks incredibly useful: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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/...

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...

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 👉🏽😎👉🏽

This should be an important result for ecology. Higher-order interactions are becoming increasingly popular to study, but that appears to be... not good

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

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.

Very cool-looking paper! Pseudo-persistence through reactivity.

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.

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...

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.