First bloggpost - Welcome!

Dear All,

Welcome to this blogg, and the first bloggpost - ever!

Above you see a picture of one of Sweden's latest arrivals in its damselfly fauna: The Small Red-eyed damselfly (Erythromma viridulum). The males in this species have characteristic red eyes, which contrasts markedly to the otherwise blue colouration of the body. The picture was taken by me in late summer (July) 2008 at "Råbydammen" between Dalby and Lund.

This enigmatic damselfly species has exploded in Skåne and is one of the most common damselfly species in newly created ponds, after only a few years. It is only one of several examples of southernly odonate species that are currently expanding northwards in Europe - presumably due to climate change.

And now over to something different:

Blogs and the bloggosphere is here to come - accept it and do not fight back. This is the future, we better adjust to it as scientists and learn the new tools of communication. It is worth putting a little bit extra effort to do this - because it will benefit you in your future career.

I hope we will all contribute to make this blogg truly interactive, in which all contribute by commenting and writing posts (for those who have gotten permission from me to do so). Only by keeping this blogg live and active will it be interesting and useful. You should also consider to post interesting links about research news or scientific papers that are likely to be of interest, not only to our research laboratory, but also to a broad audience of ecologists and evolutionary biologists. Science politics and science policy news - from Sweden, the US or other parts of the world is of course also of interest here. As will be news about our field work or scientific meetings that we have attended and where you might want to share your thoughts.

But the primary function of this blogg will be for our weekly lab-meetings. I expect all who propose papers to write a shorter or longer bloggpost (a minimum of five sentences, and longer if you wish), where you explain why you chose this paper and why you thought it might be important. You should also add a link to the article so that other lab-members could download the paper and prepare for the meeting. Afterwards, if you or somebody else in the lab has some thought(-s) about the paper or new idéas that you might want to share with the rest of us: please post it here, or add a comment! In this way, we can document the scientific and intellectual processes in our laboratory.

So: get going, log on and add your own bloggposts! It is not difficult and you are all intelligent people. I know, because I am your advisor! If an old dinosaur like me can blogg - you can too! Why wait? How many hours will it take until the next blogg post will appear by anyone from my laboratory? And when will the first comment appear on this blogg? Soon, I hope...

Looking forward to many interesting posts by you soon!