I am willing to bet most people have never heard of paleotempestology before. I hadn’t heard of it before I took a marine geology course. In a course I am taking this semester, we decided to reexamine the topic because a lot of individual studies are debatable. So, if the title of this post didn’t already give it …
Have you ever noticed a rip current at the beach? If you or someone you know was caught in a rip current, would you know what to do? If you’ve been paying attention to the coastal news along North Carolina recently, you may have noticed recent stories about rip currents and rip current safety. Dr. …
Having no publications to my name and only nebulous drafts of several (hopefully) publishable papers, I am not an expert on how to get published. This is why I attended a student workshop on this very topic at the 2018 ASLO summer meeting in Victoria, BC. In this workshop a panel of editors in chief …
Martín Benavides is a PhD student in Marine Sciences at UNC Chapel Hill. His research focuses on the variability of coastal shark communities in both time and space. He is also interested in the movement ecology of sharks in estuarine systems. Martín is a proud father of two boys and provides a unique prospective to …
Applications have been submitted. Recruitment weekends are near (or have already come and gone). Funding source notification dates are coming up. And most exciting of all–graduate school acceptances are around the corner. It is an exciting time to see your hard work pay off. But wait. Hold your horses. Here are some things you should …
The ocean is home to some strange and mysterious critters – including some that could give the Justice League a run for their money. From immortal invertebrates to flying fish, here are four super powered ocean animals. The one that can walk on land While there are a number of amphibious fish out there, …
The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRFP) application season is here. I was fortunate enough to receive a fellowship for my application is 2017 after an unsuccessful one in 2016. From one rejected and one accepted, here is a list of resources that helped get me through it, a bit of my personal …
Most productivity gurus say that when you hit a wall, you should switch tasks. This is how I ended up reading a paper about beavers who managed to hijack a wetland restoration for their benefit. So congratulations! You’re in the right place to learn some fancy philosophy terms and think about wetlands from a whooole …
As modern marine scientists, we spend a lot of time learning to effectively communicate science to various audiences. That’s mostly so we can make friends at parties, but has some nice side benefits like educating the general public, whatever. Sometimes though, and I’m probably admitting to a cardinal sin of outreach here, there’s a certain …
Happy New Year 2014! As we enter the new year, even the most diligent marine scientists may find themselves shaking off their Christmas cookie comas and wondering what happened in the world of oceanography over the past few weeks. Accordingly, here are 3 recent marine science news stories to bring you up-to-date for 2014. 1. … Continue reading
As a fun wrap-up to this semester (my first semester of graduate school!) I thought I’d create my own version of the 12 Days of Christmas, one that represents a little of the life of a marine science grad student. PS: All of us at UndertheC will be taking a hiatus from blogging over the … Continue reading
A Nobel Prize winning biologist has announced a boycott of high impact journals such as Nature, Science, and Cell. When a Nobel Prize winner says something like that, people listen. The question is really whether or not that stance is well founded. Randy Shekman, the Nobel winner in question, is the editor of an open access … Continue reading
There has been a recent debate in the scientific literature about the effect of predators on invasive lionfish. Are Caribbean predators controlling the lionfish invasion? Two studies seem to have conflicting results. Is someone “lyin’” about lionfish? See previous post, The Great Debate: Predators vs Lionfish, for background on the lionfish invasion and more info on the … Continue reading
There has been a recent debate in the scientific literature about the effect of predators on invasive lionfish. Are Caribbean predators controlling the lionfish invasion? Two studies seem to have conflicting results: Also, stay tuned to find out if someone is “lyin’” about lionfish! Background: See previous posts about lionfish featured in Marine Monster Mash and Photography Friday. … Continue reading
Check out our previous related posts this week about Poseidon’s Steed and seahorses as stealth predators! More fun facts about seahorses: Seahorses are monogamous and the males bear the young. They are poor swimmers and can die of exhaustion during storms. They have no teeth or stomach so food passes extremely quickly through their digestive systems. Seahorses … Continue reading
Have you ever seen a seahorse swim? Maybe you haven’t, because they are always doing this: Anyway, they are not very fast swimmers because they have tiny fins that they must rapidly flutter in order to move. As a result they often attach to a substrate or just float in the water column. These guys have … Continue reading
It’s your quintessential dark and stormy night, and a wooden sailing ship is making its way across the Mediterranean Sea. The waves are large, washing over the walls of the boat despite the best efforts of the captain to turn its prow into the waves. When the sun rises a few hours later, the ship … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from a graduate student in the Marine Ecology class that I am a TA for this semester. See the entire student blog at http://marineecologyblog.web.unc.edu/ by Geoffrey Neal Let me speak to a most improbable little book that I am currently reading: Poseidon’s Steed (The Story of Seahorses, from Myth … Continue reading
This Youtube video, originally posted about 3 years ago, has been making the rounds in the blogosphere as of late. It is frightening and incredible all at once. It acts as a history lesson, showing us who the players were in the arms race and even mirroring the ramp up and end of the cold … Continue reading
UNder the C 