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Fisheries and Marine Environmental Research Lab

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23.01.2022 Our group devotes a lot of time researching plankton, seeing as it supports the overwhelming majority of ocean life. Here's a fun video showing some of it up close. Another interesting tidbit? You would probably consume more species in a single mouthful of seawater than you would all year on your dinner plate. Heavy...

19.01.2022 We think it's time we helped clear something up. That's the persistent "no fish by 2048" claim. 'No fish left by the year 2048!' was splashed across all media outlets in 2006, and naturally create a huge stir. It still appears in the occasional article in 2017, and remains a key statistic for some interest groups when discussing overfishing. It's also not true. ... People have written about this before, but because '2048' keeps coming up, we thought we'd address it here too. '2048' was first mentioned by Boris Worm and colleagues in a 2006 article in the journal 'Science'. They observed an increasing number of collapsed fisheries, and stated that this trend of collapse, if (unwisely) extrapolated way beyond the data (which ended at 2005), indicates the collapse of all fisheries by 2048. Worm and colleagues were using this result to express the seriousness of the trend, and probably didn't think that 2048 was a realistic prediction of doomsday. BUT it made a wonderful number for the media to grab and promote far and wide. What you may not know is that this 2006 study created a huge stir in the scientific community too. Some thought this was a huge error in science and science communication, and there was plenty of vigorous debate. Thankfully, the key players eventually came together to re-evaluate the data in a 2009 paper in 'Science', also fronted by Boris Worm. There was no mention of 2048, and the authors highlighted that the collapse of fisheries is a tricky thing to measure, and that there's examples of us rebuilding fisheries too. It was a far more positive story, but wasn't enough to make the internet forget about "2048". There is no doubt that there are still plenty of collapsed fisheries, and that more will collapse, but there are also recovering and recovered fisheries. A 2008 study of this very trend by Trevor Branch was obviously titled "Not all fisheries will be collapsed in 2048". We may be heading towards a future in which a fishery that has never collapsed is the exception, but thanks to the complex and evolving management of commercial fishing, there will always be some in a relatively healthy state. There is no doubt that wild fisheries are still in danger. Illegal and unreported fishing is perhaps the biggest threat of all - these are outside the management essential to avoid and reverse fishery collapse - so there is certainly lots of work to do. But as far as the '2048' statistic goes, it's time we well and truly let it go.

14.01.2022 The Power of Plankton: Some recent research by one of our students, Lisa, has just come out and showed that PLANKTON is the number one food source on the rocky reefs off Sydney. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00227-017-3101-5... After lots of snorkelling and plenty of videos, Lisa was able to re-create the foodweb for these reefs, and it's the little fishes that catch the plankton floating past that are the most numerous out there. So let's not forget good ol plankton. And one of the coolest bits hidden away in her research is that the black reef leatherjacket (image: D. Harasti) eats mostly SPONGE (and plenty of sand along with it). There aren't many fishes that can stomach that toughness...

10.01.2022 Kicking off another year of fieldwork for our third-year course 'Ocean to Estuarine Ecosystems'. Horrible weather for it...

04.01.2022 Lots of our marine creatures release their larvae into the open ocean and hope for the best. The super delicious eastern king prawn is one of these, so we did an experiment using particle tracking to see how far these prawns drift before they find a home. So you know that scene in Finding Nemo where the rad turtles ride the EAC straight down the coast? Well it's sort of like that for prawns, except there are many off-ramps and they have no say in where they get off... Your a...verage baby prawn will end up about 500 km from where it started, before it's developed enough to settle to the ground. And LOTS get pushed way off the coast [Image], with only about 3% close enough to 'swim to shore' and survive... That Finding Nemo thing is starting to look pretty dodgy. So yeah, next time you get to savour an eastern king prawn, it really is a bloody miracle it survived to adulthood, so definitely enjoy it. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/fog.12213/full