Category: Uncategorized

  • Top 5 Things I Learned at The Benthic Ecology Meeting 2014

    Justin Baumann has a very nice piece on his first experience at the Benthic Ecology Meeting here. I was really impressed by his insight and the general maturity of his post. I am on Justin’s committee but I haven’t interacted with him enough to get this clear a sense of what he is doing and thinking.…

  • NOAA to close key fisheries lab in Beaufort, NC

    The excellent Fisheries Blog has a great piece on the proposed closing of the facility on Pivers Island.  I was shocked when I first heard this news.  Duke/UNC organized a congressional visit to the facility that could change minds. Despite the incredible work done by the approximately 100 NOAA Beaufort Laboratory employees (see page 8),…

  • Graph of the day: projected coral bleaching under different RCPs

    Graph of the day: projected coral bleaching under different RCPs

    From van Hooidonk et al. 2013 PDF. Learn about RCPs here.

  • Really Dumb Idea #247: Training sharks to eat dead lionfish

    Below is a repost from the graduate student-written Under The C blog by Serena Hackerott.  Since the lionfish invasion hit the news, people have suggested that native predators will eat and control invasive lionfish. For more information check out our previous posts The Great Debate: Predators vs Lionfish and Who’s “Lyin’” about Lionfish?. But with current evidence suggesting…

  • New report: what we know about climate change

    Below is a guest post by Dana Haine, a K-12 Science Education Manager at the Environmental Resource Program (ERP) here at UNC. A new report on climate change was released by AAAS yesterday.  According to the New York Times, “the language in the 18-page report, called “What We Know,” is sharper, clearer and more accessible than perhaps anything the scientific community…

  • Congress considers Magnuson-Stevens

    Note, below are materials for a guest lecture I am giving tomorrow in Dr. Elizabeth Havice‘s Geography 435: Environmental Politics class (at UNC).   Congress is currently considering reauthorizing (and tweaking) the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.  A National Academy of Science report found that the law has worked relatively well (e.g., in reducing the number of…

  • How can we represent complex results in transition journals?

    Below is a cool piece, reposted from the Wares Lab.  I run into this issue too and I think the answer is modern journals like PeerJ that allow movies plugged right into the paper.    When I first started doing science, visualization of our data and results was a bit easier. Sequence a gene from…

  • The 10 warmest years on record globally have all happened since 1998

    The 10 warmest years on record globally have all happened since 1998

  • The dangers of data deficiency

    Below is a guest post by Chris Mull, a PhD student in the Dulvy Lab at Simon Fraser University.  Chris studies shark biology and evolutionary neuroecology.  You can read more about his research here. Over this past week science headlines have been flooded with the news that one-quarter of all chondrichthyans (sharks, skates, rays, and chimaeras) are…

  • Ovik Banerjee 1989-2014

    Ovik Banerjee 1989-2014

    I regret sharing the devastating news that Ovik Banerjee passed away last Monday.  He was only 24. Ovik worked in our lab in 2011. He and Amanda and Juan de spent the summer that year in Muisne Ecuador, working on a mangrove restoration – blue carbon project (DelVecchia et al. 2013).  This is what Ovik…