Actual Sharknado off of Cape Hatteras

North Carolina’s weather has never been what you’d call predictable, especially off of Cape Hatteras (all those shipwrecks have to come from somewhere).  That said, what I saw yesterday while tagging sharks off of Hatteras takes the cake.  During what had been an uncharacteristically nice…

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…

Winter of the Shark: It Pays to Know People

This past weekend marked a new venture into shark-related field work.  For the better part of two months I’ve been fighting the good fight to keep ECU’s acoustic array up off of Cape Hatteras, and last Friday and Saturday finally managed to actually play with…

Summer of the Shark: Best Red Drum Survey Ever

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…

Summer of the Shark: Stingray City

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…

Summer of the Shark: Warts And All, Mostly Warts

Some field days just don’t go well.  This past Thursday I went out with Evan and Jeff to do a little opportunistic shark sampling in the Pamlico River while they were out collecting water samples for a striped bass project.  What actually happened was quite…

Summer of the Shark: Hatteras Blues

Field work season has officially begun.  On Wednesday and Thursday I set out for Hatteras and Ocracoke with labmate Evan and his brother Austin to test the gear, get an idea of how much sampling can happen in a day, and maybe even catch some…

Summer of the Shark: Prologue

As mentioned earlier, this summer I’ll be starting the first of several shark-related projects that should (hopefully) add up to my dissertation.  The first is a summer pilot study that aims to find shark hot spots in Pamlico Sound.  Tomorrow, before the crack of dawn,…

The Future

Posts have been a little sparse here for the past month or so, and it’s because I’ve been spending a lot of time a.) finishing up my first year of PhD school, and b.) setting up a new batch of projects set that will keep…