Guest Post By: Karen Dunmall, PhD Candidate, University of Manitoba Edited by Patrick Cooney I study salmon “on the fringe”. They are not part of the mainstream. They exist on the extreme periphery. They live in the Arctic. Specifically, the Canadian Arctic of the Northwest Territories. Naturally, Pacific salmons are primarily distributed in waters of…
Category: Ecology: Organisms & Habitats
Blurred lines: Can climate change-induced range expansion qualify a species as invasive?
Does range expansion from climate change qualify a species as invasive if it impacts resident native species in its new habitat?
The cup spilleth-over
By: Dana Sackett When marine protected areas (MPAs) are established as a strategy for fisheries management, spillover is one of the primary goals. Conceptually, spillover is relatively simple: protect an area from fishing to allow fish populations to grow inside the MPA and eventually the benefits caused by the protected status (larger and more fish)…
Fish out of water
By: Dana Sackett The saying, ‘fish out of water’ has often been used to describe someone out of their comfort zone, because if you take a fish out of water and drop them onto land most would not be very comfortable. However, there are a number of fish across the world that would scoff at…
5 Ways Mountaintop Removal affects Streams
It’s not hard for everyday citizens to take a position on mountaintop coal mining. The web is scattered with nasty before-and-after photos of mine sites and gripping narratives of environmental degradation. But sometimes it can be tough to hear the science over the screaming. After all, few of us spend time digging through scientific literature…
Do fish sleep?
Most fish do sleep. While most fish don’t have eyelids, they do have a regular period of reduced activity and metabolism.
Road Salts in Your (Ground) Water
As the latest of what seems like an endless conveyor belt of winter storms hits the middle and eastern portions of the US, it’s worth considering not only the record amount of snow that has fallen in many places, but the vast amounts of road salt that have been used this winter. One estimate of…
Strange Spawning: interesting reproductive fish facts exposed
by Brandon Peoples We’ve written indirectly about some strange spawning here on The Fisheries Blog…like how Nemo was a hermaphrodite who would have mated with his female dad …or how bluehead chubs want to spawn so bad, they’ll carry rocks twice the size of their head to build massive reproductive pyramids…or even how salmon travel…
Funny fish: common names that aren’t so common
With fish make up more than half of the estimated 54,711 recognized living vertebrate species (animals with a vertebral column), coming up with common names for all of those fish species is quite a task.
Through the Ears of a Fish
by Ed Kluender, guest blogger Ask a fish its age or where it’s been and what it ate for lunch, and chances are it couldn’t tell you. It could probably hear your question, though, with the help of its inner ear bones, called otoliths. Otoliths are one of the most useful tools in a fish…
Q-tip anyone?
By Dana Sackett You may have come across a video or two (or ten) of sharks munching down on dead whales and it’s easy to understand how a few sharks may get excited over encountering all that easily acquired energy-rich blubber. However, sharks are not the only ones that can benefit from these large dead…
Dolphin Deaths a Boon for Sharks?
By Tobey Curtis, Guest Blogger It’s been a tough year to be a dolphin. The Miami NFL football players aren’t the only dolphins making headlines lately. Over the last year there have been hundreds of mysterious dolphin deaths along the US Atlantic coast. By late summer, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had declared…
One Fish, Two Fish, Where Fish for Whitefish?
Currently, the Great Lakes Lake Whitefish fishery is the most economically valuable commercial fishery in the upper Great Lakes.
The Swimming Dead: Videos of Zombie Fish
By Patrick Cooney Like an underwater horror show, I filmed dead fish swimming amongst the living last week in a coastal river of western Washington. Or at least, the zombie fish looked like they were dead. Nowhere is the “Circle of Life” more apparent than in a river during salmon spawning season. Years after leaving the comforts of freshwater…
Song of Summers Past
By Craig Springer, Guest Blogger With this autumn’s leaves shedding, it gives one pause for all those summers that have slipped downstream. Sun-drenched memories are joyful like an Allman Brothers song. Don’t fly mister bluebird, I’m just walking down the road. Early morning sunshine tells me all I need to know. In memory, the buzz…
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