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…
spiny dogfish
My Thesis: The Liner Notes
Whew. What a semester end that was (I’m still trying to survive the fallout). The first year of the PhD is down, and with it hopefully most of my class load so I can get to the fun stuff. This year also saw the official…
Busy Times, in a Good Way
Apologies for the lag time between posts this week. I was going strong, but then the end of the semester reared its ugly head. I’ll likely be slow getting stuff up in the next week or so as I deal with the typical PhD end-of-semester…
NOAA/NMFS Plans to Reduce “Problem Species” Populations
The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is often painted by fishermen as a rabidly pro-conservation agency hell-bent on putting them out of a job by protecting every species they used to fish. However, leaked internal memos show that the agency is taking a turn back…
Spiny Dogfish Quotas Go Up for 2012
Just a quick dogfish fishery news post for your Friday afternoon. NMFS has released the spiny dogfish quota for the 2012 fishing season, and as expected the quota has gone up. This year (starting May 1st) the dogfish quota will be set at 35.694 million…
Dogfish and Seals Taking a Bite out of Fisheries?
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…
The Tidewater Recap
Last weekend I attended the 26th Annual Meeting of the Tidewater Chapter of the American Fisheries Society, better known as AFS Tidewater or just plain Tidewater. To recap, this conference encompasses fisheries academics, students, and managers from the so-called “tidewater region,” which is made up…
Sustainability for Atlantic Spiny Dogfish?
This week the U.S. Atlantic spiny dogfish fishery took another step towards becoming the second shark or ray fishery ever to earn a sustainability certification from the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). The first was the Pacific spiny dogfish fishery, which turned out to be a…
Cape Hatteras Doggin’
After most of a semester in the office, I finally managed to get out on the water this past weekend. I traveled down to Hatteras with Andrea to help out with the latest piece of his project tracking different life stages of spiny dogfish. He…
Atlantic Spiny Dogfish Fishery Closed
Chalk this up as yet another example of me missing the boat on something I should really be posting. Earlier, I posted on the recent dramatic increase in the spiny dogfish quota, then the closure of the fishery in North Carolina a mere three months…