Tagging in Bull Shark Country

Last week the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) Movement of Life Initiative tagging efforts went on the road as I headed south to Florida’s Treasure Coast in search of cownose rays and bull sharks.  Both of these species are the focus of Movement of Life…

Perfect Little Killing Machines: Healing Factor

This long-time-coming installment of the Perfect Little Killing Machines series starts with a story about a shark I got to spend a fair amount of time with.  A couple years ago I was keeping a group of spiny dogfish in captivity as part of a…

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…

The Future

Posts have been a little sparse here for the past month or so, and it’s because I’ve been spending a lot of time a.) finishing up my first year of PhD school, and b.) setting up a new batch of projects set that will keep…

AFS 2011 – Big Ol’ Recap

I’ve spent the last week at the 141st Annual Meeting of the American Fisheries Society, where nearly 4,000 fish nerds from the worlds of academia, management, and even art descended on Seattle for four days of talks, socials, interesting conversation over beer.  It was good…

Sharks of the Jersey Shore

Just got back from a little pre-school-year vacation visiting the Hot Girlfriend up in New Jersey, which has seen its share of shark sightings this summer.  New Jersey has a long history with sharks, what with the first high-profile string of shark attacks in U.S….

Hunting Bull Sharks in the Neuse

Yesterday I got the chance to wake up before dawn and head down to Morehead City to help out Duke PhD student Meagan Dunphy-Daly in her research on bull sharks and their habits in the Neuse River.  She has a guest post up at the…

AES 2011 Day 4

Today marked the last official day of shark talks at JMIH/AES, though there will still be plenty of bony fish a reptile talks tomorrow.  Most likely I’ll be exploring Minneapolis, and then it’s time for the long trip back and a little mini-vacation.  Tonight is…

AES 2011 Day 1

I’ll have to be fairly brief with this recap of day 1 of JMIH/AES 2011 so I can make the shuttle to the first “official” social of the conference, so hear goes:

Playing With Sharks in Charleston

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…