SeaMonster blog
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Smithsonian chooses Duffy to lead Tennenbaum Marine Observatories
[Hot off the presses, from the VIMS announcement] Professor Emmett Duffy of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, College of William & Mary, has been appointed director of the Smithsonian’s Tennenbaum Marine Observatories, effective September 16. He will be the first to lead this new initiative, a major long-term project to study coastal marine biodiversity…
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Shrink That Footprint
I’m a sucker for carbon accounting and carbon source graphics and I love this simple one from shrinkthatfootprint.com which came from Lindsay Wilson’s post A short history of carbon emissions and sinks at Skeptical Science.
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The MPA backlash has officially begun
Two new essays on the potential downside of MPAs – especially “super-sized MPAs” – came out this week. Super-sized MPAs and the marginalization of species conservation – by Nick Dulvy in Aquatic Conservation download PDF Environmental cost of conservation victories – by Ray Hilborn in PNAS download PDF For full disclosure, I was once a strong…
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Preprint servers: what are they good for?
Philippe Desjardins-Proulx and colleagues have a nice paper up in PLOS Biology (yes, it is PLOS now and no longer PLoS) The Case for Open Preprints in Biology. See their Box 1 – Preprint Server Roundup – for an excellent overview of the most popular preprint servers. Public preprint servers allow authors to make manuscripts publicly available…
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Where greenhouse gases come from
Ecofys released a new, nice graphic depicting where greenhouse gases come from: It generally seems accurate and they say it is based on 2010 data, although I have not been able to find their methodology. This chart updates an important, earlier one from WRI here. In 2000 18.2 % of emissions were attributed to land use…
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How to extract lionfish otoliths
Do you need to know how to get ear bones out of lionfish? Or are you just curious to know what the inside of a lionfish’s head looks like? Either way check out this film shot on location in Abaco, Bahamas featuring the crack lionfish catching team, Serena Hackerott and Katie Dubois. [vimeo]https://vimeo.com/67320381[/vimeo] Otoliths are teeny…
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Sea level rise in North Carolina
This is a post for my Marine Ecology class. We covered estuaries yesterday and will get to climate change impacts on the oceans soon. Sea level rise due to greenhouse gas emissions is one of the main ways climate change is affecting us Tar Heels. (And yes, this will all be on the final exam)…
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PeerJ Awesomeness
I’m totally smitten with PeerJ. A scientific journal. Yes, I’m am a geek. But this isn’t just any journal. It is open access, extremely fast, fair, lets authors retain copyright, publishing costs are low, and the layout of the online and PDF articles and of the submission portal is amazing – elegant, modern, and roomy.…
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It’s time for scientists to tweet
Our new lab post doc @emilysdarling has a great piece in The Conversation about the use of twitter in the life and work of a scientist: Social media is no longer a new thing. But to scientists it still might be. There are few who are starting to take advantage of social media for professional…
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The coral reef baselines survey
“The tragedy of recent coral reef decline is that too few people actually know what coral reefs are supposed to be like, and too few of those who now study reefs witnessed what coral reefs used to be like decades ago.” (Peter Sale and Alina Szmant from the Reef Reminiscences Report) I am fascinated by…
Got any book recommendations?