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 ‘fisheries’ Tag
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 […]
A shallow, unaltered stream runs through it
In my last post, I mentioned that habitat degradation and human-caused mortality were some of the biggest issues facing river otters. Recent research has tended to support those views, while providing more detail about where, how, and when those issues loom largest. We’ve also seen that otter populations can recover with protection, but there are […]
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 […]
Removing obstacles for colonial seabirds
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 […]
Harboring organochlorines
A quick look at harbor seal population trends around the world suggests that there have been ups, downs, and even some unknowns- catastrophic crashes in one part of the world while numbers grew in another and scientists couldn’t determine the pattern in a third. This wide-spread species shows corresponding variation in population status, but three […]