Over 15 years of ocean science and conservation online
The Beneath the Waves Film Festival, a student run film festival that brings scientists, filmmakers, and the interested public together, is now accepting submissions for the 2014 season! Any short film (less than 15 minutes) about a marine or coastal topic is welcome, including shorts by professional filmmakers, video abstracts by researchers, student films, and … Read More “Submit your short marine science or conservation films to the Beneath the Waves Film Festival” »
I scream, you scream, we all scream for ICE CREAM!!!!
That’s right ladies and gentlemen, this FSF is about a childhood (or for some, adulthood) favorite, Ice Cream!
Some rather ingenious… or mad scientist-esque ice cream makers have invented a glow-in-the-dark ice cream flavor. That is correct, you heard right, glow-in-the-dark ice cream, welcome to reality! 🙂
Privilege — within any given community, whether formal or ad hoc, social or professional, members will express varying levels of privilege. Some people will be playing the game on easy mode, others will be struggling with subtle and overtly oppressive societal and institutional structures. If you are a person of privilege who recognizes the reality of this imbalance and strives to make your community a more accessible and welcoming place to those who aren’t as privileged, you might identify yourself as an ally.
You are wrong.
Being an ally is not something you are, it’s something you do. “Ally” is not an identity, it is a set of behaviors that help acknowledge and promote underprivileged members of your community. But you have privileges that they do not and not all of your words and actions will fall under the banner of “being an ally”. Even if you consider yourself well-versed in your understanding of oppression and privilege, you will, eventually do or say something that reveals your privilege and is offensive, insensitive, or callous, if not outright cruel. The whole point of privilege is that it’s largely invisible to those who have it — including you. If you have colleagues that respect you, if people in the broader community value the work you do, if you are recognized as an important voice, people will call you out on your privilege.
How you respond to that criticism makes the difference between self-identifying as an ally, and actually being an ally.
Read More “On being an ally and being called out on your privilege” »
Halloween, in a lot of ways, is a celebration of fear. We dress like ghosts, goblins, and movie serial killers to give ourselves a sense of control over the things we’re afraid of. It’s also a good time of year to indulge in horror movies, where we can watch ghosts, goblins, and serial killers terrorize other people from the apparent safety of our own homes.
From an ecological standpoint, we have it pretty good. We’ve more or less tamed most environments on land and only make short forays into the oceans under conditions where we still have quite a few advantages. Most of the time we have more in common with Jason than his hapless victims. Imagine being a member of a school of menhaden or a seal that has to make daily trips through Shark Alley. It would be like spending your whole life as a camp counselor at Crystal Lake, constantly looking over your shoulder and getting picked off the second you let your guard down. If mortal terror was a regular part of your life, you’d better believe it would affect your daily habits. And if every member of your species lived with that same fear, there would be places no one in their right mind would go and choices between death by starvation and possible death by being eaten. After all, fish are always eating other fish. Let’s take a journey through the low end of the food web and see what horror can teach us about marine ecology.
Read More “Halloween Science: Fear Makes the Ocean Go Around” »
Back in the day, I worked as an intern at Rhode Island Marine Fisheries, where my job was basically to provide general field work help with whatever survey needed an extra pair of hands (yes, it was an awesome job). One of these was a beach seining survey looking at juvenile fishes using Rhode Island’s coastal salt ponds as nursery habitat. Among the usual silversides, mummichogs, and juvenile flounder, two of the ponds were also home to entire schools of something that I was only familiar with due to having relatives in Virginia: spot. These little Scianids, a member of the same family as Atlantic croaker and red drum, are caught in droves in the waters of Virginia and the Carolinas but traditionally have been rare north of the Chesapeake Bay. They were one of the more common species we caught in these two Rhode Island salt ponds, and occurred so consistently that we could actually observe them growing over the course of the summer. It isn’t unheard of for stray tropical fishes to get swept into Narragansett Bay on Gulf Stream eddies, where they’re either collected by aquarists or die during their first winter. However, these were populations of spot that we were seeing. I don’t know if these fish survived their first winter or have come back since I moved down to North Carolina, but even at the very beginning of my interest in fisheries ecology I knew this was odd.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxULreg4A1o
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCDgPjz9dv0
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJbJvL7Ycuc
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBbrBg-ji08
Today, Pew unleashed a mini-media blitz on the importance of predation in fisheries management. This got my attention because the interaction between marine predators and fisheries is one of my major research interests. They do a great (and slickly-designed) job explaining the basics of why paying attention to predation matters in fisheries management, and bonus … Read More “Predation Matters” »