Polar Bear Science envy – polar bear biologist Andrew Derocher steals my blog name

I’ve got an imitator! It appears that a recently created website promoting polar bear biologist Andrew Derocher’s lab at the University of Alberta just happens to have the same title as my blog: Polar Bear Science.

Oscar Wilde said:

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.”

Gosh, I’m seriously chuffed.

From the look of it, Derocher and his students would like to ride on the coattails of my online success and garner some Google-search views for themselves – check my blog stats, lower right: I’m coming up on half a million views in just under three years (since 26 July 2012).

Sadly for them, it does not appear to be working.

Here’s how I found it (only by constraining the ‘time’ parameter to “past year”):

Oddly, at the time I checked today (5 July 2015) there was not a link to the imitation “Polar Bear Science” website from Derocher’s U. of A Department of Biology faculty web page (back up here). Perhaps it’s not University sanctioned?

There is, however, a link to it on Derocher’s lab twitter page:
“polarbears.biology.ualberta.ca” (click below to enlarge) leads to their imitation “Polar Bear Science” website.

Since the first tweet from the Derocher Lab “@pb_research” account was 3 June 2014, it looks like that’s about the time the website was created. That means they’ve had just over 1200 views in more than a year (see far right, bottom of page in pdf here).

Looks to me like folks aren’t buying Derocher’s brand of “science without politics”!