Ecology & Zoology
Argh it's taking me longer than I thought to write this fisheries post! Quick a distraction--Did you know that June 1st was Kraken Day over at Deep Sea News? Go read all their posts! There was one every hour! Each was hilarious and/or bizarre and/or fascinating!
Now here is a kraken I drew for a super-secret project that is almost done:
Now go away and come back tomorrow.
Probably not. Unless you're a squid, octopus, or cuttlefish, in which case the answer is a definite maybe.
It's long been accepted that cephalopods can't see color with their eyes, but in the last few years, scientists have been bandying around the idea that they might be able to see it with their skin. This possibility has led to an intriguing collaboration between marine biologists and materials engineers. A new article in PhysOrg goes into a bit more detail than I did the last time I covered it:
[Marine biologist] Hanlon's team will seek different opsins in cephalopods' skin that detect…
Last winter I noticed a few ants wandering around the bathroom. I suppose most folks would run for some bug spray or call the exterminator, but not me – I went to buy more film for my camera!! I have always been challenged by filming ants. They are so unusual and so… thoughtful, determined, pre-programmed, whatever – they are very cool animals. If you ever have an opportunity to spend some time following an ant around for a while, try to imagine what it is thinking – what its intentions are, it’s fascinating.
But to be honest, at first I killed the ones I saw. I figured they were scouts…
I've got nothing at all against chefs. I'm just suggesting that when a restauranteur and TV personality says something like
“Squid is now the dominant species in the Pacific,” Cosentino says. “The waters have changed.”
. . . then you might want to fact-check with an actual oceanographer. Or, say, a squid biologist.
The quote is from a piece in Men's Journal called Save the Ocean, Eat A Squid--a title guaranteed to raise my hackles. The article documents chef Chris Cosentino's fishing trip to collect Humboldt squid, which he then cooks up for patrons of his San Francisco restaurant.
Cosentino'…
While last year's market squid bounty continues into the 2011 fishing season, the market squid's larger cousin is playing hard to get. The Humboldt or jumbo squid--you remember, our hungry friends that grow up to five feet long and eat everything they can wrap their arms around--makes a habit out of making headlines, whether it's invading or invisible. This year, it's the latter.
"Catches of jumbo squid in 2009-2010 seemed limitless," reports Frank Hartzell of the Mendocino Beacon. But they've been conspicuously absent in 2011.
As any good reporter would*, Hartzell interviewed Dr.…
With all the huge (and sadly tragic, in some cases) storms we have had
in mostly the middle to eastern portions of the United States this Spring, many
opportunities arise to see natural events rarely witnessed. Some are obvious,
such as the bears in trees in the Louisiana floods (I heard on the radio they
can survive in the canopy for up to three weeks!) Other natural occurrences are
not so easy to observe – unless you know where to look.
I had the rare (for me anyway) opportunity to use a chainsaw a few
years back. It was my first experience cutting wood. It was the old ash tree in
the back…
Last year, the market squid off California were so abundant that the fishery actually reached its quota for the first time in history. Normally, squid fishing season is April 1st to March 31st--yep, that's all year. But when they hit the quota back in December 2010, the fishery closed.However, when April 1st, 2011, rolled around and government officials opened the fishery again, no squid boats sallied out into Monterey Bay. According to the Monterey Weekly,
When the squid season began April 1, local fishermen held back in hopes of pressuring processors to bump the price of calamari from $500…
A new paper in Nature says the most widely used methods for calculating species extinction rates are "fundamentally flawed" and overestimate extinction rates by as much as 160 percent.
Obviously there aren't many ways to directly know extinction rates and very few ways of even directly estimating extinction rates, so conservationists use an indirect estimation method (calibrate accordingly, as always) called a "species-area relationship." This method starts with the number of species found in a given area and then estimates how the number of species grows as the area expands.…
As soon as you start studying fisheries science, you hear about the importance of getting fishermen and scientists to talk to each other. It's a truism once you think about it--fishermen know a lot about fishing, and scientists know a lot about science. Put them together and you get fisheries science. But it's useful to confirm that this principle works for, say, squid:
Teresa Johnson, an assistant professor of marine policy in the University of Maine’s School of Marine Sciences, concludes in a recent research paper that the preservation and protection of both the species and those…
Many people are confident that their dogs and cats can sense impending earthquakes. Could squid provide humans with the same service? Let's examine the "connections" that have been drawn between squid and earthquakes.
In La Jolla in 2009, a small stranding event occurred around the same time as an equally small earthquake. But the squid actually started stranding a few days before the earthquake, deflating the much-hyped idea that the earthquake caused the stranding.
This year in Japan,
Squid fishermen in Tokushima Prefecture hauled in a bumper catch just before the massive March 11…