Lakes as Islands: The Arising Researcher

Sooner or later, most graduate students in ecology hit a wall, realizing “I have no idea how to do what I need to do next.” Our careers would of course be unfulfilling if we were never challenged to do something new or unfamiliar, but grappling with this can be dispiriting for a novice researcher. In my case, the transition from my Masters to PhD was hard. I was a freshwater ecologist interested in invasive species: What lets some organisms new to an environment be so successful, and how can we conserve native species affected by their new neighbors? But I found that my earlier training had not quite prepared me for the questions I wanted to ask next, and I was uncertain how to proceed with my work. For my Masters research, I investigated competitive interactions between native and nonnative crayfish in the Ozark Plateaus using manipulative experiments, both in the laboratory and in enclosures in the field. And it was not that this work did not challenge me, but I completed the degree feeling that I had arrived; that I was already a pretty good ecologist (I was not). As I started my PhD, I found myself working with an adviser and colleagues seeking to tackle these same questions for communities across large, landscape scales in the Pacific Northwest. I felt paralyzed by the limits of my past skill set and conceptual background. It is hopefully some reassurance to current graduate students that you are not alone in occasionally thinking “I don't know what I'm doing.” Your advisers have been there before you. So we all read and talk to colleagues and muddle through until something helps us get unstuck. For my PhD, there were of course many exemplary papers in biogeography or landscape ecology that I could turn to for guidance in moving my research from the lab to landscapes. But I have found over time that my first step into new ideas is often eased through framing in the natural history of systems I already know something about. Given that I had worked primarily on crayfish, the paper “Morphoedaphic and Biogeographic Analysis of Crayfish Distribution in Northern Wisconsin” by Gregory Capelli and John Magnuson (Journal of Crustacean Biology 1983, Vol 3, 548–564) was what got me unstuck in the first year of my PhD. One emphasis of John Magnuson's career has been integrating ideas from island biogeography into freshwater ecology and limnology. How do isolation and abiotic or biotic characteristics of lakes give rise to their communities through colonization and extinction dynamics? John and his colleague were the first to apply these ideas to communities of