Category: Blog
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Occupy Jamaica, Part 2: The lay of the reef
Discovery Bay, Jamaica. 8:23 PM. End of my second full (long) day since arriving Friday afternoon. Kristin, James, and Solomon had arrived Tuesday — three days ahead of me – and made good progress reconnoitering and sampling at the sites we’d worked in 2008. By this evening we had collected and processed over 100 samples…
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You’ve never seen waves like this
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXDEtGw7d3Q&[/youtube] This is Teahupoo (pronounced cho-po), Tahiti. One of the heavyest and most dangerous surf breaks in the world on the biggest day it has ever been surfed. It was August 27th 2011 on a break day from the Billabong Pro surf contest, when contest organizers deemed the waves too big. That didn’t deter many of…
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What Galapagos fisherman think about fishing
From Shark Amigos [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/27136459[/vimeo]
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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).…
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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…
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Occupy Jamaica, Part 1: Prelude
[Part 1 in the SeaMonster Expedition series: Jamaica. the team finalizes preparations for a 10-day research trip to Jamaica to solve the mystery of large, cooperative societies in lowly shrimp.] As ice skins over Timberneck Creek among the bare trees of Virginia, we are eagerly staging gear and making preparations for our first expedition of…