The ability to capture stunning images of life underwater has now become part of the mainstream when it was formerly but a rivulet.
Category: Fishery Science Profession
Great Lakes, Great #SciComm
Co-authored by Katie O’Reilly, Nicole Wood, and Solomon David #SocialGreatLakes: Communicating Great Lakes Science through Social Media was a special session at the 60th annual meeting of the International Association for Great Lakes Research held in Detroit, Michigan, from May 15-19, 2017. During #SocialGreatLakes, eleven speakers from a wide range of backgrounds and disciplines shared their…
The Future of Field Notes
Guest Author: Jennifer Cochran Biederman Editor: Patrick Cooney My father was a field biologist, fish professor, and natural historian down to his DNA. Most evenings, he’d make his way from the dinner table directly to his chair in the living room. It was his spot – surrounded by not-so-neatly arranged stacks of exams to grade,…
Why we need museum collections
As fisheries ecologists, we live, work, and think in the present. We identify problems, then design and conduct field studies to address them. We solve the problem by relating some pattern to a process that was measured over a few field seasons—a static snapshot in time. But oftentimes we need to examine patterns through time,…
Stormy Forecast for NOAA Budget
By Guest Author Erica Felins, 2017 Knauss Sea Grant Executive Fellow…On Friday night, the Trump Administration released a memo to the Washington Post that shed light on what the future federal budget might look like.
Fish Health Surveys Inform Conservation
Guest Author: Craig Springer, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service I’m standing in a small side room at Willow Beach National Fish Hatchery, just off a larger chamber where a dozen concrete raceways lie. Double-doored olive metal cabinets stand against white walls under effusive florescent light. Well-used grease boards smudged with eraser marks under blue-ink to-do…
Bring Out Your Dead: Donation of fish carcasses supports community
Guest Author: Henry Hershey Editor: Patrick Cooney Open up the chest freezer at a fish biology lab and you will find a frosty collection of funky smelling specimens: maybe an old green sunfish that did not quite break the state record, or a tote full of rotten walleye from an old gillnet survey. To a…
New Year: “No,” You
“It will look great on your CV!” I think any graduate student or postdoc has heard this before…usually after a mentor or supervisor has asked for you to do some sort of activity without any (or much compensation). In reality, it sounds fairly innocent; after all, as a budding academic, a lengthy and diverse CV…
The Road Less Traveled: Fisheries scientist working for power producing industry
Author: Patrick O’Rouke Editor: Patrick Cooney “So, you’re going to the dark side?” That’s a question I got a lot when I told my colleagues that I was going to work for a power company after five years as a state agency fisheries biologist. While I would laugh and play along when I heard that…
Peer-review Survey Results!
About 2 months ago I asked all those willing and interested to participate in a survey about peer-review. As a refresher, peer-review is that activity that many of us undertake a few times per year where we anonymously evaluate the work of our peers. This typically happens in the setting of an author or collection…
Twitter predicts citations of ecology research
As scientists, communicating our research is just as important as doing it. We are well-trained to use the scientific method—we make hypotheses, we conduct experiments, draw conclusions, and repeat. But if nobody knows about what we did, what’s the point? That’s the main reason The Fisheries Blog exists. We use a popular medium to communicate…
Peer Review Survey
Although this topic will not appeal to everyone, many of us in fisheries science participate in peer review—the process of technically reviewing the manuscripts of other fisheries scientists. This is a critical process for any science—we can only publish what is generally accepted and vetting, but it also takes substantial work. In order to understand…
A student’s guide to networking at professional conferences
Your fisheries professor has probably been looking forward to the Annual AFS meeting with same enthusiasm of a host waiting for party guests… but as a student at your first meeting, you probably feel a child standing in line for their first roller coaster ride. For students who have not had practice in attending meetings, professional conferences can be intimidating, indeed!…
Building a Biological Station in Hurricane Hermine: Cedar Key
I type this tonight from Cedar Key, Florida during 60-mph winds and pouring rain from Hurricane Hermine. The University of Florida (UF) has construction underway on the new UF/IFAS Nature Coast Biological Station. This Station is part of UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS), and it will seek to improve the conservation and…
Why be a #SocialFish?
Whether you are an early adopter or a luddite like me, there’s no denying that social media has transformed the way we interact with each other and the way we communicate our science.
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