“Due to fiscal uncertainty under the new incoming administration, we will not be renewing your contract in 2017.” This was the message I received from my employer (a federal research lab) mid-November 2016, giving me little time to find a new job as an early-career fish ecologist. I felt like a casualty of what’s been…
Category: The Fisheries Blog
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,…
Spawning in strange waters: how hybridization affects native fishes
By Ed Kluender, guest blogger Hybrid creatures are one of the most common tropes of both goofy and great horror movies (think The Fly or countless werewolf movies), and plenty of them are at least half fish – Creature, Piranhaconda, and the Sharktopus franchise. Most of those films have a pretty shaky basis in reality,…
Predators reject yellow perch egg skeins
Yellow perch produce eggs in gelatinous ribbons, but so far nobody knows why. We explored this peculiar trait by conducted some experiments to see if these ribbons protect eggs from predators. Helpless and delicious. Fish eggs and larvae are an energy-rich meal for predators. For some species, predator consumption of eggs and larvae can reach up…
Results: 2016 Readers’ Survey
With five years under our belts and over a million site visits from over 220 countries, The Fisheries Blog can now look back at our body of work and say that we’ve covered a large range of topics. From our most popular posts on poisonous fishes, distortions by Disney, and shark anatomy to more personal posts on…
2016 Readers’ Survey
What is it that you want to see every Monday morning from The Fisheries Blog? Fill out our short survey to let us know!
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…
Fish biodiversity by the numbers
I was recently asked why I study stream and river fishes. Of course I rattled off several of the high points about threatened habitats, high biodiversity, and simply cool fish. But that question prompted me to reflect on why I do what I do, and I decided to go back to ‘square one’– the well-accepted…
Perch, bream, and sunfish–what’s the difference?
Perch, bream, and sunfish—same thing right? WRONG. Local names vary for these popular sport fishes, and this post is aimed to clear the water on such a confusing subject. So just what is a “sunfish”? Technically, a sunfish is any species in the freshwater fish family Centrarchidae (sin-tr-ark-i-day). These include black basses, rock basses, crappies, banded sunfishes,…
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!…
#SocialFish at #AFS146 in Kansas City–See you there!
For the first time ever, all 5 Fisheries Bloggers will be in the same room together. Why? Because at this year’s American Fisheries Society conference in Kansas City, we will be teaming up with the American Institute of Fishery Research Biologists (AIFRB) to host a special symposium: Fisheries science in 140 characters: the role of social media…
Book review: Sex in the Sea
If you like dirty jokes about whale junk, we know just the book. As you know, we at The Fisheries Blog are fascinated with reproductive ecology of fishes. I’ve written articles on multi-species spawning parties and other strange spawning tactics, and Patrick is fascinated with sex-changing clownfish and doubly-endowed sharks. But Dr. Marah Hardt has us beat….
Breeding colors of freshwater fishes
You don’t have to fly to Cozumel to see pretty fishes. Freshwater fishes are amazingly colorful, but are underrated. Fish enthusiasts and divers often flock to tropical latitudes and coral reefs to see exotic, specimens. However, some of the most eye-catching specimens are swimming in North American streams at this very moment. It’s spawning season…
What can guppies teach us about fisheries management?
We can’t manipulate entire stocks of Bluefin Tuna in massive experiments. But we can use guppies to get the same answer. But first, a quiz: How does overfishing affect fish populations? Obviously, more commercial catch reduces the total biomass and number of individuals in a stock—that’s a given. But commercial over-harvest has another, more subtle…
The Fisheries Blog 