AES Day 1

The first official day of talks wrapped up today, followed by a pretty sweet social at the Roger Williams Park Zoo.  I'll run down some of the more interesting stuff I heard about today in relatively short form below.

Dogfish on Tour: The Providence Prelude

Your humble narrator is currently in the Great State of Rhode Island after a detour to the Jersey Shore to visit the Hot Girlfriend.  I'll be spending time with some friends until Wednesday, when  the Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists gets underway.  I'll be attempting to provide regular updates from the conference (including my own poster presentation) and may try my hand at some live blogging (if I have the gumption to drag my laptop to a lot of talks).  I'm looking forward to meeting my fellow shark people and reconnecting with some old friends and advisors.  If you're attending the conference, I'll see you there.

The Ya Like Dags? Social Guide to Rhode Island

Two posts in two days?  It's like I'm a real blogger all the sudden.

The occasion for this post is that next week I'll be participating in the Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists.  I'll be presenting a poster on my work as well as seeing an almost impossible number of shark talks thanks to the fact that the American Elasmobranch Society is rolling deep at this conference.  However, being at a conference alone is not what this post is about.  This post is about Rhode Island.

This particular conference is taking place in Providence, Rhode Island and is hosted by my undergrad alma mater.  Aside from being able to reconnect with some of my old professors and peers as well as being able to spend some time in a state I still very much consider home, this also presents me with an opportunity to show some of my North Carolinian colleagues (and any other shark people out there who want to hang out) just how awesome my little state can be.  Below the jump are some of my favorite places in the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.  I know that some of my old Rhody friends know of places that I've overlooked, so feel free to add any other points of interest in the comments.

First New England Great White of 2010

I'm headed back up to my motherland of Rhode Island next week for the Joint Meeting of Icthyologists and Herpetologists (mainly because of the heavy AES presence there), and it seems the great whites are going to be there to greet me.  The first New England great white of the summer has surfaced off of Boston, where it was caught, tagged, and released by a group of Gloucester fishermen.  The Dorsal Fin has a looped video of the shark taken by the fishermen.  Maybe I should bring my snorkeling gear with me...

Feeding Habits Analysis: Detective Work Part 2

In my previous post on the detective work necessary for any good feeding habits analysis, I lamented the apparent lack of a "one-stop shop" for looking up fish scales (at least as far as I've been able to find).  In response, I've been saving scales from fishes I've been albe to ID down to species level.  The idea is to match up these "type" scales with the scales often found with the unclassifiable chunks of fish that often show up in spiny dogfish stomach contents.  Below the jump you'll find the first three species in Chuck's Field Guide to Spiny Dogfish Bait.

Marine Rewilding?

It's amazing what you'll catch in the letters to the editor sometimes.  In the latest issue of Fisheries Magazine is a classic back-and-forth editorial origination from an article by researcher John. C. Briggs.  At first my interest was piqued simply by the fact that there was something ocean-related (since the start of my subscription Fisheries has been utterly dominated by freshwater articles), but reading the debate motivated me to go back and track down the original article.  What I found was one of the more unusual takes I've seen on the management of Atlantic fisheries, and an interesting parallel with a highly controversial conservation strategy.

Angry Post

You may have noticed that I haven't been saying much about the white elephant (or big black blob) in the ocean.  This is for two reasons: first, I try to stick to my main subjects here, which are dogfish, shark research, and fisheries management.  I like to throw in some oddball internet stuff every so often but in general I try to write what I know.  Secondly, the BP disaster is being covered much more thoroughly in other forums.  Deep Sea News has been following the story from the beginning, and Southern Fried Science has a handy list of other places you can check to follow the progress of the oil as it destroys the Gulf of Mexico and potentially the entire Atlantic coast. 

Documents released today (or at least reported on today) reveal that BP knowingly and willingly cut corners in order to save time and money.  The company ignored advice from Halliburton that could have made the well much safer, and even turned a deaf ear to the Deepwater Horizon's own chief engineer, who called the situation a "nightmare well." 

I guess we can stop the finger pointing now (though BP CEO Tony Hayward's appearance before Congress on Thursday should be a hoot).  Yet again we see the end result of trusting profit-motivated entities to regulate themselves.  Will this time finally be the time we learn that this is a bad idea?