So I had originally intended to have a mini-blitz of material posted during Shark Week involving some of the topics that slip under the Shark Week radar, but for some reason technical difficulties arose that prevented me from successfully posting.  Also, in the middle of that I attended the annual AFS meeting in Quebec, which was awesome (I did my best to live-tweet the shark, highly migratory species, and feeding ecology talks, which you can see at #AFS14).  Those aforementioned posts will be up in the next coming week (give or take), so I hope you haven’t been completely burned out by shark material yet.

As far as Shark Week goes, others have covered the event itself better than I could.  Dave Shiffman has a nice recap of reactions to this year’s offerings as well as his own reviews, and I pretty much share his opinions.  It seems Discovery is determined to continue down the path of fear-mongering and spreading fake information in its quest to run Shark Week (which, by the way, exposed me to some of the first shark conservation messages I’d ever heard as a kid) straight into the ground.  If that’s their goal, it seems to be working: Christie Wilcox pointed out that this is the first year Shark Week has actually done worse than the previous year, though it’s worth noting that the only shows to fare relatively well in their time slots were the ones that profiled real research.  Clearly the audience has spoken and prefers real sharks and real shark scientists to poorly scripted CGI, but has Discover burned its bridges by lying the very scientists that provide them with material?  I certainly hope the ship gets back on course, because being on Shark Week is still a personal bucket list item of mine, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to participate in the nature documentary equivalent of Fox News.

And on that note, let’s get back to blogging.