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Tips from a workshop on Negotiating
Negotiating is a valuable skillset that many scientists are never formally trained in. This post highlights some of the take away messages from a Strategic Persuasion and Negotiating workshop I attended last week (November 13, 2018).
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Negotiating is a valuable skillset that many scientists are never formally trained in. This post highlights some of the take away messages from a Strategic Persuasion and Negotiating workshop I attended last week (November 13, 2018).
Check out the latest from Matt Larsen about shark habitat around the globe, and how these areas overlap with fishing hotspots!
At this point, it’s undeniable that the climate is changing rapidly. What are our options for mitigation? Many scientists are considering strategies that involve engineering the climate – also known as geoengineering.
People often associate intelligence with mammals because humans are mammals and we like to think of ourselves as being pretty smart. The movie Deep Blue Sea toys with the concept of genetically modified hyper-intelligent sharks running loose in a research facility. While this Sci-Fi thriller is a sensational over-exaggeration, it does pose an interesting question: […]
The tiny critters that burrow, swim, and graze in the benthic (bottom) habitats of marine ecosystems are often monitored over long time periods so that researchers can measure changes in biodiversity over time. Read on to find out how researchers used long-term benthic data from Narragansett Bay to link human activities with changes in biodiversity.
Despite mudflats supporting fisheries, providing homes for birds, and serving as a buffer between land and sea, these ecosystems are still threatened by human development. Researchers looking for ways to protect mudflats found that in order for mudflats to remain healthy, 4 important roles must be filled by the animals living in them.
A few months ago, I wrote about sawfish research in Papua New Guinea, but if you live in the U.S. you can find sawfish much closer to home. The smalltooth sawfish (Pristis pectinata) once roamed throughout the Gulf of Mexico and along the East Coast, but now calls South Florida, particularly Everglades National Park, home.
Krill, the tiny organisms that feed the Southern Ocean, have long been thought to be pretty mellow in the winter. As it turns out, it is quite the party down there year around!
A recent study uses satellite data to show that Arctic sea ice retreat is causing changes in the timing and location of spring phytoplankton blooms, which play a large role in the regional ecosystem and carbon cycle.
Kosuth M, Mason SA, Wattenberg EV (2018) Anthropogenic contamination of tap water, beer, and sea salt. PLoS ONE 13(4): e0194970. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0194970 You’ve seen it; plastic bottles discarded on the beach, photos of marine life starved on a diet of plastic straws, shopping bags adrift in a flotilla of single-use refuse. Plastic changed the world when […]
A recent study shows that within the mixed layer—the region of the upper ocean where temperature and salinity are homogeneous—biological properties may not actually be well mixed. These results have implications for our understanding of phytoplankton biomass distribution.
Researchers spent seven years specifically studying deceased, stranded cetaceans along the coastline of the Canary Islands in Spain to figure out what most likely caused their deaths. They found that while human activity accounted for a large portion, something else was responsible for a much larger percentage of cetacean death.
It turns out tide pools are a lot more complex than they seem – and often inhabited by cannibals. Can we glean answers to the universe by peering into them? John Steinbeck seemed to think so.
Even though the benthos is a largely unseen energy base for marine food webs, scientists are listening to benthic habitats as a novel way to monitor ecosystem health. Read on to learn about how acoustics can capture sounds produced by benthic algae.
By looking at fossils found in the Western Atlantic, Dr. Luke Strotz and a team of scientists at the University of Kansas and Oxford have come across an intriguing idea: that an animal’s metabolism may be linked to how likely the species is to going extinct.
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The goal of oceanbites is to make cutting edge research in the ocean sciences accessible to all. oceanbites will also highlight classic, seminal research papers, and feature op eds about current issues in research.
Science Communication
Outreach- Ship to Shore STEM education
Delivering field work directly from the field to the classroom has become an important part of science communication and engagement. This post introduces a great learning tool called Adopt a Microbe- a fun and engaging project and website designed to bring microbes and marine science inside the classroom.
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