Christopher Anderson
@cranders
Languid and bedeviled computational ecologist interested in plant/pollinator communities and mutualistic networks. PhC at UW/Seattle From Colorado originally he/him.
Spoiler alert (and perhaps anti-climatically), I conclude that I should just keep doing the work because I think it's important. Even if I am often languid and bedeviled. Although maybe I should take up White Monster Energy and Zyn...
As I'm nearing the end of the PhD I've been struggling with motivation and what it means to be "inspired". This post is me trying to come to terms with inspiration vs work using caricatures of Darwin and Wallace
Really happy that I got to share some of this work on using multi-objective optimization to explore what networks look like when they're explicitly optimized on the stability metrics we think might be important. A lot more analysis to be done but for a quick preview: there's nestedness! #ESA2026
Yearning for crisp autumn days and fruiting fungi on this 90 degree Seattle day…. #mushroooms #mycology
Reminds me of the Dominic West hiding in the bushes pic. So excited to have a new entry to the genre.
Anyway, here’s to you mom. You really checked out right before the world went completely insane. I’m sure you’re pleased with your timing, you never could stomach bullshit.
But more often it is this: a reminder of her life and an affirmation of the impact she had on this world.
Oof, is this your vet? (I hope your dog ends up being okay and/or recovers soon!)
Yes! And anything that can get us to this solar punk future (including sustainable biplane technology)
And I say this as someone who played and beat all of the best game candidates this year. They’re all awesome! But I can’t fathom caring about other game’s fan’s tears. 3k fucking upvotes for this?? Just gommage me now.
A movie that takes place where you were born. Filmed an hour away.
Just presented at #EntSoc25! All about the benefits and challenges of using autonomous camera sampling and machine learning to study plant/pollinator interactions.
Also, my reading this morning brought me to this paper which has this spooky (cute) figure that I wish I had found before Halloween
Reading a really nice paper on equilibrium (or lack thereof) in ecology and it has one of the most ecology coded passages I've read in a while: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Also, CUDA is incredible. 15x speedup on object detection inference tasks, 90 minutes to 6 minutes to churn through 3,500 images. I strongly suspect that the bottleneck is now reading the images from a usb thumb drive. Look at this Bombus x Delphinium interaction I was able to find as a result!
Hooray! Finally got some some object detection up and running on my dataset from RMBL this summer. Still a lot of work to do to clean this up but soon, all of the pollinators shall be detected! #ecology #openscience #pollination
This project was a major milestone for me after years of not thinking I had what it took to be a scientist. Huge thank you to all of my collaborators and everyone in the Brosi Lab for helping make this paper a reality. This paper would not exist without all of their help.
In conclusion, we offer two new theories to explain why nestedness is seen so often in mutualistic networks in nature. Directly tying theory to empirical observations remains difficult, though there are some admirable attempts (see Valdovinos et al. 2016).
Consider the case where a single pollinator starts to visit a new plant. This represents one new mutualistic interaction but will introduce several new competitive interactions (one for each other pollinator that visits that plant).
When competition is included, however, the most stable configurations end up being those in which species double down on the species that they share with the most competitors.
This makes intuitive ecological sense as species want to maximize their resource gain and avoid spreading their efforts too thin. We have seen some evidence for this in bumble bees at RMBL.