Expiscor is moving!

It’s been fun bringing you Expiscor each week, but things are changing and this blog feature has found a new home. Starting later this week, I’ll be blogging over at SciLogs.com.

Yes, I’m excited.

Excited!

It is truly an honour and a thrill to be invited to join the cast of impressive science bloggers, from Malcolm Campbell and his “Six Incredible Things Before Breakfast”, to Paige Brown’s “From the Lab Bench” to GrrlScientist’s “Maniraptora” and Matt Shipman’s Communication Breakdown.

Expiscor will also change its style; I don’t provide nearly as good a “link-fest” as other people do (e.g., Ed’s and Malcolm’s are amazing!) and so instead of a weekly set of links, I will bring what I view as a short-list of fascinating discoveries, mostly from the world of Arthropods. These highlights, to be posted on Monday (as usual), will be more than a list, as I will try to provide a bit of context and opinion around each story. I see opportunity in the blogosphere to highlight new findings, stories, and photos related to the natural history and biology of spiders, insects, and their relatives. In addition to these weekly highlights, I will write semi-regular long-form posts, again with a focus on arthropods, and some of these will be cross-posted on arthropodecology.com.

Don’t worry, you’ll still see amazing photos on Expiscor, like this one from Nash Turley:

Expiscor is flying away to SciLogs (photo by N. Turley, reproduced here with permission)

You might wonder why I have opted to move Expiscor from its current home to a community blog. For me, it’s about continuing to improve and expand the blogging side of my academic life, and working alongside the other bloggers on SciLogs.com, I think, will help further hone my skills. More importantly, however, is that this move will allow me to reach out and connect with a very broad and interdisciplinary audience. Science communication, to me, is all about continually pushing the limits, expanding, thinking about and re-working the ways to bring exciting scientific discoveries to the world, and SciLogs is exactly aligned with this belief, as its mission statement highlights:

The SciLogs combine the strengths of both science culture and the blog medium. They provide scientists and those interested in science with the opportunity to interact in interdisciplinary discussions about science in all its forms…

ArthropodEcology.com will remain active, although it certainly won’t be as active as it has been over the past year. The original idea behind the arthropod ecology blog was to highlight research activities within my laboratory, and to provide a forum for writing and discussing Higher Education. It’s grown a lot since then, and in some ways, the site will return to its roots, and I hope to get my graduate students and other people within my local community interested in writing their own posts under the arthropod ecology banner.

To my loyal readers, followers and friends: I must thank you for continued interest and support. The community of people associated with this blog is truly tremendous, and you give me energy, ideas and support every day. You help me uncover fascinating stories, provide me with terrific content, including photographs. You have made me a better scientist and a better person.

In sum, I pledge to continue to fish out discoveries and bring them to you; what’s changing is the location, and I do hope you will keep following along over at Expiscor’s new home.

And I know you want it… here’s your tweet of the week, from Minibeast Mayhem. Yeah, invertebrates are awesome.