Over the last few weeks, I’ve described some of the big challenges facing reef fish and the coral reefs they inhabit- some of those issues are very big, such as the scale of climate change and ocean acidification, and some of those issues occur on a much smaller scale, such as when fishermen use cyanide […]
Archive for the ‘Marine Ecosystems’ Category
Go (help a reef) fish!
Regenerating a coral reef
In my last post I mentioned some of the challenges facing reefs and reef fish, particularly overexploitation and habitat degradation. Although these issues affect reef fish in different ways, they can work in tandem to intensify conservation problems. The good news is that we have better insight into how to lessen or even remove some […]
Fishing down the coral reef
Over the past week I’ve been looking into the challenges facing reef fishes and the environments they inhabit, and there are some very clear recurrent themes: overexploitation (on a number of levels), habitat degradation (for a variety of reasons), and climate change. These are all big issues and unfortunately some of them are probably not […]
The tropical life aquatic
During a recent trip to New England, I spent an afternoon wandering around an aquarium- I love watching all of the undersea life, but one of my favorite exhibits is always the shallow coral reefs with their diversity of brightly-colored fish. I know that there are a number of conservation concerns for the fish we […]
Giving eels a leg to stand on
Over the past week, I’ve looked for ways for us to get directly involved with eel conservation- the good news is that those opportunities are out there; the bad news is that it took some searching to find everything I mention here, so it takes persistence to get involved. Of course, it also takes persistence […]
Crowded eels
In my last post, I mentioned some of the big issues facing eel populations around the world: habitat fragmentation, overexploitation, climate change. We’re constantly gaining information on how these problems impact eels, and we’re also getting a better sense of how to mitigate some of the challenges. Once again, I’m largely looking at those eel […]
Slipping through the cracks
This past week has been really informative for me- so many things that I didn’t know about eels, and it turns out that I’m not the only one. Although there are a large number of scientists looking into eel conservation, there are still so many unknowns about eel ecology that it can be hard to […]
A slippery subject?
I was brainstorming for this month’s topic and it seemed like it’s been a while since I have chosen something with a truly aquatic lifestyle. Plus I was thinking that it would be nice to talk about something that has at least a partial connection to the food I eat, and then I thought ‘eels.’ […]
Drama on the seas and islands and beaches
Giving crabs a leg up
In my reading about hermit crabs over the last few weeks, I’ve certainly gotten the sense that most hermit crab species aren’t in particularly precarious positions with regard to survival. While king crabs and coconut crabs are an exception, most species seem to be doing pretty well at the moment. That trend is likely to […]