dorkiness

Thresher Sharks vs. Whales – Finding Melville’s Shark?

Back in the day (earlier this year) Andrew at Southern Fried Science had a series of posts called “Finding Melville’s Whale,” in which he poetically summarized chapters of the Herman Melville classic (and required reading for anyone serious about the salty life) Moby Dick.  These…

Post-Halloween Horror: Hagfish Slime

Hagfish are awesomely disgusting creatures.  My first personal encounter was seeing their handiwork (and then seeing the fish themselves) while gillnetting off of Massachusetts.  The sheer amount of slime produced by these little monsters has long been thought to function as a sort of predator…

Duke Grad Student Mini-Symposium Recap

This past weekend I headed down to beautiful sunny Beaufort, North Carolina for the semi-biannual (is that even a word?) Duke Grad Student Mini-Symposium.  This event is open to all North Carolina-based universities willing to send grad students to check out other students’ research, develop…

AFS 2011 – Big Ol’ Recap

I’ve spent the last week at the 141st Annual Meeting of the American Fisheries Society, where nearly 4,000 fish nerds from the worlds of academia, management, and even art descended on Seattle for four days of talks, socials, interesting conversation over beer.  It was good…

Shark Night 3D – A Shark Scientist’s Perspective

I’m going to try to bridge my “wannabe shark expert” and “pop culture dork” sides tonight.  Last night I got the chance to check out Shark Night 3D, which has been getting a little bit of buzz as the first truly “big budget” shark attack…

Breaking Down Shark Week 2011

As you may have noticed, a little thing called Shark Week was on TV this week.  It’s long been something of a Super Bowl for shark fans, and has more recently become a pop culture phenomenon.  It can be said that with the increasing popularity…

Happy Shark Week

Love it or hate it, Shark Week is in its 24th year and starts tonight.  I’ve been watching since I was a small child, and though some seasons have certainly been better than others, this year’s line-up is looking good, with show about actual science…

North Carolina Shark Round-up

In case you think I’ve been too wrapped up in my old home’s sharks, here’s a recap of the latest shark news from my new home.  North Carolina is plenty sharky, even if Jaws itself only makes rare appearances.

New England Great White Round-up

Most of my linking now takes place on Twitter, but I thought it’s about high time I did a quick recap of the summer’s New England great white sightings so far.  It’s looking to be the sharkiest summer so far, and yet again I find…