Category: Uncategorized
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Scourge of the Lionfish
From a great piece in the NYT by Carl Safina. About 20 years ago, one of the world’s most beautiful and otherworldly fish, the red lionfish, started showing up in south Florida and the Caribbean. Now, they’re a plague. Millions of them live from northeastern South America to New York, from water you can stand…
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Lionfish continue their upriver march
Below is a repost of a piece by Zack from Abaco Scientist about the the lionfish invasion of the Loxahatchee River in southeastern Florida. I grew up on the Loxahatchee, fishing and boating in it, and I knew every nook and cranny in the map below. The snook fishing was amazing and it wasn’t uncommon to see manatees.…
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Sharky desktop
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Shrimp farming – not cool
A great piece on shrimp farming from environment 360 by Marc Gunther: Carlos Perez, a well-to-do businessman, has been farming shrimp in Ecuador since 1979. He has seen the industry boom: Ecuador exported about $1.2 billion worth of shrimp last year, and its shrimp farmers employ about 102,000 people. He has also watched as shrimp farms have…
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Lionfish: the true pirates of the Caribbean
This is a guest post by Serena Hackerott, an undergraduate in my lab. In the photo below, Serena is teaching me how to extract the tiny otoliths from a lionfish she captured. Lionfish are the first marine fish to successfully invade the Caribbean. Lionfish are “piscivores”, or predatory fish that eat other fish, native to the…
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Extinction happens
This is why we think hunting tiger sharks and other top predators and large sea critter is not cool. They can and do so easily disappear forever. The excerpt below about the extinction of Stellers Sea Cow on Bering island in the mid-18th century is from The Unnatural History of the Sea by Callum Roberts. I…
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Sharks mean business!
Every day that a shark stays alive and available for divers to catch a glimpse of, it raises an average $73 in tourism revenue. That ads up to ~ $25,000 a year and well over a million greenbacks over a life time (Gallagher and Hammerschlag 2011). [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdFe3vs5FN4&[/youtube] [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/27134578[/vimeo]
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Shark killing contests alive and well in the US
Star Island shark tournament by the numbers: Two days of fishing 156 boats ~ 1000 hunters $540,000 in prize money 94 dead sharks biggest dead shark: 422 lb thresher Meanwhile, down in Alabama at the “Outcast Mega Shark Tournament” the catch of the day was a 949 lb, 14 ft tiger shark: …
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Shark week with Kelly Slater
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/47538086[/vimeo]
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Blue footed boobies!
From Nat Geo and the amazing blog NatureAfield by Heidi Smith. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NAKg46s1DA&[/youtube]