Over 15 years of ocean science and conservation online
From a global pandemic to information overload to out-of-control drug prices, 1995’s Johnny Mnemonic made a lot of bold predictions about 2021 that landed a bit too hard. Among the hits that landed hardest? The rise of containerized housing and a chaotic kludge of weird construction welded together in a way that doesn’t exactly scream stability and permanence.
The year is 2021. Can we put to rest the idea that a shipping container home is anything but an aesthetic choice?
Donald F. Trump hates sharks. We learned that in 2013, when, during an entirely uncontroversial discussion about shark conservation foundations on Twitter, the would-be President of the United States of America blocked a small cohort of marine scientists.
Gracing David Shiffman and myself with a timeline blissfully free of his insufferable Tweets for eight years was the only good thing he has ever done for the ocean.
Initially, it appeared as though Trump’s war on the oceans would take a backseat to his other social, judicial, and environmental atrocities. Though a troubling selection for a host of reasons, Wilbur Ross’s appointment as Secretary of Commerce was seen as a relatively non-threatening move. His letter to NOAA staff, reassuring them that his department would continue to follow best-available science, was met with praise. His initial leadership appointments received bipartisan support.
It is clear now in hindsight, that that initial optimism was intensely naïve.
Read More “Donald Trump secures his legacy as the worst ocean president in American history.” »
This is the winter of finding as many good, educational projects to keep our kids as occupied as possible. If you’re anything like me, you probably have a stack of assorted electronics in various stages of disrepair, which is great for your hardware hacking dads and moms, but kids need projects with a little more structure and, especially for the younger ones, a lot less soldering.
We can’t build open-source CTDs every day.
Fortunately, the awesome folks at Adafruit have built up an absolutely massive collection of electronics projects using just about every component you can imagine. I’ve culled through the archive to find three kid-friendly (projects that don’t require soldering or involve particularly risky components) ocean and weather projects that take advantage of NOAA’s publicly available databases to help students learn a little bit about electronics and the natural world.
All of these projects were built with the help of my kiddo (age four), require no soldering or electronics skills to start, involve just enough coding to stay interesting, and use Adafruit’s CircuitPython ecosystem, which is fairly easy to learn. Adafruit does a great job compiling detailed instruction for every project. These can all be completed in a lazy afternoon.
Read More “3 kid-friendly STEAM electronics projects that harness NOAA’s massive public databases” »
Hi, friends at Southern Fried Science!
You’ve probably seen in the media lately that there’s been a lot of coverage about whether sharks are being killed for SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. With an awesome undergraduate co-author, I’ve tried to gather some facts about what is happening (or might happen) and what it means. You can read a preprint of that work here, or read on for a short FAQ in plain English.
August 26, 2020 Don’t take the bait. Baiting fish for the sake of tourists has always engendered a fair bit of criticism. New research out of the Cook Islands demonstrates that frequent baiting at popular snorkeling sites alters fish behavior and causes harm to the reef ecosystem. Just don’t do it. More trouble in Mauritius. … Read More “Taking the bait, chopping up tankers, the calamari comeback, and some #scicomm advice– What’s up with the Ocean this week?” »
On Tuesday, August 18th please join us for a (now virtual) European shark conservation symposium as part of the (now virtual) 6th International Marine Conservation Congress (IMCC!) IMCC is a once-every-two-years event that brings together ocean scientists, conservation and management professionals, and educators from all over the world- register here for just $25 for the virtual version. Follow along on twitter with #IMCCsharks
We have 11 speakers from all over Europe and North America speaking on a variety of issues related to the conservation and management of sharks and their relatives in European waters, and ongoing efforts to scientifically study especially threatened species. The symposium will also feature a panel discussion and informal mingling via a Zoom happy hour with some of the speakers after the symposium ends. The symposium is broken into two 90 minute parts, be sure to check out them both!
Amidst all the hysteria surrounding the seemingly unstoppable COVID-19, we bring you a story of a fish without blood. In 1928 a biologist sampling off the coast of Antarctica pulled up an unusual fish. It was extremely pale (translucent in some parts), had large eyes and a long toothed snout, and somewhat resembled a crocodile (it was later named the “white crocodile fish). Unbeknownst at the time, but the biologist had just stumbled on a fish containing no red blood pigments (hemoglobin) and no red blood cells – he iron-rich protein such cells use to bind and ferry oxygen through the circulatory system from heart to lungs to tissues and back again. The fish was one of sixteen species of what is now commonly referred to as icefishes that comprise the family Channichthyidae, endemic around the Antarctic continent.
Author’s note: This blog post is part of a multi-week assignment for students taking my introduction to marine biology course at Arizona State University, and also part of an exercise in my professional development training workshops on communicating science to the popular press. I am sharing the background information publicly because I believe it’s a topic that is of broad interest.
The internet in general and social media specifically have made it easier than ever before in human history for experts to share information relevant to their area of expertise with the interested public, with journalists, and with policymakers. Unfortunately, these same communications tools have also made it easier than ever before in human history for misinformation to be widely shared. When wrong information goes viral, it can lead to the destruction of democracy and civilization as we know it people believing factually incorrect things about fish.
Therefore, it’s important for anyone and everyone who cares about the future of democracy and civilization as we know it my marine biology students and media training workshop participants to be aware of how to find reliable and accurate news, and how to spot misleading or inaccurate news. If you can do this effectively, you may well save democracy and civilization as we know it do well in my course.
Something need not be actual “fake news,” a term we should consider using less because it’s become politically charged to the point that it’s nearly meaningless and people don’t hear what you actually mean to say, to be inaccurate and problematic. There are many different ways that a news article can be biased, misleading, and/or wrong.
First, I’ll go through some elements of a reliable, accurate science or environment news story. Then I’ll go through red flags of inaccurate, problematic news stories. Throughout, I’ll highlight representative examples. (Students, after reading this you’ll be assigned some articles to look for these elements and red flags in).
Scientists (and sci-fi fans) have to varying degrees been discussing the concept of suspended animation for years; the idea that the biological functions of the human body can somehow be put on “pause” for a prescribed period of time while preserving the physiological capabilities. If you’ve ever watched any sci-fi movie depicting interstellar travel you have probably seen some iteration of this concept as a way to get around the plot conundrum of the vastness of space and space travel times, relative to natural human aging and human life span. The basic principle of suspended animation already exists within the natural world, associated with the lethargic state of animals or plants that appear, over a period, to be dead but can then “wake-up” or prevail without suffering any apparent harm. This concept is often termed in different contexts: hibernation, dormancy, or anabiosis (this last terms refers to some aquatic invertebrates and plants in scarcity conditions). It is these real-world examples that likely inspire the human imagination of the possibilities for suspended human animation. The concept of suspended human animation is more commonly viewed through the lens of science fiction (and interstellar travel), however, the shift of this concept from scientific fiction to science reality has a more practical human application.
A couple of years ago, several of the people organizing the International Marine Conservation Congress let slip in their planning discussions that they played Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). There are many of us of a certain age that remember fondly playing in our youth, some of us have kids who are now getting of an age where we can, in turn, teach them how to play, and some were drawn in by the surge in Youtube and podcast shows like the hugely popular “Critical Role” where literally millions of people turn in to watch a bunch of nerds play Dungeons and Dragons … and have fun.
This led to the idea of playing a game at the conference. After more discussion, perhaps helped by a few drinks, the idea was spawned that perhaps we could make this game marine-themed and educational? Maybe even play this game in front of an audience at the conference? Perhaps even record it and share it online…?!
Read More “Come to the geek side of #scicomm: Marine science education by Dungeons & Dragons” »
