So, the ESA is coming to a close. This was my first time attending, and I was very impressed with the science. There were not, however, enough parties. Here are a couple of shots from last night’s shindig at the Milwaukee Public Museum, an old fashioned collection of skeletons, butterflies in cases, and lots of dioramas peopled with mannequins. Food was served in a little mannequin-peopled village called “The Streets of Old Milwaukee”, and the consensus was that it would not do to be there alone at night. Various food was served. I had the German platter, with potato pancakes. Yes, that picture is of an the world’s largest bowl of sour cream.

The highlight of the evening was contra dancing, a kind of complex-looking but not too hard (at least for this crowd) dancing with a caller, in which you end up dancing with everyone in the room—not a bad idea for a mixer. The program chair for this year’s meeting, Louis Gross, is apparently a contra dancer himself.

I talked with Richard Primack of Boston University, who has been using records collected by Henry David Thoreau to see if blooming times in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts have been shifted by climate change. They have, by seven days.

He thinks that the clearest trend in the Ecological Society of America is its shift, en masse, towards studying climate change. “Two years ago there were very few papers on climate change,” he said. “Four years ago there were virtually none. But if you look at this year, it is becoming the major driving topic of the ESA.”

That’s all from Milwaukee. Next year the meeting will be held in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

So, the ESA is coming to a close. This was my first time attending, and I was very impressed with the science. There were not, however, enough parties. Here are a couple of shots from last night’s shindig at the Milwaukee Public Museum, an old fashioned collection of skeletons, butterflies in cases, and lots of dioramas peopled with mannequins. Food was served in a little mannequin-peopled village called “The Streets of Old Milwaukee”, and the consensus was that it would not do to be there alone at night. Various food was served. I had the German platter, with potato pancakes. Yes, that picture is of an the world’s largest bowl of sour cream.

The highlight of the evening was contra dancing, a kind of complex-looking but not too hard (at least for this crowd) dancing with a caller, in which you end up dancing with everyone in the room—not a bad idea for a mixer. The program chair for this year’s meeting, Louis Gross, is apparently a contra dancer himself.

I talked with Richard Primack of Boston University, who has been using records collected by Henry David Thoreau to see if blooming times in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts have been shifted by climate change. They have, by seven days.

He thinks that the clearest trend in the Ecological Society of America is its shift, en masse, towards studying climate change. “Two years ago there were very few papers on climate change,” he said. “Four years ago there were virtually none. But if you look at this year, it is becoming the major driving topic of the ESA.”

That’s all from Milwaukee. Next year the meeting will be held in Albuquerque, New Mexico.