By Christopher Brown, RJD Intern As dawn broke on Saturday, November 7, 2015, eight sharky RSMAS students and one fearless lab manager awoke to the call of the sea. The RJD team assembled at Diver’s Paradise in Crandon Marina at 8:00am to begin loading the boat with the shark-friendly fishing gear that is utilized to […]
By Rachel Skubel, RJD Intern If you were a barnacle, how would you choose your home? For X. globicipitis barnacles residing on striped dolphins, this question was ‘put under the microscope’ by Juan Carillo and colleagues at the University of Southern Mississippi and Cavanilles Institute of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology (Valencia, Spain). Of all […]
By Melissa Soto, RJD Intern It was a warm November morning as the students from Palmer Trinity high school made their way onto the boat. This was my first trip of the semester so I was just as eager as they were to see sharks. After placing all the gear onto the boat, RJD and […]
By Grace Roskar, RJD Intern Long-Term Changes in the Distributions of Larval and Adult Fish in the Northeast U.S. Shelf Ecosystem Fishing pressure and climate change have been linked to changes of the distribution of several fish species in past studies. These factors contributed to geographic shifts of fish populations to different areas and impacted […]
By William Evans, RJD Intern Assessing environmental correlates of fish movements on a coral reef by Currey, et al. discusses the movement of fish dependent on environmental conditions. In this study, the researchers aimed to determine if environmental factors changed the location of Lethrinus miniatus, also known as the redspotted sunfish, on the reef to […]
By Dana Tricarico, RJD Intern Friday October 23, 2015 was officially my second trip as an RJD intern. Needless to say, I was extremely excited to get the day started and to become more familiar with all the jobs on board. It was a beautiful morning for some shark tagging as the team met at […]
By Julia Whidden, RJD Graduate Student “Microbiome” is the term used to describe the communities of microorganisms that live inside a host, and includes microorganisms that are beneficial, detrimental, and neutral to host health. Some of these microorganisms are vital to digestion, but the diversity, composition, function, and source of an animal’s microbiome is still […]
By Shannon Moorhead, RJD Intern The sun was just beginning to rise as my fellow intern, Grace Roskar, and I began our drive to Crandon Marina. On a typical day, waking up so early would leave me tired and irritable, but it’s hard not to be in a good mood when you have a day […]
By Stephen Cain, RJD Intern For millennia our ancestors fished the world’s oceans. Today’s fishing fleets are the most effective in all of human history, extracting ever-larger quantities of wild fishes. Only recently have scientists shown that seas are vulnerable to overexploitation, which can put species at extinction risk. Meanwhile, human population growth places increased […]
By Hannah Calich, RJD Graduate Student The giant limpet (Patella ferruginea; Figure 1) is one of the most endangered species in the Mediterranean Sea. As with many other marine species, their population decline has been attributed to overexploitation by humans. Giant limpets are most commonly harvested for food, fishing bait, or shell collection. Much of […]