It should be no secret to readers of this blog or anyone familiar with fisheries at all that spiny dogfish have a pretty rotten reputation among commercial fishermen. Quickly approaching the notoriety of dogfish are those damn dirty sea mammals, the harbor seals. Both animals…
This week the U.S. Atlantic spiny dogfish fishery took another step towards becoming the second shark or ray fishery ever to earn a sustainability certification from the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). The first was the Pacific spiny dogfish fishery, which turned out to be a…
After most of a semester in the office, I finally managed to get out on the water this past weekend. I traveled down to Hatteras with Andrea to help out with the latest piece of his project tracking different life stages of spiny dogfish. He…
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…
Finally managed to get enough time between recuperating from the trip and moving apartments to sit down and give you all a recap of what I and the rest of the Rulifson lab have been up to for the past week or so. As you…
As mentioned in my previous post, I’ve spent the weekend in Charleston hanging out with David “WhySharksMatter” Shiffman and taking part in the coastal shark survey run out of the Charleston SCDNR lab. Since most of my work has been based on trawl data, I…
The past few posts have been quick short-form recaps of what’s been going on that day. Now that I’m back in town (after we called the trip early due to weather) I finally have a chance to upload the pictures from the trip and give…
This will be a rare non-shark post, but I think it will cover an issue that permeates throughout fisheries management regardless of which species you’re focused on (maybe not so much spiny dogfish: rec and commercial fishermen alike aren’t huge fans of them). I’ve heard…
It’s been a hot topic in this state for a while that gill nets are both important to the commercial fishing industry and highly controversial. I personally know a couple people involved in this debate, and have been following it with some interest, though I…