Something Nifty

My lab-mate Dan has started blogging about his adventures in otolith microchemistry, river herring, and hockey.  Check his stuff out over at The Endolymph (possibly one of the coolest names for a science blog ever) and encourage him to post often.

Dogfish on Tour: Pittsburgh, PA

Hey all.  I’ve been ridiculously busy lately and it almost slipped my mind to announce my next trip out pimping my research.  This time I’ll be presenting a poster at the AFS annual meeting in sunny Pittsburgh, PA.  For those who saw my poster at…

Shameless Self-Promotion

If anyone is in or near the ECU area around lunchtime on Monday, you should probably stop in and check out a certain handsome devil giving a talk on dogfish feeding habits.  Just sayin’.

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…

AES Day 2 – Day of the Dogfish

Today was the day when two of us from the Rulifson lab gave our presentations (Jen gave a talk, I stood by my poster and chatted with passers-by).  Perhaps by design it was also the day that the dogfish talks came out of the woodwork. …

AES Day 1

The first official day of talks wrapped up today, followed by a pretty sweet social at the Roger Williams Park Zoo.  I’ll run down some of the more interesting stuff I heard about today in relatively short form below.

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…

Feeding Habits Analysis: Detective Work

As anyone who’s ever done a diet study will tell you, you end up getting a lot of unverifiable gunk in your study animal’s stomach contents.  Sometimes enough of the consistency remains that you can tell generally what this chunk of meat used to be. …