Oceanographer's Choice

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10 posts · 8,172 views

Nekton, plankton, pings, and backscatter. Musings on marine ecology, fisheries, oceanography, salt water, and all things tangentially related.

Sam
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  • June 24, 2011
  • 04:51 PM
  • 846 views

Are Grouper Eating Invasive Lionfish?

by Sam in Oceanographer's Choice

A short but provocative study just came out in the open-access journal PLoS ONE. As readers may or may not be aware, the Caribbean Sea has seen an invasion of lionfish over the past five to ten years. No one … Continue reading →... Read more »

Peter J. Mumby, Alastair R. Harborne, Daniel R. Brumbaugh. (2011) Grouper as a Natural Biocontrol of Invasive Lionfish. PLoS ONE, 6(6). info:/doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0021510

  • April 10, 2011
  • 05:10 PM
  • 967 views

Beaked Whales and Naval Sonar: What’s Going On?

by Sam in Oceanographer's Choice

There have been huge fights in the past decade over Naval sub-hunting sonar and its effects on certain species of whales. In several cases, mass strandings of marine mammals have occurred shortly after naval exercises where mid-frequency active (MFA) sonar … Continue reading →... Read more »

Tyack PL, Zimmer WM, Moretti D, Southall BL, Claridge DE, Durban JW, Clark CW, D'Amico A, Dimarzio N, Jarvis S.... (2011) Beaked whales respond to simulated and actual navy sonar. PloS one, 6(3). PMID: 21423729  

T.M. Cox, T.J. Ragen, A.J. REad, E. Vos, R.W. Baird, K. Balcomb, et al. (2006) Understanding the impacts of anthropogenic sound on beaked whales. Journal of Cetacean Research and Management, 7(3), 177-187. info:/

Jepson, P., Arbelo, M., Deaville, R., Patterson, I., Castro, P., Baker, J., Degollada, E., Ross, H., Herráez, P., Pocknell, A.... (2003) Gas-bubble lesions in stranded cetaceans. Nature, 425(6958), 575-576. DOI: 10.1038/425575a  

  • February 7, 2011
  • 05:40 AM
  • 778 views

Reef Noise As Guide for Floating Crustaceans

by Sam in Oceanographer's Choice

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a small planktonic crustacean floating in the tropical ocean. Your world is vast, but its physical geography at your scale is relatively simple. Light and warmth are above, dark and cold are down. … Continue reading →... Read more »

Stephen D. Simpson, Andrew N. Radford, Edward J. Tickle, Mark G. Meekan, Andrew G. Jeffs. (2011) Adaptive Avoidance of Reef Noise. PLoS ONE. info:/doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0016625

  • November 30, 2010
  • 04:54 AM
  • 1,020 views

Cape Cod Crabs Consume Haline Hay

by Sam in Oceanographer's Choice

An interesting piece of ecological detective work from the shores of New England, which came to my attention via this blog post and this op-ed in the Cape Cod Times. Salt marshes on Cape Cod have been suffering local die-back … Continue reading →... Read more »

  • October 5, 2010
  • 02:23 AM
  • 624 views

Matching Management to Fish and Fishers

by Sam in Oceanographer's Choice

There are no truly universal laws in ecology. Every pattern and process takes place on its own scale in time and space, and truths that hold at one scale do not necessarily hold at another. This is a fact of life anyone dealing with an ecosystem has to come to terms with, whether they are [...]... Read more »

  • June 12, 2010
  • 03:33 AM
  • 871 views

Methods of sampling and analysis and our concepts of ocean dynamics

by Sam in Oceanographer's Choice

I read a paper today (actually, more like an essay) by Peter Wangersky, a longtime chemical oceanographer. Titled “Methods of sampling and analysis and our concepts of ocean dynamics,” it is essentially a personable ramble through six decades of marine science, reflecting on the technical capabilities and sampling methods over time and the [...]... Read more »

Peter J. Wangersky. (2005) Methods of sampling and analysis and our concepts of ocean dynamics. Scientia Marina, 69(S1), 75-84. info:/10.3989/scimar.2005.69s175

  • May 16, 2010
  • 09:50 PM
  • 843 views

Varieties of Oceanographic Experience

by Sam in Oceanographer's Choice


I’ve been thinking a lot lately about issues of scale in ecology lately, both because I’m taking a fascinating seminar on the topic this quarter, and because my particular research is conducive to thinking about them. “Scale” came to the fore as a topic of interest starting in the late 70’s, and is tied [...]... Read more »

  • March 15, 2010
  • 07:40 PM
  • 1,003 views

Krill v. Salps in the Southern Ocean

by Sam in Oceanographer's Choice

Last week, writing about copepods, I mentioned that they make up what is probably the most massive group of animals on earth. I also mentioned the likely runner up: krill. In particular, the Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba.

The Euphausiids are a major group of small, shrimp-like crustaceans found worldwide in the marine plankton. [...]... Read more »

V Loeb, V Siegel, O Holm-Hansen, R Hewitt, W Fraser, W Trivelpiece, S Trivelpiece. (1997) Effects of sea-ice extent and krill or salp dominance on the Antarctic food web. Nature, 897-900. info:/

  • March 10, 2010
  • 05:11 AM
  • 629 views

Self-Evident Victor of the Invert War

by Sam in Oceanographer's Choice

Invert war has been declared. Personally, I consider myself a lover, not a fighter. And all the inverts are worthy of love in my book. But, knowing that tempers may flare as biologists across the blogosphere come to the defense of their preferred spineless taxa, I thought it would be worth injecting a [...]... Read more »

  • February 4, 2010
  • 10:25 PM
  • 591 views

Sustainabewildering Seafood

by Sam in Oceanographer's Choice

I just finished reading a new paper from Jennifer Jaquet et al., mostly from Daniel Pauly’s group at UBC. The paper is titled “Conserving wild fish in a sea of market-based efforts,” and it appears in the current issue of the conservation biology journal Oryx. In it, the authors investigate the proliferation and [...]... Read more »

Jacquet, J., Hocevar, J., Lai, S., Majluf, P., Pelletier, N., Pitcher, T., Sala, E., Sumaila, R., & Pauly, D. (2009) Conserving wild fish in a sea of market-based efforts. Oryx, 44(01), 45. DOI: 10.1017/S0030605309990470  

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