Dogfish Portraits

Field work season is heating up, figuratively and literally.  Before I start another series of posts on updates from the water, here’s a quick recap with accompanying photos of a little project I’ve been involved with for the past couple months (and/or year).  Readers who’ve…

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…

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…

EU Considers Ban on Dogfish

Last week the European Union considered a petition to ban on all products made from spiny dogfish.  The petition, put forward by the representative from Germany, would have banned trade of all spiny dogfish products, and barring that called for changing the names of some…

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…

Swimming Foreward

Wow, that was quite the gap.  I usually have a difficult time keeping up with blogging between Thanksgiving and Christmas, but this year it started a little early.  If you’ll notice, the last post was on October 20th.  The reasons for this include an especially…

Dogfish Fisheries: Too Successful for Their Own Good?

Things had been going pretty well for U.S. dogfish fisheries.  In June 2010, after half a decade of an essentially closed fishery, the U.S. Atlantic stock was considered rebuilt.  Shortly after, representatives of the fishery petitioned and successfully received sustainability certification from the Marine Stewardship…

A Practical Guide to Making Sharks Puke

A funny thing happened since the last time I posted: a paper of mine got published.  As of last week, this paper on evaluating a nonlethal way of collecting shark stomach contents has been available via Google Scholar.  Authored by myself, my advisor, and a…

AES 2013: Day 4

Today was the fourth and last day of presentations for this year’s AES.  The real shark week ended with a bang, featuring this year’s only concurrent pair of shark sessions.  As a result, I definitely missed some talks I wanted to see in order to…

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…