Wading Through Research

The following link is to an article written by Jessica Lee, FIU graduate student in Dr. Jennifer Rehage's aquatic biology lab ( http://www2.fiu.edu/~rehagej/index.html ). __________________________________________________________________________      In February I had an opportunity to fish with my favorite group of anglers from the Keys. For the past 30 years this group of fishermen has faithfully made it every month to the backcountry to fish. They were the inspiration for the Coastal Angler Science Team (CAST), the “original-members” before CAST officially came to be.  For the past two years they have been regularly scanning their catches for “recaptures” (previous fish we tagged with internal microchips, “PIT-tags”).  This group alone has caught over 30 recaptures, about half of the current CAST totals. To read more, please go to http://cast.fiu.edu/index.php/my-recapture-story-for-the-everglades/ .

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

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.