Interesting. Usually when I hear of generalists vs specialists it usually mentions specialists as fragile. They have one trick and they do it well, but when a habitat disturbance happens the specialists lost their spot and the generalists rush in to take the spot and don't let them recolonize.

That is what you will hear. We're way too far into translating species distributions anthropomorphically as a harlequin story of "habitat and species lost" rather than getting back to science and finding a response to some predictor. It drives me crazy.

I think a lot of what is driving this trend is interpretation of invasive species distributions solely as competitive interactions. However, I find that there is only one invasive species, it's a bipedal mammal, and it's the strongest predictor of what species will be most abundant, regardless of geographic origin.

Furthermore, and to illustrate, those species that the bipedal mammal currently calls "invasive" are nutriphilic species that "specialize" on homogenized, generalized conditions. Which, mind you, may have been uncommon to RARE historically in reaches of river (or prairie or forest or wetland) where they are now dominant.

Pot, meet Kettle.

Didn't get around to assembling a satisfactory context in another thread before my wife got home last night (thought a water change after 6 months of avoiding it was more appropriate use of time) but I hope to have something juicy together over the weekend, that we all can discuss instead of giving you whiplash

Also, I missed your point back up there Bruce, and went a totally different direction, sorry about that. I'll address that in the new thread.

Todd