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…

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…

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…

Science Online Oceans: Storify Recap of #ScioFisheries

Here it is folks, the epic Storify of the session co-lead by Ann and I at Science Online Oceans.  It was a blast, and hopefully sometime soon I’ll get a chance to put up highlights of everyone else’s sessions as well.

AES 2013: Day 3

Day 3 of AES included pretty much all the talks up for the Gruber award, an award given to the best student presentation.  Holy crap there were some good talks today.  My talk was among them, and having seen my competition, I will gracefully concede…

Big Moves Proposed in U.S. Shark Management

It’s been quite the week for sharks and the fisheries that target them.  First, ICCAT managed to disappoint on shark management (largely through the actions of Canada of all places) but finally started following scientific advice on bluefin tuna quotas.  Then, in better news, the…

How Italy Ate Up All Its Sharks

As dramatically imperfect as U.S. fisheries management can be, I still stand by my stance that we have the best-managed fisheries in the world.  Fishermen gripe about it being too restrictive and quick to change, conservationists complain about it being too lenient and slow to…

NOAA/NMFS Plans to Reduce “Problem Species” Populations

The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is often painted by fishermen as a rabidly pro-conservation agency hell-bent on putting them out of a job by protecting every species they used to fish.  However, leaked internal memos show that the agency is taking a turn back…