Last week the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) Movement of Life Initiative tagging efforts went on the road as I headed south to Florida’s Treasure Coast in search of cownose rays and bull sharks. Both of these species are the focus of Movement of Life…
Juvenile sharks have been in the news lately thanks to some fine work by OCEARCH, who found and tagged nine juvenile white sharks off of Long Island, confirming the area as a white shark nursery. While this was happening, I was also out on the…
A few recent papers in the elasmobranch world have turned some popular assumptions about sharks and rays on their heads. First and most high-profile was Grubbs et al (2016) dismantling the shark/cownose ray/scallop trophic cascade that not only became so entrenched that it actually ended…
Well, that brief break from blogging escalated quickly. Between a number of housecleaning tasks (both literal and metaphorical) and the onset of field season, I managed to let an entire month slip by without posting. Which is not to say post-worthy things didn’t happen. To…
Here it is, the first official recap post of this year’s AES. I lack both a smartphone and the Twitter vigor of Dave, so I generally throw all the things that piqued my interest into one big post at the end of the day. It’ll…
In fisheries and marine science you have days that, by any objective standard, should be an amazing day in the field. You get a ton of samples, the gear (mostly) works as planned, you find out some interesting stuff, and overall have a lot of…
What a busy day. I’ve only got a little bit of time to get this up before I have to head over to the poster session, and I saw a lot of very good talks today. Keep following #AES2012 on Twitter to keep up with…
My summer-long (likely into a little bit of autumn) quest to find sharks in the Pamlico Sound took me to the waters of the Neuse River this past Thursday. I’ve been out on the Neuse looking for sharks on a couple occasions before, and it…
Tuesday saw Evan, Andrea, and I head back to the Pamlico River to cover it with the longline (you can see why it was missing last time here) in my brave/foolish attempt to see if there are any sharks in the Pamlico Sound. Weather-wise, we…
By now it’s somewhat old news that a recent study by Gavin Naylor and other researchers from all over (freely available here) has revealed that there may be up to 79 previously undiscovered shark and ray species, which complicates conservation and fisheries management considerably. This…