SeaMonster blog
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Forum on fish, food, and people
Editor’s note: The following discussion, which more than one participant called “extraordinary”, began after Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington published an op-ed “Let us eat fish” in the New York Times on 14 April 2011, and John Bruno of the University of North Carolina (and my Co-Editor at SeaMonster) replied here at SeaMonster.…
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Teach your children well
Many of us of a certain age credit Jacques Cousteau with the inspiration that got us excited about marine life and started, or at least helped, us down the path to a life dedicated to the oceans. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Cousteau almost single-handedly created a human constituency for the oceans. Last…
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Holy Mackerel!
[. . . I’m tempted to add “Batman!”, but that would really show my age.] Where on earth do such expressions come from? I can’t answer that, but at least we can now sleuth out the evolution of the word mackerel itself, thanks to some crack detective work by Jim Gleick in his new book…
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Underwater robots listen out for whales
Whales are tough crowd to study. They swim all over the place and hold their breath for ages – those poor cetacean biologists must have a heck of a time keeping up with them. Well, one way of tracking them is to listen for their songs – but don’t just stick your head underwater and…
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The century of the environment and biology
Watch the commencement speech by Dr. E.O. Wilson at UNC last weekend. It is short and excellent. He talks about the conflicts between our stone age emotions, our medieval institutions and our god like technology, about biodiversity and the urgent need to transform how we protect and manage the living world. “There has been proportionately…
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A coral reef time machine
Great video about work by Dr. Karl Castillo (a post doc in my lab) and my UNC colleague Dr. Justin Ries on the effects of ocean temperature and acidification on coral growth and survival. You can read more about their research here and here. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvy7hFhiMZU[/youtube]
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Competition for krill links a rebounding ecosystem to penguin declines
At the far bottom of the earth, at the bitter end of the Pacific Ocean, lies the Ross Sea, home to a large proportion of the world’s penguins. Although it’s often considered the last intact marine ecosystem on earth, it appears there is no escape here, nor anywhere else, from the invisible miasma of CO2…
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Your chance to name an ocean critter
Ever fancied choosing a name for a new species? Well, now’s your chance. To celebrate the upcoming World Oceans Day, researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography want some help naming an awesome deep sea worm found 1km beneath the waves on a whale fall (the body of a dead whale that’s drifted down to the…
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Whales converge on the Big Apple
At least seven species of whales — including the rare and endangered Atlantic Right Whale and the world’s largest animal, the Blue Whale — have been recorded singing at an “open mike night” (actually many days and nights) in the waters of New York harbor and Long Island Sound by researchers from Cornell University’s Bioacoustics…
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Let us eat (other people’s) fish
Should Americans really eat more fish? In a recent op-ed in the NYT titled “Let Us Eat Fish” Dr. Ray Hilborn, a fisheries scientist at the University of Washington, argued we should. Ray thinks that because some of the hundreds of fish populations harvested in U.S. waters appear to be recovering and approaching levels that…
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