Ryan McMinds

Ever wonder what role corals play in tropical reef ecology? Find out by taking up the mantle of Team Coral 🪸! Cover the reef with colonies clad in sturdy calcium carbonate 🧪 and fend off dastardly, quick-growing algae!

What is your favorite #reef creature you’d love to see in #benthosgame?

A blue damselfly perched on the tip of a lodgepole pine branch with bokeh blending the light green and blues of the meadow, hills, and sky behind it

Not entirely sure about the nuances of photos via link, so here’s a copy with alt txt. Apparently this particular damselfly is a ‘bluet’ – azulilla, portecoupe, watersnuffel! Comparing common names across languages is a great window into how different cultures view organisms. #ArtAdventCalendar

Bluets (Genus Enallagma) Bluets from Oregon, United States on August 2, 2009 at 12:38 PM by Ryan McMinds

22 days ‘til Christmas! Damselflies – caballitos del Diablo, demoiselles, juffers – are not a group I’m super familiar with taxonomically. But I do like to be pedantic when certain close family members call them dragonflies. “Actually, …”

Pacific chorus frog (Pseudacris regilla) Pacific chorus frog from Oregon, United States on July 17, 2010 at 12:12 PM by Ryan McMinds

23 days ‘til Christmas! A tree frog – rana arborícola, rainette, boomkikker – another favorite! I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t pursue some kind of tree frog science. They are the best. Ok and those French and Dutch names are also pretty great.

Sketchy drawing of a cat, curled up and sleeping peacefully

It’s a late night, but I had to jump on the “art advent calendar” bandwagon as an excuse to carve out more drawing time ;) Thanks for modeling sweet Pika! #artadventcalendar #digitalillustration

common bracken (Pteridium aquilinum) common bracken from Oregon, United States on July 5, 2009 at 12:24 PM by Ryan McMinds

24 days til Christmas! A fern –helecho, fougère, varen – one of my favorite things. I love being surrounded by green, and nothing does that better than a pteridophyte! I hope to visit Opal Creek (Oregon) again soon, and see how it has recovered from a wildfire that occurred while I was away.

I don’t know if something similar is already a thing, but, inspired by #ArtAdventCalendar, I figured it’d be fun to do an #iNatAdventCalendar with some of my favorite iNaturalist observations.
This year I’ll use a theme to celebrate my imminent return to the PNW!

Blue Jay (Cyanocitta cristata)
#birds #nature #wildlife #photography #bluejay

La vie secrète des arbres : la théorie s’effondre L’idée est si émouvante qu’elle a conquis le public, Hollywood, et jusqu’aux plus hautes institutions  : les arbres communiqueraient via un réseau secret… Sauf que c’est faux. Les scientifiques ont...

'The secret lives of trees: the theory collapses'.
Common mycorrhizal networks exist but we are far away from making conclusions on its function. It's great to see so many people interviewed in this article and challenge a story ahead of the science.
www.epsiloon.com/tous-les-num...

Principles of experimental design for ecology and evolution Here I argue that we do not discuss experimental design, often until it is too late. This editorial seeks to begin a conversation about how and where to replicate appropriately.

I wrote (ranted) on experimental design as I was frustrated as an editor at how little guidance students were getting. I underestimated the interest in the issue: it has been downloaded 10,000+ times! Clearly it’s something we need to be talking about more. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

rmcminds's 2024 iNaturalist Year in Review Ryan McMinds's highlights and stats from 2024 on iNaturalist

Very cool!

www.inaturalist.org/stats/2024/r...

It was actually another Cousteau book; The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus – which I read in college – that really moved the needle further for me in seeing the importance of using science to help people directly, rather than an abstract love for nature itself.

The Panda’s Thumb. I loved ‘science’ before I read that, probably in early high school, but it was Gould’s books that really got me excited about science as a process and a career; an ongoing debate about theory and concepts and meaning and relevance, rather than a collection of immutable facts.

Hi on here and hi soon-to-be-neighbor (ish)!

Ahh I bought this and haven’t gotten to it yet - thanks for the reminder!

Roughly 170 years later, Siletz Tribe regains part of its coastal territory In Oregon, a coastal piece of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indian’s ancestral territory have been restored. Monday's announcement coincides with the 47th anniversary of the tribe regaining federa...

🌊 GOOD NEWS: The Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians have reacquired a 27-acre section of Cape Foulweather on the Oregon Coast, between Newport and Lincoln City. #Oregon #Oregoncoast #Indigenous #SiletzTribe #Ocean #PNW #GoodNews #LandBack #KelpForest #Kelp #Conservation

Biodiful Etude de la perception humaine de la biodiversité. Studying human perception of biodiversity.

Super fun survey for a research to understand what people find beautiful in plants and why. I learned about my own preferences too while answering it:) 🪻🌾🌼🌸🪷🌷

www.biodiful.org#/plantiful_en

I haven’t used Seek too much, myself. I usually just take photos during outings, and then upload and ID later. But I’ve had much better luck getting family members (the older ones!) to use Seek rather than the raw iNat app.

I suppose it feels odd not to have mentioned coral reefs anywhere in my bio or intro post - they have been a massive part of my life and research for the past ~15 years! But I am very happy to be shifting my focus to ecosystems closer to home, soon.

Bluesky academics, lets get to know each other! Quote this & tell me: 1) a project you are working on & 2) an odd idea/theory you aren’t working on but keep thinking about

1) about to move across the country with a baby and dog
2) has anyone thrown those echinoderm-killing ciliates at a coral yet

… problem is that each coral, or the ecosystem as it currently exists, might have a ‘tipping point’ that can be estimated, but it’s impossible to predefine a specific tipping point for a single variable that corresponds to collapse in everything that we find meaningful about the system.

… to be vulnerable to further rises in temperature. So the whole system is more fragile and closer to a more permanent collapse. So the initial message was oversimplified, and we lost credibility because we didn’t communicate that complexity. In the context of the current thread, I guess the …

… have higher tolerance for that particular stressor. So it looks like everyone was wrong to panic. But the problem is that the replacement corals are not functionally equivalent. They don’t provide the same ecosystem services, they are more vulnerable to other stressors, and they also continue…

… but when 3/4 of the reefs in a massive ecosystem are devastated in a single event, the messaging impact is later dampened because coral cover, as a whole, recovers rapidly within a couple years. And the replacement corals don’t fit the predictions as well, because they …

The main point that I gleaned from that article (perhaps filtered through or misinterpreted due to my own frustrations), is that the current message is too simplified, even if its urgency is warranted. E.g. we talk a lot about loss of coral cover or how ‘corals’ have these warming thresholds, …

A map of flight paths emanating from breeding colony of gulls, with this caption: Early on, LifeWatch noticed something odd. Most gulls were making daily trips to Mouscron, a city on the French border 65 km away. They went to investigate and found the birds bingeing on discarded snacks at the Roger & Roger potato factory.

Today in relatable science: Gulls making a mysterious daily trip that turned out to be to a potato chip factory

Those are both really great; thanks

… They didn’t publish the interview, and I decided I wasn’t qualified to take those kinds of interviews anymore :/

… didn’t feel comfortable saying ‘yeah definitely the corals will all die if we cross 1.5°’. But like - they’re dying right now, in very large, sudden events? And extinction is permanent? So it’s urgent regardless? But I guess they thought my perspective wasn’t interesting…