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By Patrick CooneyCan you say 'potamodromous' and can you guess what it means?A) A mood disorder caused by eating too many potatoes.B) A dinosaur that lived in water but could crawl across land.C) A migration of fish entirely in freshwater.A) B) C) If you pronounced it like 'poe-tuh-moe-droe-miss', then you are off to a great start. But what about the meaning? For such a strange word, it simply signifies option C, a migration of fish entirely in freshwater.Many fishes […]
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"Currently, hypoxia and anoxia are among the most widespread deleterious anthropogenic influences on estuarine and marine environments, and now rank with overfishing, habitat loss, and harmful algal blooms as major global environmental problems." Diaz et al. 2008Fish killed by hypoxic events. (Source: EPA)The Dead Zone. Fish kills. Hypoxia. We increasingly hear these terms on the news every summer—so […]
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In April of 2011, the river near my house was bigger than I had ever seen it. One afternoon I went to get a closer look at the flooding at a park near the dam. Although the park sat more than 20 feet higher than the normal river’s edge, water stood where children had played a few days before. As I watched luxury boats and floating docks bang against the dam, several loud splashes near the monkey bars caught my eye. A group of longnose gar was laying eggs on a patch of grass near the edge of
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It's that time of the year again...people across the northern hemisphere are looking towards dark skies and thinking of rain.For many fish biologists, high water simply means a perfectly good spring day spent in the office. For me, it means a long day tending to a flooded experiment. But to others, spring floods often symbolize crop losses or damages to communities amounting to millions (or sometimes billions) of dollars. This wasn’t always so. The predictable flooding cycle of
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The coelacanth (pronounced 'see-la-canth') holds an interesting place in both ichthyology and the history of ichthyology. Many of us are familiar with the image of this large, speckled fish, easily identified by the thick lobes that characterize its fins. Surely it commanded a few moments of simultaneous intrigue and eyebrow-raising in Ichthyology or Evolution 101. Coelacanth (Source: smithsonian.edu)In fact, until 75 years ago this fish was thought to have been extinct. […]
