Over 15 years of ocean science and conservation online
The Discovery Channel needs your help! They are hosting an online contest to help promote Shark Week. Film yourself singing about sharks to the tune of their wildly successful “Boom de ya deh” ads , and you could find yourself on the air during Shark Week! Let’s get some conservation-friendly humiliating singing on there! I’ll … Read More “Shark Week video contest” »
At Alligator Adventure, Charlie visits the albino alligator exhibit. He and WhySharksMatter were pleasantly surprised by the volunteer’s accurate description of mutations and deleterious alleles.
The following is a repost from the old Southern Fried Science WordPress blog. The original can be found here.
I finally had the chance to visit the the legendary Bonehenge. For those of you who aren’t longtime followers of this blog, Bonehenge is Keith Rittmaster’s vision to rearticulate a Sperm Whale skeleton and put it on display at the North Carolina Maritime Museum. We blogged about Bonehenge last year, and raised $200 for the project this summer.
With seafood season in full swing, I thought I’d repost this review of certification programs. I’ve learned lots since writing this article, most notably that the compiled data from the EDF study comes from a huge database of government sources. This gives me more confidence in their truth, but the areas tested are still light on estuaries. Everything else still stands. Please check back at the old site for comments.
Another thought process to add to the many considerations of food ethics: if you choose to eat seafood, which fisheries are sustainable and eco-friendly? For those of us who live on the coast, seafood 
represents local food that supports local businesses and helps make the connection between producer and consumer. So step one, deciding to eat seafood, has been taken. But then what? A number of nonprofits have taken on that burden and created seafood guides and certification to help you as an informed consumer. Only problem is, they sometimes differ in their listings based on what criteria they use and how they weight those criteria.
Just some food for thought – a picture really says 1000 words here. What you may not be able to see is the conservation areas completely covered up by the dots representing hog lagoons.
The following is a repost from the old Southern Fried Science WordPress blog. The original can be found here.
If a 33.5 foot Sperm Whale (Physeter macrocephalus) stranded on your beach, what would you do with it? Leave it to rot? Drag it out to sea? Blow it up? Keith Rittmaster of the North Carolina Maritime Museum decided to do one better.
This blog has never been known for heaping praise on marine mammals, but these creatures are the exception. Sperm whales are extremely strange animals. There are some fantastic online resources available that do a great job covering basic sperm whale biology, so I’d like to skip the intro and talk about some sperm whale features I find fascinating.
Read More “Bonehenge – Community action in science outreach” »
Happy birthday, America, and happy Fourth of July to all of our readers! Today marks the 234th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and many in the media are spending the day talking about life in the early United States. I’d like to take this opportunity to discuss an aspect of early American life that’s near and dear to my heart- marine biology.
Read More “Louis Agassiz and a brief history of early United States marine biology” »
I am pleased to announce that I will be working with Cindy and Alexa of Oceans 4 Ever during their Summer Sharktakular! The week of July 19th will be dedicated to shark conservation education. As with most things involving Oceans 4 Ever, a major component of the SharkTakular is a contest- specifically a shark conservation photo contest. Here are the rules:
Read More “Introducing the Summer SharkTakular photo contest!” »
We sparked a good debate over the effectiveness of direct action conservation movements over at the post “Is Sea Shepherd really saving whales?” One of the most difficult questions raised was if Sea Shepherd wasn’t there, would the Japanese make their full quota? The data presented in that post was inconclusive, because the quota increase corresponded to the beginning of SSCS’s Southern Ocean campaign, so we have no time period in which the Japanese quota was increased while Sea Shepherd was absent.
And yes, CNN failed at identifying these as Crinoids.