Southern Fried Science

Check out Episode 1 of Blue Pints: shark fishing, shark finning, and finding common ground in shark conservation

June 23, 2012October 27, 2013 Andrew Thaler 5 Comments

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Sunday night at 7:30, David Shiffman and myself will host the first, of what we hope will be many, Blue Pints on Google+. The two of us will get together via Google Hangouts and broadcast a 45-minute-to-one-hour program discussing recent important issues in ocean science, while enjoying a pint of what-cures-you. We’ll provide a link to the live stream (and subsequent YouTube video) here, in this post, as well as announce it over our various social media platforms. We’ll be monitoring the comment thread on the Google+ post, so feel free to ask questions and join the discussion during the hangout.

This week, we’ll be discussing shark fishing, shark finning, and finding common ground in shark conservation. Tune in Sunday at 7:30!

Watch the video here:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ_8ZtKKfjk

A brief, poorly researched, history of amphibious vehicles

June 22, 2012 Andrew Thaler

Popular Culture

James Bond had them. Baltimore’s inner harbor has them. Mitt Romney is probably building one for each of his moon mansions. From the Alligator Tug to the Boston Duck Boats, amphibious vehicles have been with us for more than a century. Which is why it’s strange to see a headline, dated June 21st, 2012, touting “WORLD’S FIRST AMPHIBIOUS CAR REVEALED“.

Now, if we want to strictly limit ourselves to production line, non-military, non-commercial vehicles (so no decommissioned beach landers or custom fanboat VW bugs), than the first amphibious vehicle was probably the Amphibicar, way back in 1965:

Amphicar im Main, am Eisernen Steg in Ffm via Wikimedia Commons

Notoriously leaky, not entirely stable, but still pretty swank. If Romney ever finishes building his moon mansion’s moon ocean pool for amphibious moon cars, he’ll join the ranks of former president Lyndon Johnson, who also owned an Amphibicar.

Wednesday Morning Open Thread – we’re gonna need a bigger boat

June 20, 2012June 19, 2012 Andrew Thaler 1 Comment

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It’s that time of the week again. Please use this space to ask questions, share links, start a discussion, or just say hi. Today’s thread brought to you by the boarding ladder on the Scripps research pier. What was your most eventful boat launch?

Saving Bimini: A campaign to protect a Bahamian gem

June 19, 2012October 27, 2013 Guest Writer 11 Comments

Conservation

Kristine Stump is a PhD candidate in Marine Biology and Fisheries at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS). Her dissertation focuses on the effects of anthropogenic nursery habitat loss on juvenile lemon sharks in Bimini, Bahamas. She was the Principal Investigator of the Bimini Biological Field Station (BBFS, or Sharklab) from 2008 – 2011 while collecting field data for her degree and has been heavily involved in the process of establishing a Marine Protected Area in Bimini. Kristine has an M.A. in Marine Policy from RSMAS, and prior to entering the doctoral program, she spent five years working in Washington, DC at Ocean.US – the National Office for Integrated and Sustained Ocean Observations (now the NOAA IOOS Program). In addition, she has worked for the Census of Marine Life program office at the Consortium for Ocean Leadership in Washington, DC.

There is an apex predator roaming the seas. For hundreds of thousands of years, this beast has hunted in the waters of the world’s oceans. Relentless is it in its search along the shorelines for that which satisfies its primal urges. Its numbers ever on the rise, the destruction in its path knows no bounds. And now, in 2012, it wants to dominate the sea more than ever before: it wants glass-bottom bungalows. It needs yacht dockage at its vacation home. It craves manicured fairways. IT MUST HAVE AN INFINITY POOL!

If you haven’t already guessed, the apex predator here is man. Throughout history, the environment has shaped man, but now more than ever, man is shaping the environment. In the current era of environmental awareness, however, we have learned that there are limits to the anthropogenic changes ecosystems can withstand while still maintaining ecosystem function. Luckily, we have learned to implement mitigation strategies to offset, to some degree, the negative effects of human expansion.

What shark finning means (and doesn’t mean): a primer and quiz

June 18, 2012June 26, 2012 David Shiffman 82 Comments

Conservation, Science

Shark finning, one of the most wasteful, unsustainable, and inhumane methods of gathering food in the history of human civilization, has rightly become a hot topic in the marine conservation movement. However, there is a great deal of confusion among activists concerning this problem and the best way to solve it. Those of you who follow me on twitter have seen me point out numerous recent anti-finning “awareness campaigns” which feature photographs of sharks that have not actually been finned.

Shark finning does not mean removing the fins from a shark. This is really important and seems to be a source of some confusion- not every shark fin for sale in markets is the result of shark finning! Shark finning means removing the fins from a shark while still on the fishing vessel and dumping the rest of the shark overboard. This is a problem because its wasteful (less than 10% of the weight of a shark is used), because its easy to quickly overfish a population even from a small boat (fins don’t take up a lot of space on board), and because its almost impossible for managers to know how many of each species were harvested. As stated above, this practice is also shockingly inhumane, as the sharks are often still alive when they are dumped overboard.

Understanding Sea Level Rise: Why a linear extrapolation is the least reasonable predictor of future changes

June 14, 2012June 18, 2012 Andrew Thaler 2 Comments

Conservation, Science

The Division of Coastal Management shall be the only State agency authorized to develop rates of sea-level rise and shall do so only at the request of the Commission. These rates shall only be determined using historical data, and these data shall be limited to the time period following the year 1900. Rates of sea-level rise may be extrapolated linearly to estimate future rates of rise but shall not include scenarios of accelerated rates of sea-level rise.

source (emphasis mine)

This is the text of the notorious, anti-science, anti-coastal community bill that was originally floated in the North Carolina state senate. A revised version of that bill is now under review, with new language that now mandates that:

The Commission and the Division of Coastal Management may collaborate with other State agencies, boards, commissions, other public entities, or institutions when defining sea-level rise or developing rates of sea-level rise. These rates shall be determined using statistically significant, peer-reviewed historical data generated using generally accepted scientific and statistical techniques. Historic rates of sea-level rise may be extrapolated to estimate future rates of rise but shall not include scenarios of accelerated rates of sea-level rise unless such rates are from statistically significant, peer-reviewed data and are consistent with historic trends.

source (emphasis mine)

While this new language is almost certainly an improvement over the old bill, which was heavily supported by a lobbying group for coastal developers and heavily opposed by organizations that actually care what happens to the Carolina coastline and its historic communities, it is still problematic. By problematic, I mean wrong. And by wrong I mean that by refusing to allow accelerated estimates of sea level rise, it explicitly ignores all the best available science and contradicts 130 millenia of historic precedent.

Medusa: Scientists document rarely seen deepwater sharks using baited video cameras

June 14, 2012June 14, 2012 David Shiffman 1 Comment

Science

The deep sea is one of the largest, least explored, and most unique ecosystems on the planet. An enormous variety of weird and wonderful creatures make the deep sea their home, including many species of sharks. A new project, headed up by our friends at the Cape Eleuthera Institute, hopes to learn more about these sharks.

According to Edd Brooks, CEI’s shark research and conservation program manager,

“About half of all known species of sharks make this cold, dark high pressure environment their home, and new deep water species are being described all the time. The issue we are currently facing is that basic information about the taxonomy, biology and ecology of these animals is virtually non-existent, yet they are already being harvested by commercial fisheries. The little we do know about deep water species is worrying, in that they are thought to be more sensitive to fishing pressure than all other fish – and look what we have managed to do their more robust shallow water cousins already. The worry is that in some areas, we are already be losing species before they can be described taxonomically.”

Wednesday Morning Open Thread – skeptical chicken

June 13, 2012June 12, 2012 Andrew Thaler 4 Comments

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Another week and another open thread. Here is a space where you can ask questions, share links, or just say hi. This week’s open thread sponsored by Polymerase Chain Reaction, our very skeptical chicken. A couple weeks ago, lots of people were talking about Rayfish, a hoax website claiming to produce genetically modified stingray sneakers. … Read More “Wednesday Morning Open Thread – skeptical chicken” »

Kangaroo court: an unjust criminal justice system for animals in National Parks?

June 12, 2012June 12, 2012 David Shiffman 6 Comments

Conservation, Science

On August 25th of last year, a man was brutally killed while vacationing in Montana. An expert forensics team was called in to the scene of the crime, and quickly determined from blood patterns next to a half-eaten PowerBar that the victim had been surprised and attacked from behind while taking a break from a hike. His badly damaged body was found partially buried nearby, with wounds indicating that he tried to fight back against his attacker.

A search of the area resulted in locating hair, which was soon found to belong to a suspect in another local killing from a few weeks prior to this attack. Footprints found at the scene were the same size as those of the suspect in the earlier killing as well. DNA samples were taken for future analysis. The suspect and her two small children were taken into custody.

The case was rapidly brought not before a jury of the suspect’s peers, but before a panel of local experts, including members of the forensics team that investigated the case. The suspect was found guilty even before all of the samples from the crime scene had been processed. The penalty was death for the suspect and life imprisonment for her children. The accused was not represented by a lawyer, no appeals were permitted, and she was dead within a few weeks of the attack on the unfortunate tourist. Once the DNA evidence had been processed, the detection of another suspect at the scene of the crime raised some doubt that the correct individual had been taken into custody, but it was too late to stop the execution.

How could such a trial happen in the United States of America in the 21st century? We are a nation of laws! We pride ourselves on suspects being innocent until proven guilty! The answer is simple. The now-executed suspect in this series of grisly deaths was, in fact, a grizzly herself- a grizzly bear. The series of attacks has focused public attention not just on the dangers associated with hiking in areas where large wild predators live, but on the bizarre system of pseudo-justice used by the National Parks Service to determine what to do with animals that kill or injure humans.

Aquaculture in NC: Millpoint Aquaculture

June 11, 2012June 11, 2012 Bluegrass Blue Crab 5 Comments

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Jimmy Morris is the only hatchery in North Carolina, serving aquaculture operations all along the East Coast and the state’s oyster restoration program. The process would he easy, he says, except that crops of larvae die periodically – for a variety of unknown reasons. Figuring out how to cater to the sensitivities of these shelly babies is a skill few-and-far between in the world of aquaculture and that makes his operation one of the most important businesses in both the region and the industry.