Author: Andrew Thaler

Marine science and conservation. Deep-sea ecology. Population genetics. Underwater robots. Open-source instrumentation. The deep sea is Earth's last great wilderness.

First Bluefin Tuna sells for $70,000 at Tsukiji Fish Auction (UPDATED)

Posted on By Andrew Thaler 1 Comment on First Bluefin Tuna sells for $70,000 at Tsukiji Fish Auction (UPDATED)
Conservation

Update: The blog Food, Sake, Tokyo has the numbers for this year’s auction. Perhaps most interesting, per kilogram the first tuna of the year wasn’t the most expensive fish. A 168-kg fish sold for $382 per kilo (~$64,000 total) compared to $305 per kg for the first fish of the year. In an unexpected turn, … Read More “First Bluefin Tuna sells for $70,000 at Tsukiji Fish Auction (UPDATED)” »

Southern Fried Science Year-in-Review

Posted on By Andrew Thaler
Blogging

2013 starter with a bang. More specifically, it started with a Bang! Zop! Pow! when I published Five organisms with real super powers that rival their comic book counterparts, a post that set the tenor of my writing style for the rest of the year. The ongoing posts in “Andrew makes lists of ridiculous organisms with tenuous pop-culture connections” have been among the most widely read articles on Southern Fried Science.

David followed suit with his delightfully perverse 50 Shades of Grey Reef Shark: A Valentine’s Day Special Report on Shark Sex (With Pictures! And Video!). Amy kicked of the SFS Department of Human Dimensions in Fisheries Management with Know Your Fishermen as well as your Farmer to which Chuck adds — Fishermen Are Not Evil in his inaugural post. Iris taught us all about Issues facing Puget Sound Chinook salmon in her first post as well.

Read More “Southern Fried Science Year-in-Review” »

An open challenge to journalists covering next week’s Bluefin Tuna Auction

Posted on By Andrew Thaler 3 Comments on An open challenge to journalists covering next week’s Bluefin Tuna Auction
Conservation

Every year, on the first Saturday of January, crowds gather at the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo to watch the auction of the first Bluefin Tuna of the year. For the last three years, the legendary first tuna broke the record for most expensive fish ever purchased — $396,000 in 2011, $736,000 in 2012, and a staggering $1,800,000 in 2013. Often highlighted as a symbol of the extent people are willing to go to eat that last bluefin tuna, the annual sale of this fish sets the tone for tuna conservation. With the relocation of the Tsukiji fish market to Toyosu in 2014, next week’s auction promises to be the biggest one yet.

Southern Bluefin Tuna are critically endangered, yet political maneuvering has kept tuna fisheries open and several Pacific nations have been caught falsifying their catch reports. Even still, the massive sale of the first tuna of the year is not indicative of the real demand for Bluefin Tuna.

Read More “An open challenge to journalists covering next week’s Bluefin Tuna Auction” »

25 signs that you were a conservation child of the 90’s

Posted on By Andrew Thaler
Conservation, Popular Culture

The 90’s were a big decade for the environmental movement. The media landscape was filled with environmentally-themed programming. Major laws in the US and internationally were passed to protect the planet. Formative events galvanized, diversified, and sometimes radicalized the conservation community. And, like many other of our generation, we came of age right in the middle of it.

Here are 25 signs that your laid the foundation for your environmental ethic squarely in the 1990’s. Happy Holidays from Southern Fried Science.

1. Captain Planet taught us that “The Power is Yours!”

captain-planet

You knew this would be on the list, so let’s get it out of the way. Moving on.

Read More “25 signs that you were a conservation child of the 90’s” »

We know what the Bloop is and it’s not mermaids

Posted on By Andrew Thaler 7 Comments on We know what the Bloop is and it’s not mermaids
Science

Are we really doing this again? Already?

Yes, Animal Planet apparently just re-aired the pair of fake mermaid documentaries. Judging by the search terms coming in, people still have the same questions: “Is Mermaids: the New Evidence Fake?” – YES; “Is Paul Robertson a real marine biologist – NO; and finally, a question that is actually interesting, “What is the Bloop?”

Read More “We know what the Bloop is and it’s not mermaids” »

A scientist writes science fiction – thoughts on self-publishing my first novel

Posted on By Andrew Thaler 1 Comment on A scientist writes science fiction – thoughts on self-publishing my first novel
Popular Culture

Early this month, I completed and self-published my first science fiction novel through Amazon’s Kindle Direct publishing service (and, a few days later, as a paperback through Createspace). The ideas for the book were conceived over a long week in August, while vacationing with my parents at a rental house in St. Michaels, Maryland. Wandering through the low-lying eastern shore towns started me thinking about the kinds of stories we would tell hundreds of years from now. Thus, the central conceit of Fleet — that it was not a tale of environmental devastation but of people living their lives in a post-sea-level-rise world — surfaced.

Writing Fleet was a marathon. All told, from the first day that I started outlining characters and deciding what the central story of Fleet — uncovering a human disaster caused by desperation and betrayal, then buried at sea — to the day I hit publish on the Amazon server, Fleet took a little over 3 and a half months, during which time I was also moving across the country, finishing several scientific manuscripts, and looking for a job.

Having now had a few weeks to decompress, I think it’s a good time to reflect on the book, what I tried to accomplish, and where it goes from here.

Read More “A scientist writes science fiction – thoughts on self-publishing my first novel” »

A Guide to Tweeting at Scientific Meetings for Social Media Veterans

Posted on By Andrew Thaler
Blogging, Science

A year ago, David Shiffman published How to live-tweet a conference: A guide for conference organizers and twitter users, an informative and exhaustive guide to using twitter to help promote scientific conferences. Since then, I’m certain you’ve internalized his lessons and become a veteran of the science twitterverse. Now that you’re among the top twitter users in your field, it’s time to address how that changes the way you use twitter to interact with your peers.

How do you know if you’re a twitter veteran? There’s no real, concrete rule but, being that this is a guide for scientists, let’s say that a veteran twitter has significantly more followers than the average twitter user attending the conference. If you sampled the number of followers that each conference attendee on twitter had, you would fall outside of the 95% confidence interval. For a huge tech conference, this might mean you have hundreds of thousands, even millions of followers. For a small, regional conference in a relatively narrow field, this could be a couple of hundred followers.

Read More “A Guide to Tweeting at Scientific Meetings for Social Media Veterans” »

Help Support Ocean Conservation this Holiday Season and Promote your Ocean Conservation Organization!

Posted on By Andrew Thaler 2 Comments on Help Support Ocean Conservation this Holiday Season and Promote your Ocean Conservation Organization!
Conservation

With Thanksgiving in the rearview mirror, we have entered the season for charitable giving. In America alone, there are thousands of ocean conservation organization that rely on donations and grants for their continued operation. Rather than list out our favorites, which tend to get quite a bit of promotion through Southern Fried Science’s various platforms, this year, I am inviting representatives from any ocean conservation organization to promote themselves in the comment thread. So, if your NGO is doing an end of the year fund raiser, if you have an “adopt-a-critter” programs going for the holidays, or if you just want to get the word out about your organization, feel free to leave a comment and let us know a bit about you organization and its goals.

Southern Fried Science has a large, dedicated, and ocean literate audience. Let us know what you’re up to. I promise it will be worth your time.

Read More “Help Support Ocean Conservation this Holiday Season and Promote your Ocean Conservation Organization!” »