josh donlan | September 19, 2008
Jad Abumbrad and Robert Krulwich. These two guys are probably the world's best at bringing the wonder and fun out of science. If you have not listened to RadioLab, you should. Their show last week is a gem. Making the Hippo Dance is a behind-the-scenes look at just how these guys do it. You can listen to it here.
josh donlan | September 19, 2008Secretary Paulson's plan revealed today is bold indeed, and sounds like socialism to me (banning short selling on some stocks and giving government backing to select others). Well, here is another bold plan for the North Atlantic Ocean. John Briggs of Oregon State University makes an argument that due to ecological history and overfishing, we should take a proactive strategy and start introducing fish species to the North Atlantic to increase biodiversity and production. This is certainly a risky and bold proposal, and likely a one-way street (unlike lions, reversing a fish introduction would…
jjacquet | September 18, 2008Today, Cornelia Dean at the New York Times reports on the latest findings from Costella et al. in Science about the use of individual transferable quotas in fisheries. In her article (and the study), Privately Owned Fisheries May Help Shore Up Stocks, the premise is that "allocating ownership shares of a particular fishery to individuals, cooperatives, communities or other entities gives them a reason to nurture the stock." In other words: privatize public goods. Ken Weiss at the L.A. Times also reports on the findings with a little more space. He includes quotes from Andy Rosenberg at…
jjacquet | September 18, 2008Say you're in Australia. You go to the store. You pick up some Kalamari crumbed seafood rings. The 'K' throws you but you suspect the product is still calamari, which is very popular in your country. Hopefully, you even know that means squid. You've been duped!
Austrimi Seafoods must drop the name Kalamari crumbed seafood rings, to avoid giving buyers the impression that the product mainly contains calamari rings. Only 4 per cent of the product contained squid according to the ingredients list, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said. The real question: what was the other…
rolson | September 16, 2008On the morning after our east coast premiere of "Sizzle" at the Woods Hole Film Festival on July 26 we had a really good panel discussion which WGBH video taped and has just posted. Andy Revkin (of the NY Times) and Naomi Oreskes (star of "Sizzle") are both excellent. Scott Doney doesn't quite get enough time and I take too much, but aside from that, I'd encourage you to give it a listen (just play the audio like a podcast, there's not much to watch). At 1:04 is a wonderful moment for me -- a member of the audience tells about the profound effect "Sizzle" had upon his 15 year old daughter…
jjacquet | September 14, 2008There is lots of science to show that average is beautiful. But I have never understood why averageness was a desirable trait in a political candidate. That Bush was "an average guy" was the political battle cry manufactured by Karl Rove. I didn't understand the desirability of that statement back in 2000 and I still don't understand it now. But at least it was manufactured. After all, how can you possibly be average if your father was President?
But in the case of Sarah Palin, though, I do believe she is truly average. The average person, for instance, would not necessarily know what…
jjacquet | September 13, 2008Focusing on subsidies rather than consumers likely to be better for fish and for small-scale fishermen
A couple weeks ago, Daniel Pauly and I got the paper Funding Priorities: Big Barriers to Small-scale Fisheries published in the journal Conservation Biology. In our analysis, we try to demonstrate that conservationists attempts to encourage sustainable fisheries at the market level should place at least equal emphasis on eliminating harmful fisheries subsidies as on consumer-based approaches (e.g., wallet cards that advise on which fish to eat).
More emphasis on eliminating subsidies might…
jjacquet | September 11, 2008Here ye, here ye! For those of you in the Vancouver neighborhood, Dave Ng (from World's Fair) and I are hosting an event to celebrate ScienceBlogs millionth comment on Thursday, September 18th, from 6pm at Koerner's Pub (on UBC's campus). Come by! We have a little pocket money from SEED, which means you should come even if you're broke.
Dave set up a Facebook event page just so that we have a general sense of how many folks might show up. Hope to see you in a week!
josh donlan | September 8, 2008In 2004, I was in a small intimate workshop with the founder of the field of Conservation Biology Michael Soule. To this day, I remember something he calmly announced. It went something like this:
Shit it is going to hit the fan due to global change. Not climate change explicitly but large-scale change that is also happening demographically, politically, and economically. Everything, everywhere on the planet is going to be intensively managed. This includes areas often thought as wild and frontier, like the boreal forests of the northern latitudes. The boreal forests are being rapidly…
jjacquet | September 8, 2008No one wants to talk about it, but apparently some people might not vote for Obama because he is black (a phenomenon I could indeed feel when I recently visited my home state Ohio). At this point, addressing the topic of race is sort of like having to argue against the Earth being 10,000 years old: it's stupid and boring. But, if you can still stomach trying to understand U.S. dunderheads, this column in the Philadelphia Inquirer analyzes the role Obama's father's darker skin could play in November.
The sad reality in the U.S. is that many citizens (and, in particular, union members) are…
josh donlan | September 2, 2008Nature's Emma Jones recently wrote about Moving On Assisted Migration in Nature Reports. "Experts who once disregarded it as a nutty idea are now working out the nuts and bolts of a conservation taboo: relocating species threatened by climate change." This will certainly raise some eyebrows and some ulcers in the coming decade.
jjacquet | September 1, 2008According to the BBC, a team of researchers discovered a new giant clam species in the Red Sea that may have been one of the first marine species over-exploited by humans. The team discovered fossil evidence to suggest the giant clam population plummeted at the same time humans appeared in the Red Sea area--125,000 years ago. Read the full story here.
jjacquet | August 30, 2008Baracknophobia: The irrational fear of hope.
If you saw Senator Barack Obama's acceptance speech Thursday night (TIME Magazine granted it an A+) you'll likely agree that it's hard not to be excited.
Obama's worldview and oratory skills combined with his positions on almost every issue, including health care, corporate handouts, and a national energy policy, do indeed give reason for hope (and there has never been anything false about hope). Senator Obama also recently answered 14 questions crafted by the ScienceDebate2008 team. Here is his response to the question posed about the oceans:…
josh donlan | August 27, 2008In the recent issue of the journal Biological Invasions, my colleague Chris Wilcox and I published an essay entitled, Integrating invasive mammal eradications and biodiversity offsets for fisheries bycatch: conservation opportunities and challenges for seabirds and sea turtles. It expands on a previous paper we wrote in 2007 that makes an argument for biodiversity offsets in the fishing sector. The idea has turned out to be controversial to say the least, but that is not unexpected - new ideas are often so, and biodiversity offsets in general have been controversial in nature.
Here is how…
jjacquet | August 26, 2008
Yep. Read up on the latest research on how we're wasting fish on snobby, fat cats in Australia's Herald Sun.
josh donlan | August 22, 2008Who killed the megafauna is one of science's greatest debates. Starting roughly 50,000 years ago, where and when humans show up around the globe, large animals disappear. First in Australia, later in North and South America, and finally on islands in the Pacific and New Zealand. Whether the main driving factor was man or climate has been a long-standing debate ever since Paul Martin put forth the overkill hypothesis in the late 1950s. Actually, there are two debates. First, were the megafaunal extinctions caused by humans, climate, or some combination of factors? Second, if humans did play a…
rolson | August 22, 2008Now it's time to share the truth.
Back in the first week of June the Junk Raft expedition faced some very dark days. When they were first towed out to the Channel Islands one of the pontoons broke apart, forcing them to stop and gather the plastic bottles that came loose. Then, a day later they discovered the lids of almost 1000 of the bottles were working themselves off, filling the bottles with water, causing the raft to slowly sink. When Anna Cummins took a repair crew out to San Nicholas Island she told me the raft was basically sinking and would have been done in a day or so. How…
jjacquet | August 21, 2008NewScientist's Thomas Hayden just reviewed Sizzle and liked what he saw. He recognized the film wasn't playing to the interests and expectations of the science world (Al Gore already did that) but about the importance of using humor to open hearts and minds to the topic of climate change. Read his review here.
jjacquet | August 18, 2008Overfishing, eutrophication, acidification, and climate change are leading to what Dr. Jeremy Jackson describes as the rise of slime in the oceans. For some recent evidence, check out this invasive algae in Crystal RIver or this recent story about increase in jellyfish on the Jersey shores. According to the research published last Friday in Science, there are now more than 400 dead zones worldwide, double the number reported by the United Nations just two years ago. Ugh.
A new article by Dr. Jeremy Jackson, Ecological extinction and evolution in a brave new ocean, was published early…