It’s Tough Out There for a Parasite

In this latest installment of “stuff I’ve found in a shark stomach,” something was eaten by a spiny dogfish in the process of munching on something else.  While looking at stomach contents lavaged out of dogfish captured during the 2016 winter tagging cruise, I found,…

This is Happening

I’m pretty bad about unannounced hiatuses.  The slightly over three month gap since the last post was due to me finishing off my dissertation, which for those of you outside the strange world of academia is basically a giant paper containing all the results of…

Gut Check

A few recent papers in the elasmobranch world have turned some popular assumptions about sharks and rays on their heads.  First and most high-profile was Grubbs et al (2016) dismantling the shark/cownose ray/scallop trophic cascade that not only became so entrenched that it actually ended…

Sharks at SciREN 2016

Last Thursday I participated in SciREN Coast 2016, which is my third year participating as a researcher and second year helping organize and promote it.  SciREN is a great event that brings North Carolina home-grown marine science (or in its sister event SciREN Triangle, all…

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…

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…

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…

And We’re Back

Well that was some break.  Quite a bit has been going on to make that long unannounced hiatus happen, both in the world of dogfish and in my own life.  Since it seems that this blog has been spared the weirdness going on at Southern…

Are Dogfish Running the Food Web?

When spiny dogfish come up in conversation, it’s usually in reference to their supposedly ravenous appetites and the possibility that they’re eating other, more economically valuable species out of the ecosystem.  Luckily for the very beginnings of my research career, this has lead to a…

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…