Old Research
jjacquet | March 14, 2008Young Mexicans have a warped view of what is 'normal' in the Gulf of California. This was first shown in a marvelous 2005 study on Rapidly shifting environmental baselines among fishers of the Gulf of California where the authors interviewed 108 fishermen.
Compared to young fishers, old fishers named five times as many species and four times as many fishing sites as once being abundant/productive but now depleted. Old fishers caught up to 25 times as many Gulf grouper as young fishers on their best ever fishing day.
Their results were published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society and a…
jjacquet | February 11, 2008In honor of Darwin Day, I'd like to give a little shout out to some of Charles Darwin's contributions to marine science.
Theory of Coral Reef Formation: Onboard the Beagle, Darwin composed the theory of coral reef formation. He described three types of reefs: fringe, barrier, and atoll. His illustrations of reef formation and global reef locations are beautifully detailed. Most impressive is that Darwin came up with the theory without ever having seen a coral reef (though he would eventually see one during the Beagle's voyage through the Pacific). And remember, back then there were no…
jjacquet | February 6, 2008In 1998, Pauly et al. published their seminal paper in Science on Fishing Down Marine Food Webs (FDFW). The paper has been cited nearly 1000 times and today it turns 10 years old. The paper has been influential, namely in establishing the mean trophic level of fisheries as a tool for measuring the health of the oceans. In 2000, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)--a treaty to sustain biodiversity adopted by every country except the U.S.--mandated that each country report on its the change in mean trophic level over time as an indicator of ocean health.
How did they do the study?…