Jennifer Jacquet
I am an American post-doc based at the University of British Columbia, where I also completed my Ph.D.
jjacquet
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A.O. Scott had a nice piece in this weekend's New York Times Magazine on The Screening of America. In spite of all the technological advances, he believes the cinema is far from finished:
What will happen, in the age of iPod, DVR, VOD, YouTube and BitTorrent, to the experience of moviegoing, to…
Christmas is around the bend and the oceans have one gift that keeps on giving: jellyfish. If you're inspired by these ever-increasing medusas (they seem to be on the rise even on land) and you already have the jellyfish moodlamp like me (thanks, sister), here is a relevant gift idea: jellyfish…
In his New York Times article, A Seafood Snob Ponders the Future of Fish, Mark Bittman laments the bygone days of "fishermen unloading boxes of flounder at the funky Fulton Fish Market" and seems annoyed at the fact most most fish on the menus these days are farmed. He should be. For one, the…
I really like plaid. But I am not a hipster. I wish I were because then I would have more photographs of myself and would ride a nice bicycle.
I think it is a partial combination of growing up in the Midwest and my love for higher education that has rendered me a mere observer of the hipster…
You know I appreciate a lot of the work Greenpeace does in the seafood market (for instance, chiding retailers and sabotaging seafood expos). This week, they've done it again. Greenpeace erected 'crime scenes' at 8 Loblaw grocery stores in Toronto with the message "caught red-handed selling…
My local paper, The Vancouver Sun, ran a great 5-part series on the oceans this week written by Larry Pynn titled Shifting Seas.
Part One gives an overview of fishing (both past and present) on the British Columbia coast. Part Two is all about the B.C. trawl fishery and their movement to buy and…
The New York Times ran an excellent profile of naturalist and local Vancouver legend Alexandra Morton. She has spent her life studying orcas and salmon near the Broughton Archipelago off the coast of British Columbia. But over the last decades, her attention was forced toward fish farms and sea…
"A new global deal on climate change will come too late to save most of the world's coral reefs...major ecological damage to the oceans is now inevitable." This according to The Guardian, which reports the finding of a new study in Geophysical Research Letters. The authors of the study found that…
Last week, a smack of moon jellies jammed the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant off the California coast. The rise of slime and the closure of power plants. Just another shifting baseline.
The mislabeling and renaming of fish is a problem. It means that consumers are often paying more than they should for their seafood. Plus, it impedes the consumer's ability to make environmentally or health conscious choices.
I also really like the twin problems of renaming and mislabeling…
Say hello to delecata, a high grade specially filleted piece of North American farmed catfish. This new name was created with hopes of boosting the profile and profits of a struggling industry. In The New York Times Magazine, Paul Greenberg tells the story of U.S. southern fish farmers competing…
Pollock, the poster child for sustainable fishing, appears to be on the brink of collapse. I have more on the state of Bering Sea pollock fishery in my guest post at the Gristmill...
In 1992, Consumer Reports published an article titled, "The label said Snapper, the lab said baloney". Fifteen years later, the mislabeling of red snapper is, if anything, more widespread. A 2004 study in Nature showed 75 percent of red snapper sold in the U.S. is some other fish.
Menus offer up…
A lowdown of what's happening with the oceans and the people that care about them:
1) Dr. Jeremy Jackson delivers a lecture on the Brave New Ocean tonight at Harvey Mudd College.
2) Oceana is again running their Freakiest Fish contest. Check out their site and vote for your favorite freak fish.…
Today in Barcelona, Dr. Daniel Pauly, who, among other things, is the brain behind the term 'shifting baselines', was awarded the Ramon Margelef prize in ecology.
I recently bought a new wooden toilet seat at Target for five dollars. Five dollars! It wasn't even on sale and I thought to myself, "What a steal!" I should have known that was probably, literally the case. My toilet seat was probably illegally logged in Russia. In this week's issue of The…
The latest video from Randy Olson's Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project is here and highlights the differences between two sailors' experiences: one describing his voyage in 1958 and one (the leader of the junk raft expedition) describing the exact same voyage but 50 years later. You can…
The New York TImes reviewed the new Sant Ocean Hall, which opened this weekend at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. The new exhibit on the oceans is the largest renovation in the museum's century-long history and it sounds and looks promising. I wonder what the child's perspective is on…
With jellies on the rise and overlapping with more and more people, it is good to know how they got their sting. According to some new research, it seems ancestor jellies might have gotten their defense capabilities from a bacterium via horizontal gene transfer. Read more at Nature.
For those of you who watched the first Presidential debate last night, you know that the state of the U.S. economy was the first and central topic discussed by Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama. You also might have heard Senator John McCain, in his first few minutes of answering…
Today, Cornelia Dean at the New York Times reports on the latest findings from Costella et al. in Science about the use of individual transferable quotas in fisheries. In her article (and the study), Privately Owned Fisheries May Help Shore Up Stocks, the premise is that "allocating ownership…
Say you're in Australia. You go to the store. You pick up some Kalamari crumbed seafood rings. The 'K' throws you but you suspect the product is still calamari, which is very popular in your country. Hopefully, you even know that means squid. You've been duped!
Austrimi Seafoods must drop the…
There is lots of science to show that average is beautiful. But I have never understood why averageness was a desirable trait in a political candidate. That Bush was "an average guy" was the political battle cry manufactured by Karl Rove. I didn't understand the desirability of that statement…
Focusing on subsidies rather than consumers likely to be better for fish and for small-scale fishermen
A couple weeks ago, Daniel Pauly and I got the paper Funding Priorities: Big Barriers to Small-scale Fisheries published in the journal Conservation Biology. In our analysis, we try to…
Here ye, here ye! For those of you in the Vancouver neighborhood, Dave Ng (from World's Fair) and I are hosting an event to celebrate ScienceBlogs millionth comment on Thursday, September 18th, from 6pm at Koerner's Pub (on UBC's campus). Come by! We have a little pocket money from SEED, which…
No one wants to talk about it, but apparently some people might not vote for Obama because he is black (a phenomenon I could indeed feel when I recently visited my home state Ohio). At this point, addressing the topic of race is sort of like having to argue against the Earth being 10,000 years old…
According to the BBC, a team of researchers discovered a new giant clam species in the Red Sea that may have been one of the first marine species over-exploited by humans. The team discovered fossil evidence to suggest the giant clam population plummeted at the same time humans appeared in the Red…
Baracknophobia: The irrational fear of hope.
If you saw Senator Barack Obama's acceptance speech Thursday night (TIME Magazine granted it an A+) you'll likely agree that it's hard not to be excited.
Obama's worldview and oratory skills combined with his positions on almost every issue, including…
Yep. Read up on the latest research on how we're wasting fish on snobby, fat cats in Australia's Herald Sun.