Southern Fried Science

A field guide to ocean science and conservation on twitter

June 30, 2012June 30, 2012 Andrew Thaler 2 Comments

A few of my colleagues recently came to me looking for advice on how to get started on twitter. Even for seasoned marine scientists who grew up during the internet revolution, establishing a twitter presence can be a daunting task. When used well, it provides a steady stream of news, commentary, and discussion that can provide broad insight into the current state of marine science and conservation. When used poorly, twitter can become a continuous, unrelenting torrent of irrelevant nonsense, punditry, and manufactured controversy. I put this guide together to provide a foundation for those interested in using twitter to engage with the Ocean Community.

There are several great basic guides on how to get started on twitter, so, rather than reinventing the wheel, here are a few of my favorite resources:

All of these guides have some good advice, but really, the best thing you can to get a feel for twitter is to create a personal account and play around for a week or two. Always start with a personal account. You’re going to make mistakes, faux pas, or perhaps accidentally tweet something that you’d wish you hadn’t. You don’t learn to ride a bike on a Pinarello Dogma 60.1 and you shouldn’t learn to use a new social media tool on an account that will be permenently linked to your online reputation.

A revolution in underwater exploration for everyone: the open source underwater robot

June 29, 2012June 29, 2012 Andrew Thaler

If you’ve been following me on twitter, checking out some of my YouTube videos, or reading this blog, you probably have a good sense about how enthusiastic I am about ROV’s and how excited I am about the current wave of cheap, easy to build and maintain, functional ROV’s for outreach, teaching, and recreational exploration. Inexpensive, high quality ROV’s can provide us with previously unheard of access to the ocean.

So I’m really excited that OpenROV, an open source project to develop a robotic submarine that anyone can build and use, has launched their kickstarter page to develop and distribute the OpenROV kit. From the project page:

Watch Blue Pints Episode 2: Sea Level Rise, Seafood Fraud, Shipwrecked Aliens, and more!

June 28, 2012October 27, 2013 Andrew Thaler

Uncategorized

Watch Episode 2 here:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijPEW7x93N0

World Oceans Day #OceanFacts

June 26, 2012 David Shiffman

Science

On World Oceans Day, I asked the online marine science and conservation community to tweet their favorite facts about the ocean using the hashtag #OceanFacts . Dozens of people joined the discussion, and more than 300 #OceanFacts were contributed. These tweets cover a variety of topics, from marine invertebrates, fish, sharks, and marine mammals to facts about the ocean itself and conservation policy. The discussion also inspired a great deal of humorous posts, including an entire spinoff #OceanFibs hashtag. Some of my favorite #OceanFacts tweets are saved in the Storify below.

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

Uncategorized

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

Uncategorized

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.