Andrew is a freelance marine biologist 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.




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One way an oil rig's blowout preventer can fail

By Andrew David Thaler, on May 3rd, 2010

There’s not much more to say other than blue marlin bill fish caught in oil rig blowout preventer.

Several people have asked why we aren’t blogging about the oil spill. The simple answer is that the Deep Sea News crew has done such an awesome job there’s not much more for us to add.

H/T Underwater Thrills

~Southern Fried Scientist

Please note: this is not taken from the well currently destroying the Gulf Coast.

May 3rd, 2010 | Tags: , , , | Category: Blogging, Science | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)

Monday Morning Blogaerobics - Black Gold and Bad Genes

By Andrew David Thaler, on May 3rd, 2010

The massive oil spill creeping across the Gulf Coast dominated the twitterverse this weekend. DrCraigMc has been doing an awesome job keeping us up to date on the progress of the oil and the status of clean-up. Deep Sea News posted a time line of the disaster. At the current rate of 210,000 gallons of oil a day, this spill to reach the magnitude of the Exxon-Valdez in 62 days. In comparison, 67,500 gallons of oil enters the ocean from runoff in the United States every day, for a grand total of 24.6 million gallons a year dumped into the ocean.

Sparked by a comment I made on Thursday, several tweeps have been sharing paternity fails from classic grade school biology lesson:

@WhySharksMatter: You joke, but a girl in my high school found out she was adopted after we did a pedigree lab. She was quite unhappy.

@SFriedScientist: my 8th grade bio class did it with blood types. 2 kids found out that their parents couldn’t be their parents.

@ebamignone: Cold Spring Harbor labs used to have visiting students bring hairs from each parent. They had to stop because too often 1 hair didn’t match with the kids. “Ask your parents” didn’t work…

We’ve also revamped the homepage to make it more readable. It should now be much easier to subscribe to out Feedburner RSS Feed, recieve e-mail updates, or visit our Facebook Fan Page.

The dislike threshold on comments has been increased to 10. Only comments with more than 10 net dislikes will fade.

~Southern Fried Scientist

May 3rd, 2010 | Tags: , | Category: Blogging | Comments are closed

So much for drill, baby, drill

By Andrew David Thaler, on April 29th, 2010

Satellite image provided by NASA

April 29th, 2010 | Tags: , , | Category: Blogging | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)