And We’re Back

Well that was some break.  Quite a bit has been going on to make that long unannounced hiatus happen, both in the world of dogfish and in my own life.  Since it seems that this blog has been spared the weirdness going on at Southern Fried Science, I might as well take the time to kick start this blog back up again.

2015 has been quite the year since April, which is embarrassingly the last time I posted anything.  Mid-April through mid-October made up my last field season in the gorgeous waters of Back Sound, where I conducted a gillnet, longline, and drumline survey and tagging study looking at shark habitat use within estuaries.  Then in June a record-crushing series of eight shark bites on swimmers in only three weeks occurred in North Carolina, and I found myself being asked a lot of questions about sharks in local waters.  I also provided North Carolina shark-related commentary for two programs on Nat Geo Wild, so while I have yet to make it onto Shark Week, I have now officially been on Shark Fest, which is apparently the same sharks.  Between all that, I made it to some great conferences and gave a whole lot of public talks, including one of the NC Natural Sciences Museum’s great science cafés.  I even got to help cut up a dead great white shark.  All while working on finishing my PhD.  And none of that ended up here on the blog.  Good thing I’ve managed to stay active on Twitter.

I’m looking to fix that, so here’s where the resolution comes in.  I’m going to challenge myself to post here the equivalent of once a week.  I say “equivalent” because there will be times when I’ll be out on a boat or otherwise out of town and won’t have either reliable internet or the time to make a full blog post.  In those cases I’ll try to make it up in the previous or following week.  But if all goes well there should be 52 posts here in 2016.  One down, 51 to go.

While I’ll continue to generally write about sharks with a particular focus on my own research, the main theme will be on the under-appreciated species.  The spiny dogfish will be the star of course, but also other overlooked sharks like the smooth dogfish, Atlantic sharpnose shark, maybe some skates, and perhaps even some of the bigger, more charismatics sharks that just happen to not be great whites (who am I kidding, I’ll probably write about great whites too).  Occasionally I may even write about fish or other marine animals that aren’t elasmobranchs at all.  Should be fun.

One comment

Comments are closed.