Andrew is a post-doctoral researcher in North Carolina focused on population and conservation genetics in hydrothermal vent communities.
David is a graduate student in Florida. He studies the ecology and conservation of sharks. 
Amy is a graduate student in North Carolina studying local ecological knowledge within small scale fisheries. 
Chuck is a graduate student in North Carolina focusing on apex predators and how they interact with fisheries. 
Lyndell is a graduate student in North Carolina, studying the feeding ecology of cownose rays. 
Iris is a graduate student in Washington studying habitat use and feeding habits of juvenile Pacific salmon and herring in Puget Sound. 
Michael is a graduate student in Maryland investigating the visual systems of mantis shrimp. |
It’s that time of the week again. Please use this space to ask questions, share links, start a discussion, or just say hi.  One awesome ladder. Photo by ADT Today’s thread brought to you by the boarding ladder on the Scripps research pier. What was your most eventful boat launch? Another week and another open thread. Here is a space where you can ask questions, share links, or just say hi.  Poly is a very skeptical chicken. Photo by ADT This week’s open thread sponsored by Polymerase Chain Reaction, our very skeptical chicken. A couple weeks ago, lots of people were talking about Rayfish, a hoax website claiming to produce genetically modified stingray sneakers. What other ocean-product claims are you skeptical about? I’m going to try something new this summer. Every Wednesday we’ll post an open thread where you can ask questions, start discussions, post links to interesting articles, or just say “Hi”.  Luna. photo by Andrew Thaler Today’s open thread sponsored by Luna, the Nigerian Dwarf Goat. To y’all’er’um it may concern, I really appreciate what you do. Checking the RSS feeds for my favorite scientific journals is the first thing I do, every morning; it’s how I find out about the latest publications in my various interests. That being said, when I come back from lunch and you do this:
I’m much more likely to click this:
Than if, every couple of hours, you did this:
So let’s work together to ensure that the maximum number of articles from your journal get read. Spread out the RSS updates. Thank you. ~Your snarky, neighborhood Southern Fried Scientist (And yes, I do have separate subscription folders for journals that dump 50+ articles at once and journals that post 1 or 2 at a time)
 WhySharksMatter and a whale shark at the Georgia Aquarium The world’s largest shark eats only plankton, couldn’t bite a human if it wanted to, and is one of the few sharks that could be reasonably described as beautiful. Globally, SCUBA divers pay an estimated $50 million each year for the chance to swim with these incredible fish. Their long migrations through international waters makes international cooperation necessary to protect them, which is particularly important because the 30 years it can take for these animals to reach reproductive maturity means that populations will take a long time to recover if they are overexploited. They’re listed by the IUCN Shark Specialist Group as Vulnerable globally. Between their charismatic nature, their inability to harm humans, and their value to ecotourism, it should be easy to convince governments to protect whale sharks *, making two recent reports all the more shocking.
This year the festival received an overwhelming number of submissions, and I was honored to sit on the pre-screening board. Films were screened for exhibition based on 4 categories: Originality, Strength of Message, Clarity of Narrative, and Production. The official list of 27 marine films for this year’s event spans topics such as plastics, shark conservation, seal biology, deep sea discoveries, as well as films with leading marine ecologists telling the stories of their research. The list of films for the March IMAX event can be found here. The official welcome video, which introduces this year’s films in a unique way, is below. Beneath the Waves Film Festival: 2012 Intro Video from Triakis Films on Vimeo. This spring and summer the film festival will embark on the “Shore Dive Series,” a series of touring dates open to the public in the US and abroad that will screen even more films that were submitted in addition to those selected for the Virginia event. Confirmed dates thus far include Seattle (July 13-15), Portland (July 20-22), and Los Angeles, CA (August 10-12), a west-coast tour in collaboration with the ocean/shark conservation organization PangeaSeed’s “The Great West Coast Migration.” For more information, see the film festival website.  Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons, via the National Marine Fisheries Service historic collection A press release circulating on Twitter, which claims that a “deadly expansion” of a California fishery will negatively affect critically endangered leatherback sea turtles, has been making waves in the marine conservation and fisheries communities, inspiring a series of interesting discussions. Is it better to buy US-caught seafood with some bycatch than foreign-caught seafood from fleets with less strict environmental regulations? Is the current “Pacific leatherback conservation area”, a large region of the ocean where no fishing is allowed, too much of a restriction on U.S. fisheries? Can there be a balance between fisheries and conservation? I invited Jonathan Gonzalez, a California graphic designer with a strong interest in marine conservation issues, to write a guest post about the swordfish fishery in question. You can follow him on Twitter here, and he’s happy to answer your questions about this issue in the comments section of this post. In addition to his graphic design work, Jonathan has served as the assistant director of the Santa Barbara Marine Mammal center, and has worked with the California Shark Coalition to gather support from fishermen for the state’s recent ban on shark fins. by Jonathan Gonzalez Fisheries are complicated and often misunderstood. We often see conflicting information about what fish we should or should not eat and we see general statements about certain gear types that over simplify an extremely complex issue. But don’t be discouraged, learning about fisheries can be very fun and can lead to eating seafood with confidence, free of any guilt or confusion. One particular fishery I want to talk about that is not only complicated, but in my opinion it is California’s most misunderstood fishery. I’m talking about the drift gillnet (DGN) fishery for swordfish and common thresher sharks (CTS). Swordfish, CTS and mako sharks caught in Hawaiian set longlines are also landed in California, but I am not going to talk about that here. I am going to focus on the DGN fishery because this fishery has been in the headlines a bit lately because of recent motions that were voted on at a Pacific Fisheries Management Council (PFMC) meeting. Here is a press release you may have seen that in my opinion is full of factual errors and a few downright slanderous statements. I’m not going to point them all out and I’m not going to try to tell you what to do. Instead I am going to give you some background about the fishery and provide you with information that will hopefully help you to make an informed decision for yourself. Continue reading Good intentions and negative transfer effects: A guest post about the California swordfish fishery  WhySharksMatter at a previous Final 4 (in the midst of the Great Darwin Beard Challenge)
South region: #11 Colorado #3 Baylor
This past Friday on the banks of the Neuse in New Bern, NC, people interested in aquaculture in the region gathered to discuss the future. The group packed the ballroom in the Hilton with scientists, extension agents, interested citizens, and of course – producers. The afternoon before some attendees had the chance to visit farms in the area firsthand, one of which I’ve previously written about (White Rock Fish Farm). Friday held talks on the science, economics, and policies of aquaculture. Saturday morning wrapped up with freshwater and saltwater workshops tackling the details of growing fish. Parallel to the whole event was a trade show exhibiting the myriad food options available, water quality testing technology, cages and nets, greenhouses, and contacts for state programs. Friday night, there was proper celebration of aquaculture in the form of the Aquafood festival showcasing products from around the state. Take home message from the event? I left wanting to put a tank in my small Beaufort yard alongside the goats, chickens, and vegetable garden. Continue reading Aquaculture in NC: North Carolina Aquaculture Development Conference
Attending scientific conferences is one of my favorite parts of my job. I get to travel to interesting places (and Mobile, Alabama), catch up with colleagues, learn about what smart people all over the world are up to, and get feedback on my own research from those smart people. Conferences help me to learn about the world, network with people in my field, and become a better scientist. To date, I’ve attended 13 conferences (including 3 international ones), and I learn something new at each one. There are a lot of non-scientists in the world who care about many of the issues discussed at scientific conferences, issues like climate change, endangered species, overfishing, and cool new discoveries about sharks. The overwhelming majority of these non-scientists lack the resources or the time to attend conferences, and many might not even know that they’re happening. In many cases, increased public awareness of a conservation issue is exactly what’s needed to help fix the problem. If the interested public can’t attend conferences and the mainstream media doesn’t typically cover them, how can we get the word out?  Image courtesy twitter.com, used with permission Part of the answer is social media, the so-called Web 2.0 technologies that simultaneously make it easier than ever before in human history for people to share information with the world (without traditional gatekeepers like the mainstream media), and make it easier than ever before in human history for people to find information about topics they care about. One social media tool that lends itself particularly well to sharing information from a conference is twitter, and live-tweeting conferences is a growing trend. For the purpose of this post, I define live-tweeting (henceforth simply “tweeting”) as simply tweeting about conference presentations and events. This tweeting can take place during the actual conference presentation (in several cases, I’ve been able to relay a question to a presenter from one of my twitter followers during the official question and answer period associated with a presentation), but doesn’t necessarily have to be. At one conference, I simply took notes on talks and tweeted about them later- the only disadvantages of this strategy are that you can’t relay questions from your followers to the presenters and you may be discussing the same topic at a different time as other twitter users. Presented below is a guide for conference organizers to promote conference tweeting, and a guide for interested twitter users to use the tool to maximum effect. The guide is with specific reference to getting important information from a conference to the interested non-scientist not-present-at-the-conference public. There are many other goals for conference tweeting (taking notes on a conference primarily for personal use, sharing important technical information with colleagues in your field, etc), and the strategies and suggestions below may not be appropriate for these goals. Continue reading How to live-tweet a conference: A guide for conference organizers and twitter users |
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