Mapping a Smoother Fishery for Smooth Dogfish

A commonly-used quote from John Shepherd states, “Managing fisheries is hard: it’s like managing a forest, in which the trees are invisible and keep moving around.” This is particularly true for highly migratory species like sharks, for which the full range is often poorly understood…

Dogfish Days at the ASMFC

A couple posts ago I recapped fishery management measures that have gone into place for spiny and smooth dogfish.  Those measures covered dogfish fisheries in federal waters, which are defined as waters between 3 and 100 miles off the coast.  Waters within 3 miles are…

2015: The Year in Dogfish

2015 turned out to be a pretty big year for the most under-appreciated sharks in the sea.  Now that it’s a new year that promises to offer more cool small shark science, it’s time for a look back at what happened with the spiny and…

Are Dogfish Running the Food Web?

When spiny dogfish come up in conversation, it’s usually in reference to their supposedly ravenous appetites and the possibility that they’re eating other, more economically valuable species out of the ecosystem.  Luckily for the very beginnings of my research career, this has lead to a…

Atlantic Spiny Dogfish Sustainability Certificate Suspended

In 2012, the Atlantic spiny dogfish fishery became one of the first shark fisheries to be certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council (the first was another dogfish fishery, this one targeting North Pacific spiny dogfish in British Columbia waters).  The MSC is the…

Dogfish Don’t Eat As Much As You Think They Do

It’s been a long time coming, but the work I’ve been doing on spiny dogfish feeding ration has finally seen publication.  For those with access, the paper (published in the North American Journal of Fisheries Management) is now available online (and if you don’t have…

New Dogfish Management Rules Proposed

Earlier this week some new rules were proposed for spiny dogfish management on the east coast.  The changes affect three key parts of the fishery management plan for spiny dogfish: quota set aside for research, essential fish habitat, and the allocation of the quota.  While…

What Drives Dogfish Distribution?

I’ve been meaning to get back into writing about research done by other people (especially if it concerns the mighty spiny dogfish) for some time.  Fortunately, a pretty interesting paper has just come out by researchers at Stony Brook and the National Marine Fisheries Service…

AFS Southern Division Recap

Last week (January 22nd-26th) a couple of my labmates and I headed down to Charleston, South Carolina for the spring meeting of the American Fisheries Society’s Southern Division (referred to from here on in as SDAFS).  This meeting gets researchers from the Southeast and Gulf…

Winter of the Shark: Brace Yourselves

One of the many projects that have been consuming time that could be spent blogging is the acoustic telemetry project ECU has been involved with off of Cape Hatteras.  Last year saw me take over the day-to-day running of this valuable piece of equipment, from…