Wading Through Research

Hi all, Check out my post on the Oikos blog about subsidy regulation in the Everglades! Click on the link below to read the entire story Oikos blog full story

Happy new year folks!   I am writing today to discuss extreme ecology! As much as I wish that “extreme ecology” is studying ecology while surfing or snowboarding, it is not. Rather, extreme ecology or the” ecology of extremes” is the study of how ecosystems change following very rare natural disturbances.   These disturbances are more like natural disasters, that include volcanic eruptions, biblical floods, hurricanes, super storms, and boiling heat waves.  Extreme disturbance events are so harmful because they often kill everything that happened to be in the path of the disturbance. On top of destroying ecosystems, these events incur billions of dollars of damages to humans.  The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens provides a good example of an extreme disturbance event.  Mount St. Helens before and after the 1980 eruption

Good morning everyone, This blog is a tribute to all the animals that get caught up in science. Without their help, we would know alot less about the environment and the natural resources we all love! Lobster toupee None of the other lobsters can tell its scientific equipment: These tags are the same as the ones I use . They send a sound pulse that can be detected by underwater equipment and are used to track movement patterns (photo courtesy of FWRI http://myfwc.com/research/saltwater/telemetry/) Gopro shark (insert dup-step music here)   These are cameras attached to the sharks back that used to video and understand shark feeding habits. Courtesy of the Shark bay ecosystem research project and the Heithaus lab (http://www2.fiu.edu/~heithaus/SBERP/projects/tigerres.html). Punk rocker walleye… His girlfriend’s parents are not impressed   Lip tags are used in mark rec...

Good afternoon everyone! I hope everyone had a good summer! For us, school is beginning, once again FIU has become a large traffic jam.  And as I was sitting in my car waiting to leave FIU, I came up with this blog idea. When is accomplishing nothing, more than just accomplishing nothing? 

Tropical storm…… slow moving…….. heavy rain……. breezy……. Not the phrases you want to hear when you need to go deep into the Everglades and do a days worth of electrofishing before June ends.  Thanks to tropical storm Debby, I am going to have to sample in an orange tropical threat level!  One valuable lesson that I have learned over the few years that I have been doing field work is that if you wait till the last minute to sample,  super natural forces will make sure that your crucial sampling is impossible to finish.  Either something that you can’t fix will break, some plague will sweep through  your  lab making everyone too sick to help, or a tropical storm will park itself over south Florida.