By: Dana Sackett The lives of fish cannot technically be compared to the lives and pressures placed on today’s human moms (that then naturally let loose in an epic party). However, in honor of Mother’s Day we decided to share some of the maternal roles fish play and imagine if these same roles existed for…
Category: The Fisheries Blog
World Fish Migration Day – Geaux Fish!
“Connecting fish, rivers, and people” is the overarching theme of World Fish Migration Day, a global event on April 21, 2018. Among the primary goals of World Fish Migration Day (WFMD) are to raise awareness of the importance of migratory fishes, as well as calling for action to safeguard and restore free-flowing waterways. This Saturday…
Communicating science through digital media
If a scientist conducts research, and never tells anyone, did they really do it? Scientists communicate with one another in very specific ways: peer-reviewed journal articles and technical presentations. However, most journal articles largely go unread and conference audiences can be limited.. Public trust in science is decreasing, so it’s our job to help them understand the…
Changing venom
By: Dana Sackett You have probably heard the myth that baby snakes are more dangerous than adults because they haven’t learned to control the amount of venom they inject. The theory being that baby snakes unintentionally release much more than an adult would when they bite. While this myth has been mostly dispelled by herpetologists…
Fisheries Science “Unplugged”
If a sturgeon leaps from the water and no one’s there to tweet about it, does it make a splash? Earlier this week, fellow Nicholls State University biology professor Dr. Gary LaFleur Jr. sent me photos from his biomarkers class after they “went off the grid”. Students took pirogues (a type of canoe) to a…
What’s Your Story?
I just read For the Love of Rivers by Kurt Fausch. It came out a couple years ago when I was a postdoc, but I just got around to reading it because, as it turns out, postdocs don’t have a whole lot of spare time for leisure reading. For the Love of Rivers describes the…
The Rise of Fishing Apps
For the past decade, most of us have come to spend a lot of time with our smartphones. We check them first thing in the morning for any overnight messages and then proceed throughout the day swiping every which way through the apps we have let into our lives. And as apps have completely infiltrated our…
Legacy pollution, an unfortunate inheritance
By: Dana Sackett Legacy is defined as something that is inherited by one generation from the previous. While some legacies are better than others, not all are good. Legacy pollutants are one of the bad ones. These pollutants stick around to cause problems well after they are released into the environment. Indeed, they often continue…
How do fish handle cold water?
Summertime’s come and gone, and winter has arrived in the Northern Hemisphere. Inland waters across North America are cooling down, and many will soon be covered with ice. Winter can be hard on fishes, being poikilotherms that can’t regulate their own body temperature (with some exceptions). So just how do they make it through this…
Blog Biodiversity: Related Species in the Scicomm Ecosystem
It’s my first semester teaching Evolution & Ecology at Nicholls State University; with plenty of challenging and complex topics to tackle, I’ve also been given the latitude to integrate more science communication (scicomm) into this upper-level biology course. We’ve included Twitter and popular science articles alongside analyses of natural selection, genetic drift, and traditional scientific…
A cocktail of contaminants: why environmental toxicologists are moving away from single-chemical science
By: Dana Sackett For me, the word cocktail usually brings to mind delightful adult beverages or a foggy witch’s brew (still in Halloween mode). However, more frequently, as an environmental scientist, this word is being used to describe the conditions of our aquatic environments. Our waterways are often where the slurry of chemicals from agricultural…
Fish-inspired Halloween Costumes
On the day before Halloween, the Fisheries Blog brings you a boo-tiful list of fish, aquatic, and marine-life inspired costume ideas!
