“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…
Repeat Spawner Series: How climate impacts microorganisms and why we should care
By: Dana Sackett, PhD As Earth Day approaches, it seems timely to pause and examine some of the natural processes that enable life on Earth. Remarkably, this big topic requires us to take a look at some of the smallest organisms on the planet. Microorganisms (or organisms that cannot be seen with the naked eye…
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,…
From reef bank to fish tank: how the aquarium trade can impact coral reef conservation
By Josh Cahill: Captivating millions, the popularity of the home marine aquarium hobby has grown dramatically in the past decade…If consumers are willing to pay more for animals harvested from renewable management areas and handled responsibly, there would be great incentive for a larger shift toward sustainability.
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,…
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.
Beavers are fish? During Lent they are, and so are other weird creatures.
By Patrick Cooney We know just how important fish are for all you folks waking up this morning with a raging headache after a Mardi Gras/Fat Tuesday bender. Just ask McDonalds how important fish are during this time of year…they sell 25% of all Filet-o-Fish sandwiches during the 40 day Lent period. Besides fish, did…
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…
The value of a species
By: Dana Sackett According to some scientists the earth is currently undergoing the sixth mass extinction crisis in the last half-billion years. Some have described this current crisis as the largest loss of plants and animals since the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. With so much loss it is hard to understand how these extinctions…
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…
The 7 Wonderful Pikes, Pickerels, and Muskies of the World!
Guest Author: Sasha Doss Editor: Patrick Cooney Artist: Hannah Dean White Sox, Red Sox, Esox. People obsess more about one of these three “sox” than the other two. Only fisherpeople will know which one prevails. Studying Muskellunge has been such a wonderful experience. Many of my days over the past few years as a graduate…
Dananananananana BAT RAY
Like Gotham’s caped crusader, Bat Rays soar through their surroundings. The Bat Ray is a key benthic predator and a model example of unique sensory adaptations, making the Bat Ray a hero in its own right!
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…
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