Ashkaan K. Fahimipour

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.

Functional motifs in food webs and networks | PNAS When studying a complex system, it is often useful to think of the system as a network of interacting units. One can then ask if some properties of...

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...

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.

GitHub - fau-fahimipour-lab/pokemonPatterns: Simulate high-order competition on a lattice Simulate high-order competition on a lattice. Contribute to fau-fahimipour-lab/pokemonPatterns development by creating an account on GitHub.

Here is the Julia code: github.com/fau-fahimipo...

We are doing spatial patterns in class tomorrow. So please enjoy my simulation of Pokemon battles on a lattice. Pokemon attack a random neighbor and winners are based on the game's hierarchy (water > fire > ice ...). Some amazing spatial patterns emerging from 7-way rock-paper-scissors!

Jumpstart Postdoctoral Program The Charles E. Schmidt College of Science Jumpstart Postdoctoral Program aims to stimulate synergy between faculty and postdoctoral associates interested in collaborating on multidisciplinary research...

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.

Our paper made the cover of Trends in Microbiology! doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

New paper in Ecology! We show how to incorporate basically any animal behavior into ecological networks models: doi.org/10.1002/ecy....

This paper looks pretty neat!

Microbial inoculants and invasions: a call to action Microbial inoculants are increasingly used for beneficial purposes in agriculture, bioremediation, and medicine, but they can carry risks of generatin…

New open access review paper out now in Trends in Microbiology: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Really curious about any feedback you receive 👀

Congrats! Well deserved.

With sadness and respect, we honor the legacy of Dr. Jim Estes, who passed away this week. A pioneer of marine ecology, Jim’s groundbreaking work transformed our understanding of ecosystems and the essential role of keystone predators like sea otters. He is an icon in sea otter research. 🧵👇

Today's lesson: if you want to model agents with bodies, probably add physical constraints to their bones

New paper led by @janamassing.bsky.social, with @jdyeakel.bsky.social and @thilogross.bsky.social, on dynamics of cooperative bacteria: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Ours is still happening! You should apply: fau.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/FAU/de...

When animals' decision-making processes are disrupted, models predict that small mistakes like false alarms will be magnified, spreading contagiously on a grand scale

Assistant Professor, Systems Biology Apply now to join FAU on its race to excellence. For more information on everything FAU has to offer, please visit www.fau.edu/jobs. Note: Current FAU employees must apply as an internal applicant by ...

My department is looking for an Assistant Professor in the broad area of 'biological systems.' Would be great for a theoretical or quantitative empirical ecologist. Any system/taxa are ok. Come work with me! fau.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/FAU/de... #facultyjobs #ecology

This is the way I would do it

GitHub - tseemann/barrnap: :microscope: Bacterial ribosomal RNA predictor :microscope: :leo: Bacterial ribosomal RNA predictor - GitHub - tseemann/barrnap: :microscope: Bacterial ribosomal RNA predictor

`barrnap` is super good and easy for this: github.com/tseemann/bar...

This is the color of my childhood super nintendo

Yes, the apparent violation of competitive exclusion in nature has guided the search for overlooked niches and other forms of density dependence, that can explain mismatch between theory and data. We talk about all of this in the paper.

A real step toward understanding how local structure shapes global dynamics! We think this insight will be useful not just for webs, but other networked systems from power grids to epidemics.

In other words, transient dynamics of foodwebs can be broken down into contributions from building blocks! This is huge. It means measuring reactivity of a single species or a specific interaction can already tell us how much risk of violent perturbations originates from that part of the network.

We show mathematically why this is the case and why it’s unlikely that undiscovered motifs with similar predictive power exist. But then it gets interesting. We find that reactivity (short-term violent responses to perturbations) is different. Unlike stability, reactivity is rooted in small motifs.

We ask: when can you predict dynamics of a network just by knowing the dynamics of a small part of it (a motif)? In food webs, the answer is almost never. One famous exception is competitive exclusion: two consumers sharing a single resource can't coexist, precluding stability of the whole web.

New paper! (arxiv.org/abs/2503.14093) I haven’t been this excited about one in a while, and I think the theory @mhab.bsky.social develops here will be a big step forward for the field. Why? Let me explain 🧵...