Over 15 years of ocean science and conservation online
Thanks to everyone who stuck around during our blog vacation. Our adventure into Moby Dick continues with chapter 34 – The Cabin Table. Read along with us and discuss this chapter or the book as a whole in the comments. Visit this page for the complete collection to date: Finding Melville’s Whale. The Cabin Table Down … Read More “Finding Melville’s Whale: The Cabin Table (Chapter 34)” »
This post is the first of a new series here at Southern Fried Science called “State of the Field”. The series is meant to introduce key ideas, methods, and theories to support later research posts and to spread these concepts across disciplines. For the first month, I’ll be covering what’s known as “big T” theory to my lab group – that is, grand social theory about how the world works and also the theory that guides research question and method development. Please discuss!
Somewhere in the introduction of most social science papers is a short statement about the author’s philosophy. Scholars in physics have long recognized that you cannot observe something without perturbing the something. In a research world where that something is a person, the subject can tell you how much a researcher is perturbing the observed system. This realization then begs the question – since we can’t observe a pristine system, is there a single reality out there to describe? Or will each researcher have a slightly different, though correct, description of reality based on their interactions with that reality? Or, taking the idea farther, is there no reality at all but instead a world completely constructed by those who describe it? These philosophies are called positivist, critical realist, and social constructionist, respectively.
Depending on the philosophy chosen, there are lots of things at stake such as objective methodology, legitimacy of certain types of knowledge, and the authority of science. Stay tuned for further discussion of these – first let’s get into more detail about the philosophies themselves.
While we were away on our December blog-cation, sharks were all over the news. Specifically, a series of shark attacks in the resort town of Sharm-el-Sheik, Egypt, captured the attention of the media and of beachgoing news watchers worldwide. I normally don’t talk about shark attacks on the blog, but lots of readers have been asking me for my opinion on this incident. Fortunately, even though I was on blog-cation, the rest of the shark blog-o-sphere was hard at work covering this issue.
While it’s difficult to integrate a month’s worth of news stories after the fact, I’ll do my best to provide you with a complete picture of what happened. Please feel free to point out inaccuracies in the comments section.
In the latest edition of Shark Science Monday, Richard Ellis of the American Museum of Natural History discusses a new “sharks in popular culture” exhibit that he’s designing for an art museum in Florida. If you have a question for Richard, please leave it as a comment below. ~WhySharksMatter
Of all the questions I am asked as a deep-sea biologist, the hardest to answer is “why conserve deep-sea hydrothermal vents?” Sure there are the classic canards of economics (vents produce valuable minerals) and biotechnology (vents house unique organisms that may produce useful pharmaceutical or technological products) but these are hollow, belie a conservation ethic driven by human selfishness, and pander to an exploitative system. Beyond those lie a series of high minded, though vague, ethics about preserving biodiversity, protecting unique habitats, and understanding an ecosystem more alien than any science fiction story before destroying it.
Our global society is coming around to the idea that biodiversity is valuable in its own right, that species are precious, and that we have a duty to minimize the damage we inflict upon the world. We still have a long way to go, but the wind is in the sails and the ship is coming about. Despite this growing environmental ethic, the tragic reality is that before 1977 we didn’t even know hydrothermal vents existed and if every vent community was wiped from the face of the seafloor, few outside of a handful of fortunate scientists and deep-sea enthusiasts would notice.
So why conserve deep-sea hydrothermal vents?
Happy New Year to all our readers! 2010 was a big year for Southern Fried Science. We added a new blogger, moved to our own server, and launched The Gam. Along the way we’ve won a few awards, hosted the first Ocean of Pseudoscience week, cooked a whole pig, exposed some blatant greenwashing, challenged conventional … Read More “Southern Fried Scientist’s Predictions for 2011” »
Well, it’s been a whirlwind year here at SFS. We moved to our own server and launched the Gam – the largest network of (mostly) marine science blogs. Below are our ten most popular (by pageviews) posts of 2010: How to brew beer in a coffee maker, using only materials commonly found on a modestly sized oceanographic … Read More “Top Posts of 2010” »
Two days left, how’d we do?
While we take a break during December, enjoy these penguin videos shot by intrepid Antarctic explorer David Honig.
