Mridul K. Thomas

Thank you so much - that is very kind! All the best to you too.

My time in academia is at an end. I'm not sure what comes next, but what a privilege it's been getting to work with smart, idealistic, and kind people every day to understand our world a little better.

Happy to see our analysis on scaling up temperature x nutrient interactions from populations to communities published in Ecological Monographs @esajournals.bsky.social! 📈

How do temperature and resources interact to shape both population and community growth rates?

We have a model that makes predictions at both levels! And we test them with experimental data from the lab & field.

This one has been gestating for years and we're rather proud of it. Give it a read.

Looks like an exciting network!

There are so many interesting, important questions that we could address well with some more co-ordination.

The MEDDLE Data Analysis Guides as a Living Resource for Multiple‐Driver Marine Research Click on the article title to read more.

Our data analysis guides for multiple stressor/driver research 🌊

@christinamcgraw.bsky.social
@sineadcollins.bsky.social
@mridulkthomas.bsky.social
@chrisecornwall.bsky.social
+ Peter Dillingham, Steeve Comeau, Sam Dupont

aslopubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Hi everyone! I'm co-organizing this retreat/workshop June 15-19 for those looking to get started in mathematical/computational modeling of biological processes. Location is a beautiful farm in NC. Please share with students and others who want to build modeling skills. Interdisciplinarity welcome!

Pseudoblepharisma - Wikipedia

And while we're on the subject of weird photosynthesis, Pseudoblepharisma has both a green alga and a purple sulphur bacterium as endosymbiotes.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudob...

Paulinella - Wikipedia

The genus Paulinella is apparently the only known case of a photosynthetic eukaryote that did NOT receive its chloroplast from a primary endosymbiosis more than a billion years ago.

It repeated the trick independently ~100 million years ago!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline...

Australian 'drop crocs' unlock insights into ancient ecosystems In a local grazier's backyard in the small southeast QLD town of Murgon, scientists have been digging for decades in what looks like an unremarkable clay pit. But within the clay lies one of Australia...

Tree-climbing crocs that prey from above? Of course it's Australia.

phys.org/news/2025-11...

Now in mgcv!

bsky.app/profile/gsim...

Thank you @ecologicalsociety.bsky.social's Theoretical Ecology Section for the Best Theory paper award for our @science.org paper on eco-evo emergence of macroecological scaling!
esa.org/theory/award...

library(manipulate)

manipulate(
curve(
arnoldi(x, T_opt, E, Pf_max),
0, 40, ylim = c(0, 2)),
T_opt = slider(0.1, 40, 20),
E= slider(0.1, 20, 5),
Pf_max = slider(0.01, 3, 1)
)

# Arnoldi et al. (2025) function
arnoldi <- function(x, T_opt, E, Pf_max){
exp((x-T_opt)/E)*(1-((x-T_opt)/E))*Pf_max
}

# T_opt = optimum temperature
# E= upper critical temperature (i.e. Tmax) minus t_opt
# Pf_max = max performance (e.g. max growth rate)

curve(arnoldi(x, 20, 10, 2), 0, 35)

A universal thermal performance curve arises in biology and ecology | PNAS Temperature has strong impacts on all biological and ecological processes, and thermal performance curves (TPCs) have been employed recurrently to ...

Need to think more about the headline claim, but this proposes a very nice new thermal performance curve (TPC) function with appealing properties.

www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Interactions between ocean alkalinity enhancement and phytoplankton in an Earth system model Abstract. The functioning and efficiency of ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) as a CO2 removal strategy is well investigated in model studies, but risks for the ecosystem are presently not considered...

🌊 New paper out today: Assessing the interaction between ocean alkalinity enhancement 🚢 and phytoplankton🦠 in an Earth System Model 🌐
#mCDR #OAE #ESM
bg.copernicus.org/articles/22/...

Interested in resource competition theory, mutualism, spatial patterns or temporal dynamics? I'll be giving a talk in the IITE online seminar series tomorrow summarizing our recent work on microbial cross-feeding that includes all these ingredients.

Bird migration is changing. What does this reveal about our planet? – visualised Bird migrations rank as one of nature’s greatest spectacles. Thanks to GPS tracking, scientists are uncovering extraordinary insights into ancient and mysterious journeys – and new threats that are re...

A beautiful piece about bird migration.

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

GLEONetwork

Our thanks to @gleonetwork.bsky.social for hosting this as part of its Limnoseries. And for this impressive catalogue of past workshops & talks on youtube - an excellent resource:

www.youtube.com/@gleonetwork...

Feedback for GLEON experimental design workshop Thank you for attending the GLEON workshop on 'How to design better experiments' by Mridul K. Thomas & Ravi Ranjan on 23/09/2025! This is a quick survey about your experience at the workshop. We are h...

If you watch this video and go through the scripts (or attended live), we'd be happy to have your feedback!

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

GitHub - mridulkthomas/experimental-design-limnoseries-workshop: Materials for workshop "How to Design Better Experiments" Materials for workshop "How to Design Better Experiments" - mridulkthomas/experimental-design-limnoseries-workshop

R scripts and presentation:

github.com/mridulkthoma...

No need to be familiar with Github, just download two files at the link.

YouTube video by GLEONetwork Limnoseries: How to Design Better Experiments

Our experimental design workshop had ~40 participants from >15 countries!

@raviranjan.bsky.social and I focused on refining ideas, estimating parameters precisely, leverage in linear & nonlinear regression, and using simulations to compare designs.

Presentation & R scripts in next post:

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.