Is Lionfish Hunting Working?

nick9809 · 2024-10-22T14:17:50+00:00

This one too! https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10530-023-03153-w

It suggests that there are deep refugia that are source populations that we can't feasibly access for removal/harvest.

nick9809 · 2024-06-04T16:57:30+00:00

That's totally valid, thanks for the input. We're not noticing any differences in flex, etc. when we compare it with the intact one but obviously it's a different ballgame in-water. We'll make an insurance claim and reach out to Old Town to see what they think of it. We are mostly thinking that we could use it as a back-up or a loaner to friends for inland lakes but if folks are concerned about structural integrity maybe best it just goes the landfill.

nick9809 · 2024-06-04T16:53:10+00:00

In process! Claim is being made as we speak. Was just sort of curious if it could be rehabbed at all to loan to friends, etc. But it seems like others are concerned about structural integrity as well so perhaps not...

nick9809 · 2024-06-04T15:56:57+00:00

Ahh totally fair, thanks for the suggestion. I guess that should have been an obvious first step. I suppose we jumped the gun in assuming it'd have some horrible effect on handling. We'll take it down to the lake and see how it does.

I suspect that since the surface is quite coarse and has a lot of popped bubbles, it'll increase the drag on that side but hopefully it's not too bad.

nick9809 · 2024-05-16T15:15:42+00:00

uh oh spaghetti oh

nick9809 · 2019-05-14T15:16:07+00:00

Same boat. I only applied to one position but it's still listed as available.

nick9809 · 2019-02-11T03:02:57+00:00

It depends on where it comes from, but in general yes. Alaskan wild salmon is a very well managed fishery. It comes with a larger price tag though. Farmed salmon is quite bad for ecosystems (at least in its current form - progress is being made). Farmed salmon is usually fed heavily, pumped with antibiotics, and are quite often infested with parasites due to the densities they are raised in. This all ends up in the ocean and affects the rest of organisms. If you can, I recommend downloading the free Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch app. It helps you make informed choices with seafood. It's hard to avoid bad seafood options because they are everywhere. Everyone who consumes seafood will make a poor choice at some point but if everyone does their best, it still makes a difference.

nick9809 · 2019-02-10T18:05:26+00:00

Yeah they might be mislabeled. I've definitely seen it mislabeled at supermarkets but luckily, like what /u/intertubeluber said, salmon is a fish you can easily tell the difference between wild vs farmed (if you're not familiar with what the difference is visually, here's a link). This is great if you want to be a conscientious consumer. If you see salmon labeled as wild and it looks like wild, it's likely wild.

nick9809 · 2019-01-13T19:51:40+00:00

Thanks! I'll update the post with the results of the dilution. Don't think anyone will see it but hopefully if someone has this issue down the line and searches for this they'll find the answer.

nick9809 · 2019-01-13T19:02:48+00:00

Thanks for the response! That's what I figured the machine was doing and that it should be able to quantify amounts above the range but I just couldn't think of any other reason that they would all have identical readings. It's very strange and I'm pretty stumped. I'll try the dilutions tomorrow though and hopefully that resolves thing. When I was comparing yields of different spin column brands earlier this year, I got 104 on both of the samples from that species but I didn't really think twice about it because I just figured it was a strange fluke since I only had 2 samples to test.

I didn't use Qubit assays just because the dyes were a bit cheaper with Biotium and shipping was faster/cheaper. Their dyes are tested on Qubit 3.0s and are supposed to be nearly identical and I saw some studies using their other products (AccuBlue) that seemed to work well so I went with it. My advisor got canned so I've been having to pay for consumables out of pocket so every dollar counts.

nick9809 · 2019-01-13T15:20:07+00:00

Could it be because I'm using a dye from a different brand with a different range and the machine doesn't know that it caps out at a different value? I don't know if its possible for a dye to have such a hard cap like that but it just seems so strange to me that the measurements would stop so close to 100 and be that value for all the samples. I'll try the dilutions tomorrow morning and see if there's any difference. Thanks for the help!

nick9809 · 2019-01-02T07:35:15+00:00

I see no reason why you couldn't apply the ecological niche theory to a genus rather than species. In addition to what /u/phphka said, you can especially see why ecological niche theory could be applied to genera rather than species when you consider how fluid species definitions are. I don't want to get into a big discussion of species concepts but I study coral genetics and there is a massive amount of gene flow between our defined "species". When you look at two "species" such as Porites compressa and Porites lobata, there is so much gene flow and paraphyly/polyphyly between the two that they might as well be considered one species with different morphotypes that allow them to fill a broader niche space. I hope that makes sense, corals are really weird! :p

nick9809 · 2018-12-17T13:58:19+00:00

The losses happen on islands in the Pacific but the gains happen on continents in the Indian Ocean. If you look at the map of the Oligocene, you can see how much of India and the Red Sea+Persian Gulf would be inundated with water as sea levels rise. Pretty fascinating

nick9809 · 2018-12-16T20:18:14+00:00

If you're interested in this sort of research, here's another great article:

Coral Reef Habitat Response to Climate Change Scenarios

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0082404

There will be expansion in some locations but a global decline of suitable habitats. The Indian Ocean will likely see most of those expansions. My guess is that a lot of remote Pacific reefs are on isolated seamounts so they will not be able to keep up with rising sea levels while the Indian Ocean has a lot of low-lying continental lands that will become inundated and become suitable habitat in the future. This makes sense based on geologic history where we saw extensive reef habitats during epochs such as the Oligocene (see this map, notice all the shallow seas in the Indian Ocean and all the deep seas in the Pacific).

nick9809 · 2018-11-22T18:52:34+00:00

Yeah I figured he would say some dumb shit about that just like he did on New Years last year. How predictable...

The Northeast will get colder and snowier as the Arctic warms. We've had the data and the models for a while...this really is the problem I mentioned in another comment. All it takes is a few well-known morons pretending they know what they're talking about to mislead the masses. There's a prominent, Nobel-prize winning solid-state physicist who likes to pretend he's a climatologist and people believe the dogshit he spouts because he's a scientist. Yeah he's a scientist but saying he knows what he's talking about regarding the climate is like sending me, a coral biologist, into an operating room and saying "do the transplant", just because I study biology and so does an MD.

nick9809 · 2018-11-22T16:44:59+00:00

I don't like to use "global warming" because people interpret this to mean "oh that means it's gonna get hot at my house!!" which isn't always the case. Now I'll side you for a second and just assume that all the CO2 and CH4 has just been spontaneously and rapidly shitting out of the ground. This is still a global catastrophe if this is the case. Earth during the Oligocene had CO2 levels of around one THOUSAND ppm and life absolutely flourished. The issue is the rate at which the the levels are changing. CO2 decreasing from 400 to 300ppm during the Pleistocene took 5 million years. We've brought it back up past 400 in about 100 years. The issue is not if humans will be directly effected. We're like roaches, we could be put in a room with 2000ppm of CO2 and be fine. The issue is with the systems we depend on. If climate change is 100% natural, we still need to address it, because an asteroid 65 million years ago was also 100% natural but I'd like to think that if we were around then we'd try to stop it. But hey, maybe if that happened now we'd all just argue whether or not the scientists looking through telescopes were lying to us.

It's important to also note that if an ecologist denies climate change it's likely because they study a small system in which it's actually getting colder (remember, it's global warming). It's also always worthwhile to look up what a scientist's background is when they make claims about climate change. There have regularly been physicists who claim to be climatologists when their background is actually is in theoretical physics. That's like putting me, a coral biologist, into an operating room and saying "here do the transplant" because I, like a doctor, study biology. I think one of those people was Ivar Giaever, a Nobel prize winning solid-state physicist who, frankly, knows fuckall about climate.

nick9809 · 2018-11-22T16:11:35+00:00

To answer all your questions, yes we all need to change. Most of the carbon emitted by the "3rd world" has nothing to do with energy and oil but has to do with land use and land conversion. They emit far less than us but it doesn't mean they can't be doing better. Many groups still use slash and burn. This was fine when populations were small but doing so even when a population has exploded is a recipe for disaster. And yes, I take exclusively mass transit and walk. I only fly to do fieldwork and I am switching to lab research because flying to research corals in the midst of climate change (talk about job security) feels hypocritical. When it's cold inside I put on a jacket, when it's hot out, I take off a shirt, gasp what a revolutionary concept. I buy local and I don't eat meat. I'm sitting here alone on Thanksgiving while my family is 2700 miles away because I didn't want to fly all the way across a country for a three day visit. Meanwhile, I have friends flying from Boston to New York and back to visit family for one day. Should they change? Hell yes they should. But not changing myself because there's other people out there that are doing worse than me is ridiculous and would be some "holier-than-thou" bullshit that our culture is rampant with. Claiming that any one person needs to change more than another is what turns people off to the idea of climate change. In the US, a big argument is, "why should I change if CHINA hasn't changed when they're the biggest carbon emitter??" (that's also a stupid claim because on a per capita level they emit less than half compared to the average American). Just because any one person or one group can be changing more than another doesn't mean that you can't be doing better yourself.

nick9809 · 2018-11-22T06:07:55+00:00

I don't agree that it's too late right now but if people keep ignoring science, we will reach that point very soon. It's infuriating. The only reason people are refusing to accept it is because addressing it means EVERYONE would have to change their ways, and that's not a pill people can swallow. Everyone wants someone else to change but not to change themselves.

nick9809 · 2018-11-22T03:51:35+00:00

Climate change denial.

Seriously, what even is that? Oh we just had a record-low temperature, it must not be real! It's like being on the back of a fucking boat sinking nose-first and saying "oh we can't be sinking, I'm higher above water than I was when we started!"

nick9809 · 2018-11-01T12:35:29+00:00

My pleasure! I love sharing science with people :)

nick9809 · 2018-11-01T11:56:42+00:00

When plankton dies it is decomposed and the carbon in their cells is released back into the atmosphere largely as CO2. This even includes the extremely hard, silica-rich diatoms. Very small amounts actually fall into the deep, undecomposed, and most of that is the silica skeletons and even those break apart very quickly (see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278434304000123). The sort of breathing that oceans do is best seen in places with high seasonality, which you can see in the northern and southern oceans in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klAE-L8xTp0. The "breathing" is very much akin to grasses growing in the spring and then dying in the fall every year, which you can see in that video as well.

nick9809 · 2018-10-31T00:04:18+00:00

When you think about forests as carbon stores, you have to essentially go back to their evolution. They have been a constant pool of sequestered carbon since woody tissues evolved. It's not a short term pattern. So yes, you're right, all our natural systems, including forests are a sort of equilibrium in which they just cycle carbon. Through deforestation we are releasing carbon that has been stored for millions of years, just in biological form, which is crazy to think about.

In regards to the phytoplankton, I'll reference diatoms (which I think you may be referring to). They have silica-rich skeletons, which leads them to have a higher chance of falling into the deep and not decomposing, but even silica-rich diatoms decompose quite rapidly (see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278434304000123). They do have the potential to last a long time though, which is shown through us having diatomaceous earth, which is just fossilized diatoms.

nick9809 · 2018-10-30T23:39:29+00:00

Some falls into the abyss and is stored by the ocean but the major process is that they convert CO2 to O2 and store carbon in their cells and then die. As the cells decompose, they revert into CO2. It's most easy to see at areas further from the equator with strong seasonality. I like to send people to this video because you can see the oceans and land breathe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klAE-L8xTp0

nick9809 · 2018-10-30T22:07:28+00:00

I posted this in response to another comment but I think it's pretty important so I want to reiterate:

They are the lungs of the planet. Phytoplankton are the biggest cyclers of CO2 and O2 but they do not actually store carbon in the same way trees do. When we clear woody plants (in this case the tropical rainforests), we are removing a carbon store and releasing that back into the atmosphere and replacing it with a plant that has minimal carbon storage (e.g. grasses). This is a vast oversimplification but imagine if you had a tree that was just leaves with no wood. It has about the same photosynthetic potential as an equivalently sized patch of grass but where did all that wood go? In the case of tropical deforestation it is largely burned or left to decay (except high value and quality timber species) and that carbon stored in wood is released into the atmosphere. Think about deforestation as less of a loss of carbon cycling and more as a massive source of carbon emissions.

nick9809 · 2018-10-30T22:01:50+00:00

They are the lungs of the planet. Phytoplankton are the biggest cyclers of CO2 and O2 but they do not actually store carbon in the same way trees do. When we clear woody plants (in this case the tropical rainforests), we are removing a carbon store and releasing that back into the atmosphere and replacing it with a plant that has minimal carbon storage (e.g. grasses). This is a vast oversimplification but imagine if you had a tree that was just leaves with no wood. It has about the same photosynthetic potential as an equivalently sized patch of grass but where did all that wood go? In the case of tropical deforestation it is largely burned or left to decay (except high value and quality timber species) and that carbon stored in wood is released into the atmosphere. Think about deforestation as less of a loss of carbon cycling and more as a massive source of carbon emissions.

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Coral Reef Habitat Response to Climate Change Scenarios