by Ed Kluender, Guest Blogger It’s happened to most of us in fisheries field research, whether loading up the shock boat at a ramp, stopped at a gas station for tater wedges and bad coffee, or on the river when you run into someone who’s paying a guide to be there for nearly the…
Category: Guest Expert
Is the Kiddie Pool Safe? Pollution in Coastal Fish Nurseries Affects Offshore Populations
By Tobey Curtis Do you take your young kids to a daycare or nursery? These are places where we expect our children to be, at minimum, safe and nurtured. Nurseries help ensure survival and growth to a well-adjusted adulthood. It turns out that many ocean-going fish use the same strategy for their young. It has…
What’s So “Great” About the Great White Shark, Anyway?
Don’t you hate it when radio stations play a song that you really like so much that eventually you can’t stand to hear it anymore? What may have been a legitimately great song gets over-played to the point that its quality becomes diminished somehow. That’s how I feel when it comes to Shark Week and…
Doctor Fish: What seems to be the problem?
By Erin Miller Walking through a touristy district of Bangkok, Thailand, I saw a sign that read “Fish Massage: Only $300 Baht For 30 Minutes!” As always, my imagination ran wild. I pictured a carp, sprawled out across a massage table, cucumbers over his eyes, a steaming, damp towel over his forehead, relaxing as two…
Top 10 Weirdest Things Found on a Fish’s Head
By Gus Engman and Patrick Cooney Have you ever looked at a fish and wondered, “What is that weird thing on its head and what is it there for?” Well here is our list of the ‘Top 10 Weirdest Things Found on a Fish’s Head’. Electrosensitive Rostrum: “That’s no banana, that’s my nose! Acha cha…
Research Feature: Turtles, Crabs, and Bycatch Reduction
By the time long-lived marine vertebrates reach adulthood they have few natural predators. However, fishing gear set in critical estuarine and nearshore habitat can serve as anthropogenic “predators” to these megafauna. For larger marine megafauna such as sharks, marine mammals and sea turtles, fisheries-related mortalities are mostly due to incidental entanglement in gear such as…
Q-n-A: Fish illustrator
Ichthyology, the study of fishes, doesn’t always mean sitting down in a stuffy lab with jars of preserved fish. For this installment of Q-n-A, I sat down with Val Kells, a renowned marine science illustrator with a passion for ichthyology. Val has illustrated field guide books for fishes of the Atlantic coast of the US…
Losing Atlantis…Again?
Bimini, just 50 miles off the coast of Miami, sits beside the Gulf Stream. (Kristine Stump) “The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea…It was shaded by tall coconut palms that were bent by the trade wind, and on the ocean side…
Why do native plants matter?
Plants are often overlooked as important contributors to the long term health and integrity of aquatic systems. As a result, impacts to riparian areas as well as invasive vegetation introductions have had devastating impacts on fish populations across the globe. For example, Appalachian brook trout were once found in abundance from Canada to Georgia along…
Q-n-A: Journal Editor
Welcome to The Fisheries Blog‘s second Q-n-A! This segment is designed to showcase the knowledge and specialty of someone in the fisheries world who flat out knows their stuff. For this Q-n-A, we are featuring Derek Aday, the new Editor of Transactions of the American Fisheries Society. I recently asked Derek what it’s like to…
Tracking Sharks in the Space Age
In Wes Anderson’s hit film The Life Aquatic, Captain Steve Zissou attached a “homing dart” to a Jaguar Shark so he could later track it down and kill it in an effort to avenge the death of his friend. Continuous yellow blips on their ship’s instruments allowed Team Zissou to track the shark across…
Dam trout: How do trout populations respond to altered flow?
By: Aaron Bunch The basic premise of adaptive management is to learn from previous actions and adjust accordingly with the ultimate goal of reducing uncertainty over time. The goal of the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program is to minimize impacts to ecological and cultural resources downstream from Glen Canyon Dam as the Colorado River…
Bottom of the barrel – Expansion of fishing to the deep sea is not sustainable
By: Dr. Jeff Drazen Department of Oceanography University of Hawaii Over the last 50-60 years many shallow water fish stocks have become depleted and others have outright collapsed. As a result fishers have targeted fish stocks in deeper and deeper waters. Studies on global catch have shown that the average depth of catch has increased…
The Trouble with Shark Week
Dear Discovery Channel, Please pick a theme for Shark Week! In a fear evoking frenzy, you arbitrarily rank the most deadly sharks and most gruesome attacks, then go on to demonstrate the ecological importance of sharks and the need to save them. Your constant back-and-forth is very confusing and may be doing more harm than…
What Do Las Vegas and Coral Reefs Have in Common?
Coral Reefs: The Las Vegas of the Sea (Credit: Patrick Cooney) Dirty Little Secret I will let you in on a dirty little secret of mine: I am not a fish biologist. I study corals. Unlike fish, corals do not migrate, they do not school, and last I checked, they aren’t even delicious. Putting it…
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