David García Callejas

A king on a sumptuous, much elaborated throne; in one hand he holds a sceptre of office, in the other, the leashes for two fierce stone dogs that guard the throne. The king's head has been replaced with a character who was used as the basis for MAD Magazine's Alfred E Neumann. The new head sports a conical dunce cap. Behind the king is a large group of 1960s business men, seated and standing, in conservative suits. The background is the view from the 80th floor of World Trade Center 3. The floor has been carpeted in sumptuous tabriz from the Ottoman court. Image: Aude (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:80th_floor_of_3_World_Trade_Center_-_OHNY.jpg CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en

Even if rich people were no more prone to believe stupid shit than you or me, it would still be a problem. After all, I believe in my share of stupid shit (and if you think none of the shit you believe in is stupid, I'm afraid we've just identified at least one kind of stupid shit you believe).

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📊🌱 Hoy #8M lanzamos encuesta sobre #cuidados y carrera científica en #ecología.
¿Quién cuida en la comunidad científica?
¿Cuánto tiempo implican esos cuidados?
¿Influyen en las trayectorias investigadoras?
Si trabajas en ecología, cuéntanos 👇

aeet-comisionigualdad.limesurvey.net/485287?lang=...

Si conocen a jóvenes investigadorxs que tienen potencial para producir una revisión con una perspectiva interesante, difundan este anuncio! Queremos más sumisiones del Sur, y hay waivers para los costos de publicación. La primera fase es un resumen con una propuesta, simple!
🌐🧪

Front cover of my book, titled "Comparative musicology: Evolution, universals, and the science of the world's music" (published today by Oxford University Press)

1st of my 4-page essay published in Nature today titled "Music is not a universal language - but it can bring us together when words fail" Picture caption: "Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny (centre) performed in Spanish at the half-time show of the 2026 American Football Super Bowl LX."

My book is now published! 🌏🎶🧪

You can download it for free at academic.oup.com/book/62353 - I’d be grateful if you do!
I also published an accessible summary with audio/video today in @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Try reading that first, then give the whole book a read if you like it!

🗓️Complete schedule for this term, where we will have speakers covering higher-order interactions, metabolic scaling, niche dimensionalty, coexistence and more!

Look forward to seeing you there! All details and Zoom link: iite.info/seminar/

Degradation of fish food webs in the Anthropocene The decrease in body size driven by the selective species turnover is widely altering fish food web topology and function.

New paper out examining fish food web degradation in the Anthropocene. We show the structure of aquatic food webs are changing-- even when species richness doesn’t. These signals are strongly associated with decreases in body size within fish communities. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🌐🐠🐡🦈🐟

New paper on global change impacts on insects, out in GEB🦋🌍

Climate change and urbanisation act synergistically: butterfly declines are stronger under warming in urban environments.

Species traits help explain heterogeneous responses.

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

@ylndmc.bsky.social

¡Atención! 🔊

Llamada abierta a contribuir al monográfico "La paleoecología como herramienta para comprender el cambio global desde escalas temporales largas". Hasta marzo puedes mandar tu propuesta de contribución a este monográfico. Toda la información aquí:
revistaecosistemas.net/index.php/ec...

📣We will be back soon with a new series of online theory seminars!

As ever, free and open for all via Zoom. Follow us on here, or join our email list (iite.info/seminar-emai...) for details.

In the meantime, all our past talks are on Youtube: www.youtube.com/@theoretical...

See you there!

☀️ 2026 Summer School in the Pyrenees - Unifying Mathematical Models of Biodiversity
Applications are now open!
This school offers a state-of-the-art overview for interdisciplinary theoreticians.
🗓️ July 5-11
🎯 PhD students to senior researchers
ℹ️ intp.science/en/summer26....
📭 contact@intp.science
🌐🧪

si trabajas con el medio natural y computación, únete a la comunidad de ecoinformátic@s!! 👇

This is an excellent analogy, because my recollection from grade school is that the pen on the right looks fun and exciting, and then you play with it for a few minutes and realize it's not actually useful for anything and in fact makes some tasks more cumbersome, and never think about it again.

🧪 Figuring out the right way to represent interactions as a network is a really difficult task, makes a big difference on the interpretation.

In a new preprint by @tanyadoesscience.bsky.social we attempt to provide a hierarchical framework for network ecology:

ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

Plant‐Pollinator Interaction Rewiring Boosts Year‐to‐Year Community Persistence Our study shows that year-to-year changes in plant–pollinator interactions are not random but structured to enhance pollinator persistence, buffering communities against environmental fluctuations. U...

Interaction rewiring is a response, not simply a consequence, of environmental change. Observed rewiring boosts species persistence opportunities. This is one of the nicest ideas we tested in the lab recently. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... lead by @domgarvir.bsky.social

📢 Keynotes unlocked: 12/12. Thrilled to have Virginia Domínguez-García @domgarvir.bsky.social as a keynote speaker in Complenet’26! Join us to learn more about #ecology and #networks!
🌐 Info & registration: complenet.weeblysite.com
🚨 Call for contributions open – submit by Nov 15, 2025!

I suspect that one of the reasons behind the widespread adoption of generative AI by faculty is that it gives people the illusion that they can still do the things they knew how to do as a postdoc. Gen AI is used as a poor substitute to maintaining core skills.

hasta siempre, Robe

Contenidos del curso

7ª ed. del curso 'Optimizando #Rstats para el análisis de datos en Ecología'

4-8 mayo 2026, Jaca, Huesca

www.aeet.org/events/2026/...

Generalized plant–pollinator phenological climate‐driven advances still lead to a decline in phenological overlap Climate change is altering the phenology of interacting species, potentially leading to mismatches in the timing of their interactions. This may affect the delivery of key ecosystem services such as ...

My 1st thesis chapter is out in #EcologicalMonographs! 🎉
With @curromolina.bsky.social @ibartomeus.bsky.social
How is #climatechange reshaping plant–pollinator timing (phenological overlap) in Mediterranean ecosystems? Can #biodiversity buffer mismatches?
Find out here👇
dx.doi.org/10.1002/ecm....

Hay #alternativa a editoriales comerciales q buscan el beneficio€ x encima de calidad
👉🏽Revistas Científicas gestionadas x la comunidad científica xra la comunidad como @ecosistemas-aeet.bsky.social entre otras
#publish&read4Free
#ModeloDiamante #4RealOpen&FairScience
¿A q modelo quieres contribuir?

¡Atención!

¡Buscamos nuevos Editores Asociados! 🔎

Abrimos la convocatoria para incorporar nuevos editores asociados a nuestra plantilla, principalmente para aquellas áreas aún poco representadas. ¿Estás interesado/a? Te contamos más en los siguientes tweets.

🚨 Job alert 🚨 Postdoc position in ecological forecasting 📈 as part of the Horizon Europe OSCARS call. The postdoc will be based in lovely Sevilla (fantastic place to live) and will include working closely with several European forecasting projects. Apply by Dec 11! 🌎🧪 globalchangeeco.com/jobs

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

Schematic illustrating how species interactions can depend on neighborhood density and identity.

🆕 in "Ecological Monographs": Static models miss the mark—adding nonlinear, density-based facilitation helps predict coexistence, persistence, and realistic community dynamics

📄Neighbor density-dependent facilitation promotes coexistence and internal oscillation
doi.org/10.1002/ecm....

What is the origin of diversity in allometric laws scaling across species? Check our new paper led by Andrea Tabi where
we propose a new theory of metabolic scaling grounded in thermodynamics and stochastic fluctuations at the cellular level.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Postdoctoral position in agroecology for TRANSFORM Project The Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3) is offering a full-time postdoctoral research position to support activities within a Horizon Europe project. The project focuses on developing innovative cr...

I am pleased to announce a new postdoctoral position in Theoretical Ecology. More info here: info.bc3research.org/2025/11/06/p...

wow, parabéns Alfredo!

⛰️Aún estas a tiempo de contactar para hacer tu #doctorado en cambio climático y suelos de montaña en el CREAF🌳! Anímate a solicitar ayudas FPU/FI en el proyecto DRYLAND (MICIU). Efectos sequía en las pérdidas de C y nutrientes en suelos de alta montaña. Solicita aquí!-> sl1nk.com/fnIEG

¡Continuamos con nuestros conferenciantes invitados!
En la 4º reunión de la Sociedad Española de Sistemas Complejos tendremos el placer de contar con
Maria Paniw, EBD-CSIC
@paniw.bsky.social

🚨 ¡Envía tu abstract hasta el 1 de noviembre!
🌐 cs3.es/conference-2026

PhD offer on island extinctions. Last week to apply! 👇🏼