Mridul K. Thomas

I'm developing a grad course on experimental design (study design generally) & data analysis in biology. What topics, papers, etc. do you think are most important? If you teach something similar, I would love to hear what/how you teach (if you are willing to share a syllabus that would amazing!).

Sure thing! And it's great that you're developing this - I think there's a real need that's broadly felt. Ravi and I taught a short online workshop on this just a couple of days ago and there was a fair amount of interest.

To replicate, or not to replicate – that is the question: how to tackle nonlinear responses in ecological experiments A fundamental challenge in experimental ecology is to capture nonlinearities of ecological responses to interacting environmental drivers. Here, we demonstrate that gradient designs outperform replic...

On pseudoreplication, I remember the Hurlbert - Oksanen exchanges in the early 2000s being useful.

And following Cottingham et al. 2005, there's @jaytlennon.bsky.social 2011 enviromicro-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1... & Kreyling et al. 2018: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

The need for unrealistic experiments in global change biology Climate change is an existential threat, and our ability to conduct experiments on how organisms will respond to it is limited by logistics and resour…

On this one aspect of experimental design (multiple driver studies), I'm part a working group that has written a couple of relevant papers in addition to the one Ravi mentioned:

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29476630/ &
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This looks great! Looking forward to trying it out.

GLEONetwork

Thanks! There isn't a page specifically for this workshop or the series, but the general GLEON page is here: gleon.org

Perhaps more usefully, here are recordings of all previous workshops in the series:
www.youtube.com/@gleonetwork...

Thanks, Thomas!

This @gleonetwork.bsky.social workshop series is aimed at limnologists but it's open to all. We are targetting PhD students and postdocs across the environmental sciences.

Poster for 90 minute workshop on HOW TO DESIGN BETTER EXPERIMENTS, by Mridul Thomas & Ravi Ranjan. Details: September 23rd 16:00 CEST ; 14:00 UTC Description: Experimental designs can make or break an experiment. A good experiment has a clear goal and efficiently uses experimental resources to achieve that goal. In this workshop, we will review what experiments are for, basic and advanced principles of designing experiments, and how to use simulations to evaluate designs before actually doing the experiment. We’ll do a moderate amount of coding in R and so experience with this would be helpful but is not required. We intend to have small-group discussions to help participants develop their own experiments, and encourage participants to think of a specific question they would like to answer with an experiment.

@raviranjan.bsky.social & I are teaching a free online workshop with on experimental design for environmental scientists on the 23rd.

We'll focus on using simulations to evaluate how well different experimental designs help achieve your goals.

Please sign up & share! forms.gle/MZTxeQs4UpMr...

Timely as always, @xkcd.com

xkcd.com/3140/

Discovered that SAR11 has proteorhodopsin and wanted to declare it an honorary phytoplankton. It produces ATP in light! But this only slows death in the absence of carbon and does not increase growth otherwise.

Is it a photoheterotroph? Chemoheterotroph? Is photomixotroph a word? I'm baffled.

Lunar eclipse

Lunar eclipse

Lunar eclipse

Lunar eclipse over the waters

One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants - Nature In a case of obligate cross-species cloning, female ants of Messor ibericus need to clone males of Messor structor to obtain sperm for producing the worker caste, resulting in males from the same moth...

Original paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

‘Almost unimaginable’: these ants are different species but share a mother Ant queens of one species clone ants of another to create hybrid workers that do their bidding.

I don't really understand this yet but it's some of the most interesting and bizarre biology I've ever encountered.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Sure, done!

The call for our 2026 Postdoc Cohort is now open. We offer 4 full-time positions. Apply until August 24th. hifmb.de/jobs
Please spread the word.
#postdoc #jobsinscience #marinebiodiversity #antarctica
@awi.de @hillebr1.bsky.social @ibaums.bsky.social @thilogross.bsky.social @merenbey.bsky.social 🦑

Amanita muscaria mushroom

My first Amanita muscaria! Spotted this weekend by @joelyndelima.bsky.social

YouTube video by The Tom Lehrer Wisdom Channel Tom Lehrer - The Vatican Rag - fabulous version - LIVE FILM From Copenhagen in 1967

A good day to celebrate the bitingly hilarious lyrical genius of Tom Lehrer.

Retired from his relatively short musical career...to teach maths at Harvard, MIT, and UCSC. Worked briefly at Los Alamos and the NSA. And mercilessly satirised every system he encountered.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvhY...

Bayesian Regression Using a Prior on the Model Fit: The R2-D2 Shrinkage Prior Prior distributions for high-dimensional linear regression require specifying a joint distribution for the unobserved regression coefficients, which is inherently difficult. We instead propose a new c...

I'm not sure what exactly you'd put priors on here but I recently learnt that you can even put priors on R^2 (arxiv.org/abs/1609.00046), so I imagine you're right.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language Whole language is a philosophy of reading and a discredited[8] educational method originally developed for teaching literacy in English to young children. The method became a major model for education in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK in the 1980s and 1990s,[7] despite there being no scientific support for the method's effectiveness.[9] It is based on the premise that learning to read English comes naturally to humans, especially young children, in the same way that learning to speak develops naturally.[10][11][12]

I will never understand how this became so influential. Instead of using either evidence-based teaching or tried-and-tested methods (both defensible), we somehow ended up with fad-based education.

Modelling species presence–absence in the ecological niche theory framework using shape-constrained generalized additive models According to ecological niche theory, species response curves are unimodal with respect to environmental gradients. A variety of statistical methods h…

Just learned about the existence of shape-constrained GAMs and they seem rather useful!

In species distribution modelling: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Code: fundacion-azti.github.io/gam-niche/sh...

Original paper: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

A couple of forthcoming workshops on experimental design and data analysis, taught by @christinamcgraw.bsky.social, Peter Dillingham, @sineadcollins.bsky.social, Sam Dupont, and me.

Winners and losers under hydroxide‐based ocean alkalinity enhancement in a Tasmanian plankton community Ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) is an emerging carbon dioxide CO2 removal approach for climate change mitigation and can be implemented with various alkaline materials that convert dissolved CO2 i...

Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement (OAE) is a marine CO2 removal method that uses alkaline material to increase the storage capacity for anthropogenic CO2 in seawater.
Kiyas investigated how hydroxide (NaOH) induces taxonomic shifts in plankton. She found: 👇 🌊

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

For what it's worth, I've added myself to this list for now.

In part because I'd need a visa and I'm not sure I'd be granted one. It's a complicated story related to having short-term contracts and work permits.

This looks very interesting, nice work!

Fowl play: flying duck caught in Swiss speed trap believed to be repeat offender Image shows mallard snapped at 52km/h in same 30km/h zone as a duck on the same day seven years ago

Breaking news in Switzerland

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

These are just two of the seven stats tutorials recently developed by the @scor-int.bsky.social COBS working group. Please check out the others too and follow @scor-cobs.bsky.social for updates on other resources and workshops!

bsky.app/profile/scor...

Ecological drivers/stressors interact and response surfaces capture this best. I think these experiments remain rare in part because it's not clear how to analyse the data and why their output is useful. This tutorial (in R) is my attempt to make this clear.

bsky.app/profile/scor...

I've been working on ecological responses to environmental change for a long time, so I enjoyed putting down my thoughts (and code!) on how best to go about analysing response curve/reaction norm experiments.

I think you'll find it useful if you do these kinds of experiments (and maybe otherwise!)

Ever wondered how to analyse your experimental data? 🌊🧪🌍

We’ve developed a series of tutorials in R to guide you through analysing & visualising data from single & multiple driver experiments.

Beginners and experts, we've got something for all of you.

Please share!

meddle-scor149.org/vignettes/