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…
Category: The Fisheries Blog
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!
Coming to ‘terms’ with species invasions
Believe it or not, fish don’t care what we call them. However, terminologies associated with certain species can affect how society perceives their importance and impact. Naturalists have been interested in the effects of species introductions just as long as we have been moving species around. In that time, species introductions have had a variety…
Birds vs Fish
These days, many scientists stand unified on several topics, including the defense of science itself. But it’s also good to know that scientists still have a sense of humor, and that some scientific debates can be entertaining, educational, and accessible, all at the same time. Enter “Birds vs Fish”, an ongoing feud largely played out…
A Breath of Fish Air
I recently migrated from Michigan to Louisiana to join the faculty at Nicholls State University as assistant professor. Moving from the Great Lakes to the bayou is inevitably laced with logistical concerns; in this case they included mobilizing myself, my wife, all our stuff, and…my fishes. That’s a two-day trip across ~1200 miles, but I…
Surviving the Hurricane: Science Center Nears Completion 1 Year After Hurricane
Despite the devastating impact of a Category 1 Hurricane just one year ago, the new Nature Coast Biological Station nears completion.
How (not to) fail grad school
Grad students can be successful for countless reasons, depending on their unique projects and experiences. But unsuccessful grad students have several things in common. Fall semester starts this week at many universities, and lots of grad students are taking the leap for the first time. Here are a few tips. I finished grad school in…
Dollars and Data: The Science of Rewarding Fishers to Report Their Lucky Catch
By: Dana Sackett Mark and recapture is a common method used by ecologists and resource managers to estimate a species growth, movement, levels of harvest, population size, and/or natural mortality (the rate at which animals die from natural causes such as predators, disease, or old age). For fisheries scientists, this method often involves capturing a…
Yellow Perch and the hypoxia Goldilocks zone
It may seem obvious that suffocation is not good, but determining a fish’s tolerance for low oxygen is increasingly important as hypoxia increases worldwide. Hypoxia (low dissolved oxygen concentrations) occurs naturally—it develops in the hot summers and cold winters beneath ice in small lakes and ponds. Hypoxia can also occur as a result of human…
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