AES 2011 Day 2

It’s day 2 of JMIH/AES, and, as usual, there were too many great talks for me to go through them all.  Make sure to check WhySharksMatter and labroides on Twitter to fill in some of the gaps, and if anyone else is reading this and…

101 Uses for Shark Puke

Earlier today WhySharksMatter and I had a little light-hearted smack talk about new-school (stable isotopes) vs. old-school (gastric lavage or straight-up dissection) methods of measuring the diet of sharks.  These are the things you could be privy to if you were following me on that…

Unintentional Shark Tagging

This might possibly be the most awesome paper about tagging fish ever. One of the handiest advances in telemetry, especially of large, highly-migratory oceanic species, has been the advent of PSAT tags.  These tags do it all: movement, depth, temperature, shoe size, blood type… all…

Feeding Habits Analysis: The Wrap-Up

Wow, that’s a post a day since Sunday.  I am all kinds of productive. I reached a milestone in my thesis research shortly before Christmas when I looked through my final set of dogfish puke.  All told I’ve gone through the stomach contents of either…

Feeding Habits Analysis: The Bigelow Exotics

On Friday I officially wrapped up going through all my stomach samples from my cruise aboard the NOAA/NMFS R/V Henry B. Bigelow.  Though a lot of identification work remains, it’s nice knowing that I at least have one complete data set totally cataloged.  In honor…

Feeding Habits Analysis: Clash of the Titans

It’s been a little while since I’ve added to my world-famous series of posts on spiny dogfish gut contents, but today I found something that proved to be entertaining for the entire lab, and perhaps a little heartbreaking for some.  Those of us in the…

Stomach Content Analysis: Halfway!

Today I finished the day by going over my 204th set of stomach contents.  Given a total sample size of 399 (I know, I know, I couldn’t just get an even 400), that puts me at officially a little over halfway done!  In celebration, below…

Feeding Habits Analysis: Revenge

Every so often someone thinks they’re clever and sends me this video.  I’ll not sully this blog by actually embedding it, but here’s the gist: a Pacific giant octopus eats a spiny dogfish.  Usually this is accompanied by something along the lines of “OMG!  Octopus…

AES Day 3.5

Day 3 of the AES conference was the big feeding symposium, and there was plenty to sink my teeth into (all puns always intended).  Today is mostly made up of the stress symposium, which is a little technical for my tastes but still interesting and…

Feeding Habits Analysis: Detective Work Part 2

In my previous post on the detective work necessary for any good feeding habits analysis, I lamented the apparent lack of a “one-stop shop” for looking up fish scales (at least as far as I’ve been able to find).  In response, I’ve been saving scales…