On community
"Life imitates art more than art imitates life." - Oscar Wilde Friends, we live in a fascinating world. Sometimes, it seems to me that there is an underlying structure ordering our lives. For me, that structure is largely composed of parallel lines: one line representing my scientific research, the other representing my personal experiences. The two seem eerily parallel at times. I am a community ecologist. I spent my PhD years studying communities of animals to figure out how they were structured. What species lived best together, which ones preferred to be apart. Meanwhile, I moved across the ocean three different times, planting myself in a new culture each time. My experience reflected my scientific work: I was conducting a personal experiment in community assembly. For my postdoc, I shifted my focus to an earlier stage of invertebrate life-cycles. I worked on larval settlement while simultaneously settling down myself. My trans-continental wanderings led me to...