Archive for the ‘Marine Ecosystems’ Category

Catching their breath

As I mentioned in my last post, ocean acidification is likely to cause problems for hermit crabs both because the calcium carbonate used by snails to construct shells which are, in turn, used by hermits will be less available and because hermits exhibit less movement and environmental awareness as pH drops. A variety of aquatic […]

Not upwardly-mobile?

When I chose hermit crabs as my topic for this month, I wasn’t exactly sure what I would find. It turns out that hermit populations are generally in good shape at this moment [although the popularity of hermit crabs in the aquarium industry does warrant a little concern- because of the effort and expense needed […]

Any safe haven?

Over the past month, I’ve packed up my belongings and then unpacked them again as I moved between apartments. That got me thinking about animals that travel with their ‘house’, and so my topic for this month’s posts is hermit crabs. This is a topic that is pretty well unknown to me.   During a […]

Going on the offensive for sharks

Over the past few posts, hopefully you have gotten a sense of how a combination of increasing demand and general prejudice has led to massive overexploitation of shark populations around the world- some of the information I have passed along is pretty bleak. But I don’t want you to think that it’s all doom and […]

Where the wild sharks are

My last post presented a pretty bleak view of current shark populations and the challenges they face, so this week I want to focus on the ways that researchers are trying to understand the most important aspects of shark conservation- sometimes the strategies they propose aren’t effective, but still lead to improved shark knowledge and […]

Peril in the high seas

When I sat down to read about shark declines around the world, I had thought I was prepared for the numbers I was about to encounter: it’s very bad, we know this now, time to reserve the trend. But as I became more and more depressed about the current situation of shark species, I realized […]

Fins on patrol

Maybe I was inspired by the Discovery Channel last month, or maybe it’s due to how many I see when I’m on the Louisiana coast doing field work, but this month I’ve decided to look more closely at the plight of sharks in the world’s oceans (and maybe this is just an attempt to face […]

Posted September 2, 2013 by Mirka Zapletal in Marine Ecosystems

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Getting your hands wet

Many of the salt marsh and barrier island restoration projects I’ve described in previous posts are pretty big scale- it would be challenging for an individual to plan and carry out offshore dredging or large-scale marsh terrace construction. But is there a way to contribute in some small fashion to these bigger projects? Given how […]

Waiting for time and tide

In my last post I described some of the techniques used in salt marsh and barrier island restoration, a pretty important topic here in Louisiana where we wait for the wave of each new storm to break, but it’s also important in many other areas around the world, especially since a large percentage of the […]

Are we sinking or is the water rising?

When I started looking into coastal marsh and barrier island restoration, I had assumed that there would be a veritable ocean of information to wade through- what I hadn’t expected was the diverse nature of coastal issues depending on where you were. A lot of the information I came across focused on coastal areas in […]