Conservation – Page 20 – Southern Fried Science

10 ways drones can save the ocean

June 27, 2014June 27, 2014 Andrew Thaler 3 Comments

Over the last few months, I’ve been digging into the confusing tangle of laws that protect marine mammals and regulate the use of drones–small, semi-autonomous vehicles used by both researchers and hobbyists to observe whales and other marine mammals. You can check out the outcome of my findings over at Motherboard, where I just published Drones Would Revolutionize Oceanic Conservation, If They Weren’t Illegal. The quick and dirt summary is that there is no legal way to fly drones near whales, at the moment, but there are ways to do it responsibly while we work to catch regulations up with technology.

In working through these guidelines, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we can use this new technology to aid ocean conservation. Below are my top 10 favorite ideas for using drones to save the ocean.

1. Monitor our coastlines for poaching and other illegal activities.

Selected conference tweets from Sharks International #Sharks14

June 9, 2014June 9, 2014 David Shiffman

Conservation, Science

I’ve just returned from the second Sharks International, a scientific conference for shark and ray researchers, which was held in South Africa. With nearly 300 researchers and conservationists from more than 38 countries in attendance, the conference was a fantastic learning and networking experience, and a huge success.

In addition to countless talks focusing on cool discoveries about amazing animals and important conservation issues from all over the world, I don’t think I ate one meal at a table with fewer than 4 countries represented. Our lab, the RJ Dunlap Marine Conservation Program at the University of Miami, gave 3 scientific presentations, including my own, which was well-received and resulted in some fascinating discussions. The “social media for scientific outreach” workshop I gave had more than 50 people attend, resulting in a couple of dozen scientists newly joining twitter.

Speaking of twitter, more than 7,000 tweets (including re-tweets) were shared using the conference hashtag #Sharks14 ! Below are links to 8 Storify stories I made: 4 plenary sessions and 4 days of scientific presentations. * Scientists, if any of the tweets about your talk are incorrect, please alert me in the comments and I’ll edit or delete them immediately. *

Nerds for Nature harnesses citizen scientists to monitor environmental change

May 26, 2014May 27, 2014 Andrew Thaler

Conservation, Science

[Note, this is a press release for an ongoing project of which Amy and myself are involved.]

Monday, May 26, 2014 — In September 2013, a large wildfire, ignited by careless target shooters, blazed across Mt. Diablo, leaving 3,100 acres of state park scorched. Wildfires are an important component of chaparral ecosystems, clearing the way for younger growth to take hold, but monitoring recovery after wildfires is an intensive prospect for over-committed park staff. Enter the Nerds for Nature and their change monitoring brackets.

Inspired by monitorchange.org (created by Sam Droege of the U.S. Geological Survey), Nerds for Nature combined low-tech angle brackets with high-tech smart phones to allow hikers to help monitor the ongoing fire recovery. Park visitors are invited to take pictures at predefined locations, aligning their phones against a simple angle bracket that ensures images will center on the same area. Photos are then uploaded to one of several social media services, where a program scrapes the publicly available images and compiles a time lapse video.

Don’t build a new inter-ocean canal across Nicaragua

May 21, 2014 Guest Writer 1 Comment

Conservation

Dr.Prosanta Chakrabarty is an Assistant Professor at Louisiana State University and an ichthyologist and evolutionary biologist. He is also Curator of Fishes at LSU’s Museum of Natural Science. You can learn more about him from his website www.prosanta.net and follow him on Twitter @LSU_FISH.

The National Assembly of Nicaragua approved the rights to build a new canal through the country to connect the Carribean (Atlantic) to the Pacific just as the Panama Canal does about 400 miles to the south. The approval of this contract was done largely without any scientific insights and largely without warning. The rights were given to a Chinese firm, the Hong Kong Nicaragua Development (HKND) and gives them power over this property for up to 100 years. The HKND has no experience with a project of this scale, and was largely unknown until this deal.

The new canal would be enormous, and cut across Lake Nicaragua (Cocibolca) and also adjacent rivers and waterbodies. No environmental impact studies have been completed. The Academia de Ciencias de Nicaragua recently published a manuscript detailing the problems with this proposed canal, “EL CANAL INTEROCEÁNICO POR NICARAGUA: Aportes al debate” [Available here: ]

It is multi-authored, thoughtful and level-headed: it is also a searing criticism of the stupidity of the idea of this new canal. The report thoroughly examines cultural, environmental, and economic impacts of the proposed canal.

Here are the top reasons I’ve learned from that report (with pg.#s) why this canal is ‘muy malo’ for the people and environment of Nicaragua.

It’s illegal for anglers to land hammerheads in Florida. It’s time that media coverage pointed that out.

April 24, 2014May 5, 2014 David Shiffman 18 Comments

Conservation, Science

On January 1st, 2012, new Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission regulations came into effect, making it illegal for fishermen to land great, smooth, or scalloped hammerhead sharks in Florida waters. The legal term “land” is clearly defined in the Florida Code:

“Land,” when used in connection with the harvest of marine organisms, means the physical act of bringing the harvested organism ashore”

“Harvest” means the catching or taking of a marine organism by any means whatsoever, followed by a reduction of such organism to possession. Marine organisms that are caught but immediately returned to the water free, alive, and unharmed are not harvested”

Florida code section 68B-44 (emphasis mine)

In other words, if a fish is brought out of the water, it is “landed”. If anglers stop the act of releasing a fish to measure it or take a photo, it is not “immediately released.” If a fish isn’t “immediately returned alive and unharmed” (and if the extremely physiologically stressful act of bringing a hammerhead out of the water results in it dying after release, it was not released “unharmed,”) it is harvested. If you drag the shark out of the water and leave it there until it stops moving long enough that you feel safe to approach it, that is not an “immediately released” animal, and it isn’t an animal that is “released unharmed.” Landing and/or harvesting hammerhead sharks is illegal. This is clear under the law, and has been confirmed by numerous consultations with an FWC Law Enforcement official.

Collecting organisms to save their species

April 21, 2014April 21, 2014 Guest Writer 3 Comments

Blogging, Conservation, Science

A recent piece in Science (Minteer et al. 2014) titled “Avoiding (Re)extinction” advocated avoiding collecting specimens for the sake of confirming the existence of a species. In lieu of killing and collecting the animal the authors suggest using “high-resolution photography, audio recording, and nonlethal sampling.” As a natural history curator of fishes I found this to be a pretty bad idea.

My PhD students (Bill Ludt and Caleb McMahan) in Costa Rica collecting specimens for their thesis projects. These guys better not just come back with pictures.

I don’t like killing animals, I was a strict vegetarian for 10 years (now I just eat sustainable seafood – hey, I live in Louisiana). I certainly wouldn’t want to endanger a species by over collecting it. I know of no scientific collectors who kill rare animals just so he or she can say they have it in their collections. We collect for a few simple reasons: because specimens are not available otherwise via loan, or additional specimens are needed for a comparative study, or because we need vouchers as evidence of the existence of the taxon.

I’ve collected rare species in the past, particularly some of the cavefishes I work on. For one of these species, Typhleotris mararybe, we collected the only two specimens we or anyone ever saw. We were in a very remote part of Madagascar and we were only allowed to collect two specimens from any given locality. I knew these individuals were part of a species new to science as soon as I looked at them. Did removing two samples place this species at risk of extinction? Guessing the population was much larger than what we found just at the surface, I would suppose not. What were we to do? Not collect them and just take pictures? We wouldn’t have been able to do the necessary comparative descriptive analysis to actually prove their novelty required by the ICZN (International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature). We collected these specimens so that we could formally describe this new and fantastic new species so that the world can be aware of their existence and so that measures can be put in place to conserve them and study them further.

Deep sea sharks: Do they survive?

April 2, 2014 Guest Writer

Conservation, Science

Brendan Talwar is a graduate student at the Florida State University Coastal & Marine Lab studying Ecology and Evolution. Hispast experiences in diverse marine ecosystems have led to his current research interests in deep sea fisheries management. His thesis work will take place in the Gulf of Mexico and Exuma Sound while working closely with collaborators at the Cape Eleuthera Institute and The Island School, where he will use this project to teach an Applied Research course.

Imagine it is a crisp, sunny, warm spring day and you’re out on the flats hoping a trout rips your topwater minnow to pieces. Out of a deep pocket fringed by oyster bars, a fish erupts from the mirrored surface and engulfs your bait. You win the fight, measure and bag the yellow-mouthed speckled trout, and repeat.

An hour later, you snag an undersized mackerel near the gills and reel it in for a few photos before throwing it back under the assumption that it will survive, grow, and eventually reproduce. You keep fishing and hope for the best, but find yourself wondering if it truly survived until the end of the day. What if it didn’t? Well, you didn’t mean to catch the fish. You didn’t mean for it to experience a fight-or-flight response, for its blood pH to drop, or for its lactic acid to build up. You were targeting 15” trout, and catching the mackerel was an accident. If the fish didn’t survive, then your daily catch represents a greater impact on local fish populations than the simple number you took home for supper.

Explainer: An end to Japan’s “scientific whaling” program in Antarctica

March 31, 2014April 2, 2014 David Shiffman 1 Comment

Conservation

Early this morning, the International Court of Justice declared that Japan’s scientific whaling program in Antarctica violates the International Whaling Commission moratorium, and ordered Japan to stop. This is big news for the marine conservation community, but like many legal policy decisions, it can be difficult to determine exactly what it means. I asked marine mammal biologists, conservation activists, and policy experts to help explain it.

What is the International Court of Justice (ICJ)? The International Court of Justice is essentially the judicial branch of the United Nations. Any of the 192 United Nations member states may submit a case against any other state.

What is the International Whaling Commission (IWC)? The International Whaling Commission is a regulatory body that was founded in 1946 as a result of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling treaty. The 88 member nations (any nation can join) regulate whaling and whale conservation issues.

What is “scientific whaling?” Scientific whaling refers to intentionally killing a whale for the purpose of scientific research. According to marine mammal researcher Jake Levenson, this is permitted by Article 8 of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling. According to Levenson, “In the 1940’s [when this rule was made,] we didn’t have many of the tools we have now to study whales, so at the time it was thought to be appropriate to kill whales for scientific purposes.” Several experts I spoke to noted that this was never intended to be a large-scale program. Here is a list of some of the scientific research that resulted from the program.

Beaufort NOAA Lab Builds Community: It would be a huge loss to say goodbye

March 27, 2014 Bluegrass Blue Crab

Conservation, Uncategorized

Hopefully many of our faithful readers have seen the sad announcement that the NOAA lab in Beaufort, NC may be no more. The main reason cited for the potential closure is financial – the cost of maintaining an aging building. Our friends over at the fisheries blog have written a sound debunking of this reasoning, also lamenting the loss of an institution over a century old and hub of fisheries research for the mid-Atlantic. In short, the Beaufort Lab represents a strong history of productive research, recent investment into infrastructure, and a critical part of a much larger marine science community in the region. It’s fair to say that the lab is the founding member and backbone of a marine science consortium with the Rachel Carson National Estuarine Research Reserves, Duke University, NC State, the University of North Carolina, NC Division of Marine Fisheries, and Carteret Community College.

Beyond the institutions in a list, the Beaufort lab cements a broader community and economy of Carteret County, which is still largely based on fishing. While relations with the universities and state fisheries enforcement can sometimes be strained, NOAA rises above as a voice of reason and glue of collaboration around protecting our marine resources for food, economy, and society. If you believe me, there are steps you should take right now to voice your support for the lab by contacting local Congressional representation – those with the power to stop the closure: Congressman Walter Jones, Senator Kay Hagen, and Senator Richard Burr – and write a public comment to the House Committee currently reviewing the decision. For those who need a little more context and information, read on for some personal testimony demonstrating the value of the Beaufort lab I observed during my dissertation work in the area, which was focused on collaborative fisheries research. In a nutshell, I’ve observed how the Beaufort lab builds relationships between scientists and fishermen and therefore, indirectly, trust in NOAA.

No, harassing a shark for fun is not ethically equivalent to scientific research that helps conserve a species

March 26, 2014March 27, 2014 David Shiffman 18 Comments

Blogging, Conservation, Science

Last month, I wrote an article for Scientific American that I shouldn’t have had to write. In it, I argued that riding, poking, prodding or otherwise harassing a free-swimming large predatory animal for fun is a bad idea. I do mean “argued;” believe it or not, there are people who strongly disagree with me. In my article, I was very general and diplomatic, and I took pains to avoid naming names.

However, my article was at least partially inspired by the disrespectful, potentially dangerous, and very public behavior of one person: the editor of Shark Diver magazine, Eli Martinez. Eli recently wrote an article for Medium, in which he stated that: “Look, I have no problem with touching sharks and I do not have any problem with other people touching sharks.” He also notes that ” I just think riding sharks is disrespectful to the animals .” He has also shared the following photos (and many, many more like them) on his Facebook page, photos showing behavior he does not seem to consider disrespectful.