Over 15 years of ocean science and conservation online
As Shark Week 2013 comes to a close, I wanted to take a look back at which part of my outreach strategy worked (and didn’t work), as well as what I liked and disliked about Shark Week as a whole. Ever since my “15 important shark conservation and management terms explained with memes” post, I’ve been looking for an opportunity to incorporate more internet humor into a blog post, so here goes…
The American Elasmobranch Society, the world’s largest professional organization of shark and ray scientists, has issued a resolution calling on the Associated Press Stylebook and the Reuters Style Guide to retire the phrase “shark attack” in favor of a more accurate (and less inflammatory) wording that is scaled to represent real risk and outcomes. The AP Stylebook and Reuters Style Guides are reference guides for journalists and editors which focus on, among other things, reducing the usage of inaccurate and outdated terminology. The latest AP Stylebook, for example, had more than 90 new or updated entries which include encouraging journalists and editors to a stop using terms like “illegal immigrant“, “ethnic cleansing” and “homophobia”.
“Shark scientists in the United States and around the world have great respect for the integrity and reporting of the Associated Press and Reuters. We hope they will act on this recommendation and update their style guides to ensure that the public gets the most accurate information in the reporting of these incidents,” said Lara Ferry, President of the American Elasmobranch Society, who sent a formal letter to the AP Stylebook and Reuters Style Guide.
Currently, although “shark attack” is associated with an image of a large shark and a human fatality, the phrase is used by the media as a catch-all to describe any encounter between a human and a shark, even those that don’t result in any physical contact whatsoever. Fully 38% of reported “shark attacks” in New South Wales, Australia from 1970-2009 resulted in no injury whatsoever. This is misleading and facilitates a perception among the public that sharks are more dangerous than they really are, a perception which has negatively impacted shark conservation and management policy.
“The accuracy in media reporting of shark bites and different human-shark interactions is especially important during the kinds of tragic periods we have seen this summer. The public deserves the best information to make sure there is no confusion between very serious and fatal shark bites and minor incidents,” said Christopher Neff, a Ph.D. student at Sydney University.
In a recent paper, Neff and Bob Hueter of Mote Marine Lab proposed a scaled labeling typology to describe human-shark interactions. This typology covers the full range of these interactions, including:
The Society for Conservation Biology’s International Congress for Conservation Biology took place from July 21-25th in Baltimore, Maryland. Over 1,500 scientists and conservationists from more than 60 countries participated. Below are selected tweets from the symposium on very large marine protected areas.
The Society for Conservation Biology’s International Congress for Conservation Biology took place from July 21-25th in Baltimore, MD. Over 1,500 scientists and conservationists from more than 60 countries participated. Below are selected tweets from marine conservation (and related) sessions. Talks are in no particular chronological order.
Read More “Tweets from the Society for Conservation Biology: Marine conservation sessions” »
The Society for Conservation Biology’s International Congress for Conservation Biology took place July 21-25 in Baltimore, MD. Over 1,500 scientists and conservationists from more than 60 countries participated. Below are selected tweets from the student networking workshop, in which experienced professionals gave students their networking advice.
Read More “Tweets from the Society for Conservation Biology: Student Networking Workshop” »
As those of you who follow me on twitter know, I’ve been live-tweeting the American Elasmobranch Society conference. The meeting is the largest gathering of shark, skate and ray scientists in the world, and provided lots of opportunities to share interesting shark science and conservation news to my followers. In case you missed it, all the sessions are now Storify-ed and stored here on the blog (Plenary address, Biology and Conservation of Rays Symposium, Ecology and Conservation, Best Student Presentation/Gruber Award talks , and Physiology Behavior and Genetics).
Mary Canady of Comprendia was kind enough to compile some technical statistics on the use of the conference hashtags (#AES2013 for the American Elasmobranch Society portion of the meeting, #JMIH13 for the overall Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists). Thanks, Mary!
Between July 8th and today, there have been 1,568 unique #AES2013 tweets. Approximately half of the #AES2013 have been re-tweeted. There were 218 unique twitter users that tweeted at least one #AES2013 tweet (including RT-ing). There were approximately 10 AES members present at the meeting who tweeted at least once, including several who created a twitter account at the meeting. At least 6 AES members who were not present at the meeting followed along from home using twitter. We also took questions from twitter during the expert panel discussion at the ray symposium. For those of you not familiar with online altmetric speak, this can be summarized as “a very high level of audience engagement and interaction.”
In comparison, #JMIH13 had 1,602 unique tweets- only a handful more despite the fact that AES is a relatively small component of the overall JMIH. There were 88 unique twitter users who tweeted at least one #JMIH13 tweet, and about 1/3 of total tweets were RT-ed.
Finally, I asked the people following along on twitter to tell me a little about themselves. Here are their responses.
Read More “Who read tweets from the American Elasmobranch Society? I asked, they answered!” »
The American Elasmobranch Society is a non-profit professional organization of shark, ray, skate, and chimaera scientists. Each year, AES holds an annual conference in a different North American city where members meet and present their research. The 2013 meeting took place in Albuquerque, New Mexico from July 10-15th. The full schedule of talks (including other societies participating in the Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists) can be found here.
Presented below are selected tweets from the Physiology, Behavior, and Genetics sessions.
Read More “Tweets from the American Elasmobranch Society: Physiology, Behavior and Genetics” »
The American Elasmobranch Society is a non-profit professional organization of shark, ray, skate, and chimaera scientists. Each year, AES holds an annual conference in a different North American city where members meet and present their research. The 2013 meeting took place in Albuquerque, New Mexico from July 10-15th. The full schedule of talks (including other societies participating in the Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists) can be found here.
Below are selected tweets from the Gruber Award (best student presentation) talks.
The American Elasmobranch SocietyAmerican Elasmobranch Society is a non-profit professional organization of shark, ray, skate, and chimaera scientists. Each year, AES holds an annual conference in a different North American city where members meet and present their research. The 2013 meeting took place in Albuquerque, New Mexico from July 10-15th. The full schedule of talks (including other societies participating in the Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists) can be found here.
Here are selected tweets from Dr. Gregor Cailliet’s plenary address, “unraveling the secret lives of sharks and rays”.
Read More “Tweets from the American Elasmobranch Society: Dr. Gregor Cailliet’s plenary address” »
The American Elasmobranch Societyis a non-profit professional organization of shark, ray, skate, and chimaera scientists. Each year, AES holds an annual conference in a different North American city where members meet and present their research. The 2013 meeting took place in Albuquerque, New Mexico from July 10-15th. The full schedule of talks (including other societies participating in the Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists) can be found here.
Presented below are selected tweets from the Ecology and Conservation sessions.
Read More “Tweets from the American Elasmobranch Society: Ecology and Conservation” »