Sea Monster

Author: John Bruno

  • Harp seals on thin ice

    Below is a guest post by Dr. David  Johnston, a Research Scientist at Duke University Marine Lab.  Dave is also one of the creators of the Cachalot app for ipad.  I first saw this post on his blog and asked him to repost it here, to complement our recent posts on polar bears, arctic ice and…

  • Can we save whales by buying them?

    A new paper in the journal Nature (Costello et al 2012) argues that whaling can be greatly limited or ended by developing a market for whales. By purchasing a whale, a nation, group or individual can either kill and sell it or let it live.  In essence, whaling nations would be paid not to hunt…

  • Happy 374th Nicolas!

    In case you were wondering about this: It is the 374th birthday of Nicolas Steno, AKA the “father of geology”: Steno was a Danish anatomist and geologist famous for his “principle of original horizontality”, the theory that layers of rock are formed horizontally.  He also devised the “law of superposition”, the basic idea that the oldest layers…

  • Quote of the week

    “The ocean floor is like a rainforest where feces and dead animals rain from the sky” – Dr. Craig McLean When many people hear the word “biodiversity,” they immediately think of tropical rainforests, or coral reefs; but as this picture demonstrates, biodiversity is a concept that ought to be more closely associated with the ocean…

  • Overfishing

    These are the lecture notes from the first lecture of my Marine Ecology course (BIOL 462) at UNC last fall.  I dumped Blackboard and just started using WordPress to share lectures with my students.  It works pretty well, but moving all my lecture content from PowerPoint to WP was a pain (especially for my TA).…

  • Interview with J Emmett Duffy

    There is a nice interview with SM blogger and science superstar, Dr. J Emmett Duffy in the Charlotte Observer today: Q: You’ve focused your career on species close to the bottom of the food chain. Why? I became fascinated with invertebrates, small marine creatures, at an early age. I was interested in the things that were rooting…

  • Marine Ecologist Kristin Aquilino

    A nice profile of marine ecology PhD student Kristin Aquilino. Kristin works in the Stachowicz lab at UC Davis on marine biodiversity. This video was filmed and edited by Neil Losin, Kelvin Gorospe, and Annie Schmidt (narration by Kelvin Gorospe). [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/19279147[/vimeo]

  • Record price for a bluefin – supply and demand conspire to drive a species into extinction

    The MSM is reporting this morning that a 269 kilogram bluefin tuna sold for $736,700 in a Tokyo fish market today. At least this one is going to be eaten. Mitsubishi Corp has been gobbling up tons of bluefin and putting them into deep freeze – anticipating their eventual extinction when the meat will be invaluable. It…

  • CBD sues to halt expanded bluefin catch

    The Center for Biological Diversity has sued NMFS challenging a new rule expanding overfishing of imperiled Atlantic bluefin tuna. The lawsuit seeks to halt the dramatic expansion of commercial fishing from Massachusetts to Florida in an effort to prevent bluefin from being fished to extinction. “Bluefin tuna were once the giants of the sea, but overfishing has depleted…

  • Climate change and the holiday season

    From Simon Donnor at Maribo [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEdZj5Eq-hM&[/youtube]