Trade-offs between organismal traits are among the strongest constraints on life strategies for most species and individuals (MacArthur and Wilson 1967; Grime 2006). The balance between offspring quantity and quality is a classic example found in many organisms. In humans, these trade-offs can be complex. For example, an individual either has muscles to run fast, but for a short period of time, or (s)he is able to run for longer at a slower pace, exhibiting one of two alternative strategies to escape predators. This basically implies that famous heroes such as Superman or Homer Simpson (i.e. with strategies corresponding to “never” vs “always” being caught by predators) are actually quite difficult to find in nature. Folia Geobot (2013) 48:297–306 DOI 10.1007/s12224-013-9170-4

/pdf/serious-research-with-great-fun-the-strange-case-of-jan-4aqzizbdh9.pdf

Serious Research with Great Fun: the Strange Case of Jan Šuspa Lepš (and Other Plant Ecologists)

and elsewhere. A lighter prose is encouraged and no summary is required. Formal research papers, however short, will not be considered.Like many ecologists we were intrigued by Tomas Grim’s original and thought-provoking evaluation of professional achievement amongst his Bohemian ecologist colleagues in your sister journal, Oikos (Grim 2008). In his paper, Grim argues and infers from a correlational analysis that publication success is negatively affected by beer drinking – an assumed correlate of ‘social activity’ – due to nega -tive effects of alcohol on cognitive performance. Here we question Grim’s conclusions. We criticize his focus on a single hypothesis, without consideration of reasonable al-ternatives, and note that his approach provides a valuable illustration of a more general flaw in ecological inference.Grim correlated publication success of Czech ecologists to their self-reported beer consumption. We note short-falls in this approach. We could, for example, quibble with Grim’s measures of publication success (Lortie et al. 2007), note the problems of using self-reported drinking as a measure of true alcohol consumption (Nevitt and Lundak 2005), question his neglect of gender differences (Bailly et al. 1991) and debate whether heavier drinkers really are involved in more social or anti-social behaviour (Ogle and Miller 2004). We might also note the paper focuses on just 10% of the variation in publication success – that part not explained by each ecologist’s age and duration of publica -tion career. However, this would be nit-picking. Our main concern is with Grim’s pessimism-by-default regarding the impending obscurity of drinking ecologists. As we justify below, there are good reasons to be more optimistic.

/pdf/hope-for-bohemian-ecologists-comments-on-a-possible-role-of-11mv9p0isf.pdf

Hope for Bohemian ecologists – comments on “A possible role of social activity to explain differences in publication output among ecologists?” by Tomáš Grim, Oikos 2008

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Hope for Bohemian ecologists – comments on “A possible role of social activity to explain differences in publication output among ecologists?” by Tomáš Grim, Oikos 2008