News and Announcements

Fish Quiz

Links

Sponges and Corals

• Florida's Reef Visual Census (RVC) surveys
• sponges that eat crustaceans
• creating heat tolerant corals
• coral resistant to acidification
• mushroom coral inflating to dig out of sand
• more on Steve Palumbi's research into corals that can survive ocean warming
• Aquarius Reef Base: Sponge Research
• A member of the staff at the Georgia Aquarium writes about diving with the Coral Restoration Foundation (CFR)
• my photos of CFR's work at Snapper Ledge.
• Why protecting parrotfish might be more important to reefs than warming or acidification
• gobies and angelfish may also be critical to reefs
• Diane Rehm Show: threats to coral reefs
• Coral may be able to resist warming by switching symbionts
• Montipora White Syndrome in Kaneohe Bay
• selective breeding of heat tolerant corals

Sharks and Rays

• Five reasons why the Australian shark cull was a bad idea
• whale shark kills increasing
• Cocos Islands: the difficulty in stopping illegal shark fishing
• Why Shark Week Sucks: "Educational TV" is rubbish
• when does shark tourism become shark harrassment
• landing a hammerhead shark is illegal in FL water
• Pet sharks and their sensitive skin
• Touching manta rays causes skin lesions
• the effect of fishing on whale sharks
• whale shark slaughterhouse
• not all shark fins for sale are due to finning

.@StephSchuttler The media ask me about them. "Do you support the call to ban finning in Florida?" No, because that happened 20 years ago

— David Shiffman (@WhySharksMatter) May 6, 2014

• shark con
• How to determine shark or dolphin?
• Catch and release a hammerhead? You probably killed it
• Goblin Shark
• Japanese Aquarium's public outreach failure
• Sharks in a jar
• Megamouth Sharks
• Why scalloped hammerheads are classified as an endangered species and northeast Pacific white sharks are not
• Shark tracking with the Guy Harvey Research Institute
• Cryptic Species(???): The Carolina Hammerhead
• Cryptic Species(???): A new eagle ray
• British people don't know that the "rock salmon" in their fish and chips is really shark
• Dr. Neil Hammerschlag: Baited shark dives and large scale shark movments
• Discovery Channel: rubber sharks, fearmongering, and two years of megalodon stupidity
• sustainable shark consumption? The truth is that conservation can be complicated
• should we have limits on whale shark tourism

Marine Mammals

• Russia is capturing orca for Chinese aquariums
• Orcas captured for asian marine parks
• Orca: J pod matriarch might be more than 100 years old
• The Whale Poop Hypothesis: Whales, Krill and Iron
• marine mammals: not cute!!
• beluga bellies
• barnacles as skin parasites of dolphins
• will Japanese whale watching replace Japanese whaling?

Marine Isopods

• isopod swimming
• Cymothoa exigua: the tounge eating isopod
• Interview with director of the bay (horror movie about isopods)

Plastic Waste

• the problem with plastic
• The truth about the Pacific Garbage Patch
• NYT piece on plastic pollution
• The media love to tell stories about the brilliant young person who will save us all. Naturally, they love talking about Boyan Slat. He's done a good jobe of publicizing the problem, but sadly, his cleanup ideas probably won't work. (...and Slat is bad at astroturfing
• NOAA's marine debris tracker
• Scripps surveys the levels of plastic near the Hawaiian Islands
• is the conversation about plastic debris causing us to loose focus on more important issues?

Sustainable Use Issues

• deep ocean trawling creates deserts
• Menhaden: "the greatest fish we ever fished"
• the link between sardine fishing and sick sea lion pups
• shark fishing: who catches what
• Overharvesting of seaweed?!?!?
• Haunauma Bay: overcollection of yellow tangs for the aquarium trade
• Goblin Shark reminds us of the bycatch problem
• how we wrecked the ocean
• The problem with Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing
• fisheries: poaching red snapper
• How do we know what sustainable yield is?
• Can we use satellites to end IUU fishing?
• Using stable isotope analysis to see what sharks are eating
• more on the problem with ocean cleanup
• Is sustainable orange roughy really a thing?
• maximum sustainable yield: what is it, does it still matter?
• overfishing of bluefin tuna
• activists, controversy, and salmon hatcheries

Economic impact of overfishing ($600-1400 billion) dwarfs climate change ($17-41 billion) to 2050 pic.twitter.com/beIg38JKC0

— Trevor A. Branch (@TrevorABranch) June 2, 2014

Ocean Acidification

• flarp
• NOAA's Ocean Acidification Link
• Staghorn Coral INCREASING range!?!?!
• Pursuing the Reality of Ocean Acidification>
• TSM: climate change
• Home (ocean acidificaton documentary)
• Netflix: a sea change
• How acidification might affect Alaska's fisheries

Controlling Invasive Species

• Invasive Sea Weeds in Hawaii
  • Using local urchins to control invasive seaweed
  • Vacuuming the invasive algae off of the reefs with the Super Sucker
  • Prickly Sea Weed: introduced by boats
  • invasive algae that escaped from aquaculture
• Lionfish
  • Jonathan Bird on invasives (including lionfish)
  • Christie Wilcox on the lionfish invasion (...and ciguatoxins)
  • lots of other content on lionfish
  • Lionfish can live in almost completely fresh water. That's true regardless of who discovered it first.

Misc

• the fight over eel fishing in Maine
• A biologically accurate version of Finding Nemo
• Do you love white sandy beaches? Thank a parrot fish!
• Why can't we try upbeat environmentalism
• gulf oil spill
• fukushima and starfish
• government "help" for marine conservation
• Moray eels' amazing alien-like jaws
• International SeaKeepers Society: Using luxury yachts as marine research vessels
• more on fukushima's effect on ocean life
• Elysia: a kleptoplastic, photosynthetic sea slug
• mangrove video
• cone snail
• Sylvia Earle's Mission Blue
• Sea Turtle mating strategies
• 71 things we don't know about the ocean
• Sabretooth Blenny
• The problem with Sea Shepherd
• Coelacanth: not the silver bullet of cryptozoology
• cuttlefish: difference between arms and tentacles

Underwater Art

• a href=http://iamaquatic.com/>DERON VERBECK
• Jonathan Bird's underwater photography tips
• Jason De Caires Taylor: Using underwater scuptures to create artificial reefs