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 …
I’ve been thinking a lot about science communication recently. From translating my research about nitrogen cycling into a lesson plan for high school students (via SciREN) to applying for science communication workshops, I feel like everything I’ve done recently has revolved around effectively communicating science to a non-scienctist audience. Which is equal parts great (!) … Continue reading
Want to read what we think about the accord? Scroll to the bottom of this post to see our responses! In December 2015, representatives from almost 200 UN countries met in Paris for COP21 to discuss climate and the future of our planet. The group deliberated for almost 2 weeks before finally drafting an accord … Continue reading
For Valentine’s Day this year I decided to get a little creative. Here are 3 of my own marine science related valentine creations! Below each drawing is a short explanation of the Valentine! Explanation: There is huge sexual dimorphism between male and female anglerfish. When the male is searching for his one true love (a … Continue reading
Our first Green Your Weekend post resulted in Congress banning microbeads, if we ignore the fact that correlation does not imply causation. We figured it only made sense to harness this blog’s obvious political influence with another easy tip to make your weekend a little greener! And because everyone’s thinking more pink than green this … Continue reading
This article is a guest post by ODU undergradaute Ben Maxie. Ben works in the Barshis Lab and studies the evolution of stress tolerance in corals and other organisms. The 2010 BP Deep-water Horizon oil spill was an environmental tragedy of immense magnitude. Five million barrels of toxic crude oil were leeched into the … Continue reading
In 1915 a strange new sea creature was discovered that resembled a “purple sock”. This creature was eventually named as Xenoturbella bocki in 1949, but no one really had any idea what this weird creature was (Westblad, 1949). Unable to clearly establish more information about the creature’s fit in the evolutionary tree or even its … Continue reading
This is a guest post by Elyse Dankoski, a neurobiologist at the University of North Carolina. She recently spent 3 months in southeast Madagascar volunteering with Azafady’s Conservation Programme. This fall, I lived in a small community on the southeast coast of Madagascar called Sainte Luce. Sainte Luce is remote even by Madagascar’s standards, and … Continue reading
By now you’ve probably seen one of the many articles we have posted about plastics, recycling, and the garbage problem that plagues the world’s oceans (if not, check them out 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). Ocean pollution is obviously an issue that we here are UNdertheC are concerned about. Luckily, we aren’t the … Continue reading
During the holiday season many people travel to visit family and friends that live across the country or even the world. But in the New Year, we must get back to our normal lives: school, work, or whatever one does in their everyday life. Humans are traditionally visual navigators and have developed a variety of tools … Continue reading
Warren County, North Carolina, doesn’t seem the most likely place for the environmental justice movement to have started. It’s a small, rural county northeast of Raleigh, and might have stayed just that if not for a decision to dump a toxic landfill in its midst in 1978. The response of Warren County’s primarily black residents … Continue reading
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