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Charlie sights Polaris through his Latitude Hook
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Chapter 14 of Herman Melville’s classic – Moby Dick. Read along with us and discuss this chapter or the book as a whole in the comments. Nantucket At last the two arrive in Nantucket. Nothing but sand and the whalers’ resolve. No timber nor weeds, everything that built this island was brought by men that … Read More “Finding Melville’s Whale: Chapter 14 – Nantucket” »
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Latitude Hook complete, Charlie gets ready to test it out.
Conservation, Science
We recieved several responses to Dave’s post this week on the bizarre “Save the Light Bulb” movement. A movement that seeks to ban energy efficient compact fluorescent lights (CFL) and return to the old, energy expensive, incandescent bulbs. The primary critique is that CFL’s contain mercury, and thus, any environmental benefit is negated by mercury exposure when the bulbs break or are thrown out.
Read More “Compact Fluorescent Lights, Energy, and Mercury” »
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Charlie learns how to build a Latitude Hook
Conservation, Science
I write a lot about shark conservation issues, but I rarely focus on their fellow elasmobranchs. Rays and skates have similar life history strategies as sharks, and many species are similarly overfished. A friend just sent me a cool paper about the conservation of skates, which provides an excellent opportunity to remedy this oversight.
A major issue standing between well-managed elasmobranch fisheries and the mess we find ourselves in today is species identification. Many species look very similar (in some cases, DNA tests are required to tell them apart), which makes recording catch statistics extremely difficult. In fact, United States fishery management policy sometimes focuses on species complexes (i.e. “Large Coastal Sharks”) of sharks rather than individual species. Species identification is a major issue for skates as well.
Science
Scientific knowledge comes in many forms, some not explicitly science. Social scientists call this “ways of knowing” – you can think of it as a framework on which you hang the specifics as you learn them. The framework is set up early in life and historically, scientific knowledge was held within a religious ‘way of … Read More “Vignette from the Anthropology of Knowledge: Cree Hunting” »
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Charlie ponders building a Latitude Hook by lamplight.
Conservation, Science
Yesterday afternoon, the Presidents of Honduras and Palau challenged other world leaders to follow their example by protecting sharks. Both nations have banned shark fishing within their territorial waters, and they are encouraging other nations (both rich countries with fishing fleets and poor coastal countries) to do the same. This announcement was timed to coincide with a high-level United Nations meeting to review millennium development and global biodiversity conservation goals.
The two Presidents had this to say:
Read More “A global shark conservation challenge from Palau and Micronesia” »