A quick look around this blog will tell you that I’m very interested in fish eating other fish. My Master’s research was on the feeding habits of spiny dogfish, and I’ve tried to keep up with the literature on shark-related predation ever since. It turns…
One of the cooler trends in marine science has been the revelation that advanced social and learning behavior are pretty widespread among marine animals, and not just the domain of marine mammals. Stereotypically, whales and dolphins are considered the big-brained residents of the ocean, able…
I haven’t written about New England great whites here in a while, though I do chime in about new sightings and info on Twitter. However, it looks like the sharks of the East Coast are attracting attention from more than just me. It looks like…
You might think that the title of this post refers to the spiny dogfish (Squalus acanthias), the main species of interest for this blog. You’d be wrong. You’d also be wrong to guess the great white, as badass a shark as that is. This post…
It should be no secret to readers of this blog or anyone familiar with fisheries at all that spiny dogfish have a pretty rotten reputation among commercial fishermen. Quickly approaching the notoriety of dogfish are those damn dirty sea mammals, the harbor seals. Both animals…
Recently Jason Goldman at the great blog The Thoughtful Animal (if you have any interest in animal behavior at all, you should be following it) put up a post titled “Sharks With Friends.” In that post, he summarizes a recent paper showing that blacktip sharks…
Back in the day (earlier this year) Andrew at Southern Fried Science had a series of posts called “Finding Melville’s Whale,” in which he poetically summarized chapters of the Herman Melville classic (and required reading for anyone serious about the salty life) Moby Dick. These…
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….
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:
Spiny dogfish are one of the rare success stories in the management of shark fisheries, with the U.S. Atlantic population representing one of the few shark stocks ever to fully recover from overfishing. At first glance this doesn’t seem to make any sense: spiny dogfish…