SOURCE:  Miami Herald/Jenny Staletovich – January 23, 2017

What Judas snakes, snake-sniffing dogs and even hunters from around the globe have struggled to accomplish may finally be pulled off by a pair of singing snake catchers from India: solving the riddle for finding Burmese pythons in Florida’s Everglades.

In just two weeks this month, the two tribesmen from Southern India, working with the University of Florida, caught 14 pythons. That included a monster 16-foot female holed up in the ruins of the old Nike missile base on Key Largo.

Irula trackers and biologists discovered this 16-foot female python, along with three other snakes, holed up in a 27-foot long, 18-inch wide shaft at the old Nike missile base in Key Largo last week.Courtesy of Joe Wasilewski

For perspective, consider last year’s second Python Challenge, an annual contest to draw attention to Florida’s python problem. The hunt attracted 1,000 hunters, most of them amateurs. Over a month, they managed to bag just 106 snakes. The year before, hunters snagged 68.

“If we fall anywhere in that range, I’m going to be really happy,” said UF biologist Frank Mazzotti, who heads a team of researchers investigating pythons and other wildlife.

The pilot project, being funded by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, is also relatively cheap: just $68,888 for two tribesmen and two translators for two months.

Since arriving in early January, Masi Sadaiyan and Vadivel Gopal, both in their 50s and members of the Irula tribe, India’s famed snake hunters, have headed into the Everglades almost daily. Armed only with tire irons to punch through dense burma reed and sharp limestone rock and trailed by biologists, the pair are on the lookout for the sparkle of snakeskin in the bush. They’re also searching for what the snakes left behind: a ripple in the sand, a tunnel through grass or scat.

In the nearly two decades since pythons became established in South Florida, finding them has proved one of the thorniest problems for controlling their spread. The cryptically patterned snakes easily disappear into marshes that are nearly impossible to search. Biologists have tried sending out radio-tagged “Judas” snakes to ferret out other snakes, trained dogs and even tried poisoning prey. But the number of voracious snakes, blamed for nearly wiping out the population of small mammals in Everglades National Park, keeps growing. This year for the first time, hatchlings were found in Key Largo. In November, one turned up in Biscayne Bay on a water monitoring station.

The idea of having Irula snake trackers train to target python has been percolating for years among Mazzotti; award-winning herpetologist Romulus Whitaker, a leading conservationistin India and alum of the old Miami Serpentarium; and another Serpentarium alum, South Florida herpetologist Joe Wasilewski. In 1978, Whitaker founded a snake-hunting co-op for the tribe after unregulated snake trading was banned. The tribe now hunts cobras to collect antivenin to battle the nation’s snake-bite problem: about 50,000 die annually and up to 1.5 million are bit.

But almost nobody thought it was possible.

“People said, ‘They know how to hunt in India, not the Everglades, and cobras, not pythons,’” Mazzotti said.

Whitaker was certain the Irula, whose ancestors hunted pythons to the point of extinction in their state, would succeed.

“I pointed out that part of the year, the swamp is quite dry and that’s the time when they would be able to find the things like back home, the tracks of snake,” he said. “This is very big and probably the biggest invasive reptile problem that has ever existed on the planet, so let’s do something.

Even to South Florida experts, Irula tracking techniques seem mysterious. They move slowly and rather than focus on roads and levees where snakes have typically been found basking, they head straight for thick brush. The Irulas believe the boulders and high grasses that line the levees are more lucrative hunting grounds. That seems to be proving true: UF biologist Ed Metzger has so far determined that seven of the 13 snakes captured would not have been found without the trackers.

And when the going gets slow, everyone must stop to squat for a quick song of prayer — usually an ancient invocation mixed with an ad lib about pythons or the weather — accompanied by a beedi cigarette.

To the surprise of local biologists, the trackers have also been able to detect information critical to snake management: the python’s sex, approximate size and even how long ago it was in the area.

“Our search image is really just the snake, but they’re talking about something else,” said Metzger.

Sadaiyan and Gopal are staying with Wasilewski, who is helping scout out locations while picking up tracking tips.

While the team says it’s too early to tell how successful the partnership will be, this month’s haul at the missile base is a good sign. Wasilewski, who worked as an MP at the base and has been hunting snakes for three decades, suggested the spot, thinking the piles of rubble left behind would probably be good snake hideouts. Since the hatchlings were first detected on Key Largo last year, biologists also think there still may be a chance at containing their spread.

“No one is saying this is a python eradication tool. But on a local scale, I think it can be,” Metzger said.

The Irulas first spotted a tail near the 18-inch opening of a 27-foot long shaft covered by ficus roots. Once they hacked their way through the roots, they spied the fat belly of what they suspected was a large snake and hurried to the other end of the vent — formerly used to run electric cables to the missiles — to block its escape. Instead they found another, smaller tail. For the next five or so hours, the crew wrestled to extract what turned out to be four snakes: the 16-foot female, a 10-footer and two eight foot-long snakes.

Metzger is carefully logging all the catches, which are generally euthanized or used for education, keeping track of how much ground is covered each day, who spots the snakes and conditions.

“We’re going to be calculating python per dollar and python per hour,” he said.

Those numbers will then be compared to other efforts, including the Judas snake project — which cost about $11,000 per snake caught — and a group of volunteer trackers costing about $177 per snake, Metzger said. So far, the Irula effort works out to about $4,920 per snake — but they have more than another month left and it’s hard to put a value on new skills South Florida experts are learning.

“Since the Irula have been so successful in their homeland at removing pythons, we are hoping they can teach people in Florida some of these skills,” Kristen Sommers, chief of FWC’s Wildlife Impact Management Section, said in a statement.

As for the Irulas, they seem to be enjoying only their second trip out of India. Wasilewski has taken them to Arbetters for hotdogs and to his daughter-in-law’s school to talk to her AP environmental science class. On Sunday, they watched the NFL playoffs. But the big draw is clearly the snakes, the largest they have ever captured.

“Coming to America is really fun and interesting, but catching all those snakes, that’s why they’re here,” Sadaiyan told Whitaker in Irula when asked. “They’re hunters and that’s why they’re here.”

SOURCE:  Boston University/Nov. 22, 2016

Les Kaufman, a Professor of Biology and a Faculty Research Fellow at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, participated in two related workshops in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area of southeastern Florida during the week of November 13.

The first workshop was a one-day forum focused on the health of Biscayne National Park in the face of climate change and environmental degradation in South Florida, organized by the Herbert W. Hoover Foundation and the Pew Marine Fellows Program. The forum focused on the restoration of the Park’s coral reef habitat, its links to Miami and Biscayne Bay, and coastal resilience. The goal was to share a systems view of South Florida’s future, and to show how a remarkable collection of parks and preserves — including Everglades National Park, Big Cypress National Preserve, Dry Tortugas National Park, Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, and a host of other state parks and restoration zones — can be engaged to safeguard the remnants of the subtropical ecosystem, along with the economy and quality of life that it supports. The forum’s background paper on coral reef restoration was written by Katey Lesneski of the Kaufman lab.

The second meeting was an historic gathering of coral reef scientists and coral restoration practitioners, led by the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and hosted at the oceans campus of Nova Southeastern University. The meeting, titled “Workshop to Advance the Science and Practice of Caribbean Coral Restoration,” boasted about 100 attendees from 20 Caribbean nations. Its goal was to “foster collaboration and technology transfer” and to “initiate a community of practice that addresses the evolving role of active coral restoration in the evolutionary history of coral reef ecosystems.” One crucial realization was that coral gardening can, in fact, be brought to a massive scale, but attention to the coral reef community and to the coastal environment as a whole is essential for hopes of life-boating Caribbean coral reefs through the centuries required to keep the impacts of climate change under control.

Photo Description – From left: Dr. Andrew Baker (University of Miami), Les Kaufman (BU Biology/Pardee), and Mike Beck (The Nature Conservancy), members of a Pew Collaborative project for Biscayne National Park. (Credit: Polita Glynn, Executive Director, Pew Marine Fellows Program)

SOURCE:  National Geographic/Laura Parker – November 9, 2016

A new study sheds light on why so many seabirds, fish, whales, and other critters are gobbling up so much marine plastic debris. And it’s not quite what scientists thought.

Leonardo DiCaprio travels the world to highlight the impacts and solutions to climate change in his recently released documentary, “Before the Flood.” The film is streaming for free through November 6, 2016. Find it available online here: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/before-the-flood/videos/before-the-flood/.

Source: Canton Repository/Edd Pritchard – October 10, 2016

The Stark County Broadband Task Team will meet on Wednesday to explain details of the broadband feasibility study and discuss the next option.

JACKSON TWP. Volunteers pushing for a high-speed broadband access plan hope to build support for the next phase in the project this week when they discuss results of a feasibility study.

The Stark County Broadband Task Team — using the www.theforthutility.org website — hired Magellan Advisors to conduct the study. Task team will unveil the study results during a community meeting that begins at 7:30 a.m. Wednesday at the Kent State University Stark Conference Center.

Task team members have been working three years to develop a “future-ready plan for reliable, high-speed broadband access at competitive prices.” The effort has been endorsed by elected officials, municipalities and community groups.

Ed Roth, chief executive officer of the Aultman Health Foundation, will open the meeting by adding Aultman’s endorsement of the Broadband Task Team’s work. Healthcare systems have invested in clinical information systems and digital technology and support efforts to develop a community-wide broadband infrastructure, he said in a news release.

Kent State Stark also supports the task team’s effort. “We all need to work together and focus on the future,” Dean Denise Seachrist said in the release, noting that students need affordable access to the internet.

Research effort

More than 100 leaders from the Stark County area participated in interviews and focus groups led by Magellan. That information and extensive research on the county’s existing infrastructure, bandwidth potential and pricing are the basis of Magellan’s report, task team members said.

“This had to be done and we had to have a starting point,” said Jacqueline DeGarmo, president and founder of Hilliard Jeane LLC and Task Team co-chair.

Researchers met individually and in groups with companies providing internet service to residents and businesses in the county. The three large players are Time Warner Cable, MCTV in Massillon and AT&T, which have systems that use cable and the lines to carry broadband service, but there also are smaller companies offering connections.

Victor Pavona, director of the Stark County Small Business Development Center and task team director, said the internet providers have participated in different ways. He hopes the providers remain involved.

Next step

DeGarmo said the feasibility report should provide data and a platform to begin planning efforts. The goal has been to map out a plan that will ensure the community’s future, and the next step is to pull together a coalition and see where to go, she said.

Pavona said the committee, which has received financial help from Herbert H. Hoover Foundation and backing from residents and businesses, was conceived to bring a plan to the community.

So far local officials have endorsed the need for a strong broadband system, Pavona said. How the community reacts and whether it accepts the plan will determine the next move, he said.

Wednesday’s meeting is open to the public. For more information or to register, visit www.thefourthutility.org.

SOURCE:  National Geographic/Jane J. Lee – December 22, 2013

Snot otters. Lasagna lizards. Allegheny alligators. With nicknames like these, you’d think the actual animal, a salamander more commonly known as a hellbender, would be a natural poster child for endangered wildlife.

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By Brady Dennis and Juliet Eilperin

NOTE:  This article originally appeared in the Washington Post on September 14, 2016

A decade ago, only a tiny fraction of the world’s oceans had been protected from overfishing and other environmental threats. The United States had scores of national parks and other landmarks. Other countries had safeguarded cultural, historical and natural treasures. But for the oceans, such efforts remained in their infancy.

“Ocean conservation was an afterthought,” said Matt Rand, who directs the Global Ocean Legacy project for the Pew Charitable Trusts. “When you looked around the world a decade ago, very little investment was going into the conservation of ocean ecosystems.”

A key example of how that began to change came in 2006, when President George W. Bush designated an island chain spanning nearly 1,400 miles of the Pacific northwest of Hawaii as a national monument. Last month, President Obama expanded the Papahānaumokuākea (pronounced “Papa-HA-now-moh-koo-AH-kay-ah”) Marine National Monument to 582,578 square miles of land and sea, creating the largest ecologically protected area on the planet.

As government leaders, scientists and environmental activists from around the world gather this week at the State Department for what has become an annual global conference on preserving the oceans, roughly 3 percent of the world’s oceans are now protected. That’s a far cry from the 30 to 40 percent that many scientists think will be necessary over the long term to maintain the sustainability of the seas that feed billions of people and employ millions of workers. But it’s exponentially more than only a few years ago.

“I’m thrilled with the progress we’ve made,” Secretary of State John F. Kerry, who engineered the first such gathering in 2014, said in an interview, even as he acknowledged that much more work lies ahead. “Through my years in the Senate, there had been great [nongovernmental] oceans advocates. … But I think it needed the force of an administration and a department like the State Department to say, ‘We’re not going to leave you out there on your own. This is our responsibility, too.’ “

The Obama administration’s embrace of the cause has emboldened ocean advocates and helped fuel a global push to set aside more protected areas.

“Right now, I’m more hugely hopeful for ocean conservation than I’ve ever been at any other time in my career,” said Janis Jones, president of the Ocean Conservancy, an environmental advocacy group. “There are more and more people invested in protecting the ocean.”

Those people include local advocates trying to protect marine species from threats that include plastic debris and the acidification underway as oceans absorb human-generated carbon emissions. But increasingly, it also includes high-level leaders in different parts of the globe.

Last year, for instance, the president of the tiny island country of Palau in the western Pacific Ocean pushed to create a marine reserve larger than the state of California. President Thomas Esang “Tommy” Remengesau Jr. signed a designation to keep 80 percent of its territorial waters from activities such as fishing and mining. About the same time, Chile created the largest marine reserve in the Americas off its coast called Nazca-Desventuradas Marine Park. The area encompasses roughly 115,000 square miles — almost the size of Italy.

And last week, the presidents of Ecuador, Colombia and Costa Rica announced they would expand the marine protected areas under their jurisdiction to more than 83,000 square miles, creating a network of underwater “highways” that will allow wide-ranging species such as sea turtles and sharks more freedom to move without facing intense fishing pressure. Making the announcement, Ecuador President Rafael Correa noted his nation’s underwater territory is five times larger than its terrestrial one.

“Large-scale marine protected areas are the single largest driver for ocean protection right now,” said Wilhelm, who led the public process that resulted in President Bush creating the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in 2006. “It was a crazy idea back in 2000. And now it’s normal.”

Wilhelm, who served as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration superintendent of Papahānaumokuākea from June 2006 to July 2014, said protecting those areas required a shift in mindset among policymakers. Once they accepted the idea of places in the ocean as part of a country’s cultural and historic heritage, she said, it became easier to declare them off limits.

“Before, we thought about heritage as cathedrals or maybe Mount Kilimanjaro,” Wilhelm observed, “but not about wild oceans.”

There remains considerable local opposition to restricting fishing activities in parts of the sea, whether it’s more than a thousand miles from Honolulu or off the coast of New England.

Eric Reid, general manager at a fish processing plant in Point Judith, R.I., said in an interview that just because the reserve closes off a small fraction of the ocean does not soften the economic impact on communities that fish there.

“If the state of Connecticut was turned into a monument and there was no economic activity whatsoever, or hit by a meteor or vaporized, the spin that could be used is it’s only 2 percent of the States,” Reid said. “But the people of Connecticut would be pretty uptight.”

A group of marine biologists and conservationists decided more than a decade ago to spur an intentional competition among heads of state in which leaders would vie for the mantle of designating the largest marine reserve on Earth. When Bush invoked the 1906 Antiquities Act to protect the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands in 2006, it ranked as the world’s largest protected area, but by earlier this year it had slipped to 10th in the rankings. With its recent expansion, it reclaimed the No. 1 spot.

Advocates have appealed personally to heads of state — and their spouses — to grant these safeguards. Two wildlife photographers, David Liittschwager and Susan Middleton, spent much of 2003 and 2004 documenting marine and terrestrial species on the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and in the fall of 2005 the then-head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, James L. Connaughton, gave their book “Archipelago” to first lady Laura Bush. The first lady, an avid birder, became a passionate advocate for creation of the monument and traveled there in 2007.

At times, scientists have even taken leaders underwater to view potential sites for protection. National Geographic explorer-in-residence Enric Sala went in a remotely operated underwater vehicle piloted by the president of Gabon to survey that nation’s offshore resources, and in 2014 President Ali Bongo Ondimba created a series of marine parks covering 18,000 square miles — 23 percent of the waters under Gabon’s jurisdiction.

“I saw that myself diving in the remote and unfished southern Line Islands in 2009,” he said. “These islands were hit by the strong El Niño of 1997-98, but 10 years later the corals looked pristine and healthy, as though that warming event never happened.”

Historically it has been difficult to get momentum behind ocean conservation in part because so much of the ocean is considered international high seas, and no one leader or one country can decide to protect it. Sala said this is the area that policymakers need to eye next.

“If nobody owns or is responsible for a patch of the ocean, it makes it much harder to create the coalition that’s necessary and the authority that’s necessary to move that ocean space into conservation,” Jones said. “It’s really hard, because the lines are not clear.”

She said that treating the oceans as a common space has hindered the world’s ability to safeguard them, and only in recent hears have nations made more concrete efforts to work together to grapple with which areas deserve protection.

“Continuing to treat the ocean just as a global commons is really ruinous for us all,” she said. “When everybody is responsible, nobody is responsible.”

Still, most experts said, many citizens in the United States and abroad have a hard time understanding the need for marine protected areas.

“People get parks on land. They don’t really get parks in the ocean. Not just green parks, but blue parks,” said Jane Lubchenco, who served as head of NOAA during Obama’s first term. “A hundred years ago it was set in motion a movement to protect special places on land. Now is the time to think about protecting special places in the ocean.”

Source: World Ocean Radio/Peter Neill – August 30, 2016 in Radio

Where does water come from? We know from science that water evaporates from the ocean reservoir, is captured in clouds, fog and rain, descends to seep into the underground aquifer or be distributed via lake and stream. In this episode of World Ocean Radio, host Peter Neill reminds us that the ocean exists at both ends of the water cycle–at mountaintop and abyssal plain–and essential to the sustainable ocean is the protection and conservation of the vast, fluid passage that each of us on this earth relies upon.

Transcript:

Where does water come from? It seems such a simple question, and the answer is known from our earliest science lessons when we are introduced to the water cycle and the global circulation system that is so essential to our well-being now and forevermore. Water evaporates from the ocean reservoir, captured in clouds and fog and rain, from which it descends to become ground water, seeping into the underground aquifer, or surface water distributed by lakes and streams. Some of the water is captured in ice as glaciers and high mountain peaks; some is retained deep in the earth, some perhaps pre-historic in its deposit, but there for now beyond our eager, sometimes desperate, digging and drilling.

All of it is finite in volume.

We know this cycle, and if we think about it at all, it becomes easy to understand the idea that the ocean where 97% of that volume is contained is the alpha and omega, the mouth and tail from this circle of sustenance. It becomes easy to see the “edge” of the ocean not at the boardwalk and beach, but rather at the distant snow-capped range where begins the long, convoluted flow of water down and across the land until it reaches its ocean origin…and the cycle begins again.

Essential to the sustainable ocean, then, is the protection and conservation of this fluid passage, the global hydraulics that can be compared to the circulation of blood through our bodies, themselves made substantially of water. Each of us is an ocean, with a comparable circulation, and a reliance on a healthy environment to sustain it. Extend the metaphor: if we treat those bodies with indifference, pollute them with excess and poisons, then we can expect them to succumb to obesity, disease, and collapse. If you think of yourself as the ocean, your family as the ocean, your community as the ocean, your nation as an ocean, then perhaps you will take the necessary steps to sustain the health of each of these many seas.

So, too, with the earth, and we return again to the geography of our living; the ocean, as I choose to define it, as a vast global system of interacting, infused water that extends from mountain-top to abyssal plain and connects us all – physically, financially, politically, socially, and spiritually.

I belabor this point because it lies at the core of any strategy for change. It establishes the context for every decision that follows – the choice to conserve hillsides and watersheds, lakes, ponds, and rivers; the planning for different settlement and systems, for new construction and re-construction; the promulgation of new standards for economic development; the recognition of natural capital and new economic models as significant elements in the pricing of goods and services and the calculation of our gross national product; the re-engineering of the coastal zone; and the definition of new policies to maintain the quality of our air and water, to manage responsibly our ocean resources, and to govern the open ocean under an egalitarian and equitable set of international treaties and agreements that benefit us all.

I belabor this point because that without our understanding of this absolute, this measurable, undeniable fact of life, all our efforts may be for naught, all our strategies may be half-baked, all of our results inadequate. We cannot build a new society, hydraulic or otherwise, if we build it on a weak and corrupted foundation. We cannot change behaviors if we do not accept and assert new core values. This clear and present understanding of the wisdom of Nature and the knowledge revealed can guide and protect us in our first steps toward sustainable practice and global renewal.

Where does water come from? That’s one question, and we know the answer, but here’s another, more difficult one: what will we do, who will we be, when that water has come…and gone?

We will discuss these issues, and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.

WORLD OCEAN RADIO IS A PROJECT OF THE WORLD OCEAN OBSERVATORY IN ASSOCIATION WITH WERU FM, BLUE HILL, MAINE. WORLD OCEAN RADIO IS DISTRIBUTED BY THE PUBLIC RADIO EXCHANGE AND THE PACIFICA NETWORK. FIND OUR PODCAST ON ITUNES AND AT WORLD OCEAN OBSERVATORY DOT ORG.

World Ocean Radio is brought to you in collaboration with the World Ocean Observatory. The World Ocean Observatory advocates for the ocean through independent, responsible, apolitical science, and is dedicated to advancing public understanding of ocean issues through institutional collaboration and partnerships, pro-active programs, and connection with individual subscribers around the world.

UM research team says restricting shark consumption protects human health and shark populations

August 29, 2016

MIAMI—In a new study, University of Miami (UM) scientists found high concentrations of toxins linked to neurodegenerative diseases in the fins and muscles of 10 species of sharks. The research team suggests that restricting consumption of sharks can have positive health benefits for consumers and for shark conservation, since several of the sharks analyzed in the study are threatened with extinction due to overfishing.

Fins and muscle tissue samples were collected from 10 shark species found in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans for concentrations of two toxins—mercury and β-N-methylamino-L-alanine (BMAA).  “Recent studies have linked BMAA to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS),” said Deborah Mash, Professor of Neurology and senior author of the study.

Researchers at the UM Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and UM Miller School of Medicine detected concentrations of mercury and BMAA in the fins and muscles of all shark species at levels that may pose a threat to human health. While both mercury and BMAA by themselves pose a health risk, together they may also have synergistic toxic impacts.

“Since sharks are predators, living higher up in the food web, their tissues tend to accumulate and concentrate toxins, which may not only pose a threat to shark health, but also put human consumers of shark parts at a health risk,” said the study’s lead author Neil Hammerschlag, a research assistant professor at the UM Rosenstiel School and UM Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy.

Shark products including shark fins, cartilage and meat are widely consumed in Asia and globally in Asian communities, as a delicacy and as a source of traditional Chinese medicine. In addition, dietary supplements containing shark cartilage are consumed globally.

Recently scientists have found BMAA in shark fins and shark cartilage supplements. The neurotoxic methyl mercury has been known to bioaccumulate in sharks over their long lifespans.

About 16 percent of the world’s shark species are threatened with extinction. The shark species sampled in this study range in threat status from least concern (bonnethead shark) to endangered (great hammerhead) by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

“Our results suggest that humans who consume shark parts may be at a risk for developing neurological diseases.” said Mash.

“People should be aware and consider restricting consumption of shark parts.  Limiting the consumption of shark parts will have positive health benefits for consumers and positive conservation outcomes for sharks, many of which are threatened with extinction due in part to the growing high demand for shark fin soup and, to a lesser extent, for shark meat and cartilage products.” said Hammerschlag.

The study, titled “Cyanobacterial Neurotoxin BMAA and Mercury in Sharks,” was published in Aug. 16 in the journal Toxins. The study’s coauthors include: Neil Hammerschlag; David A. Davis, Kiyo Mondo, Matthew S. Seely, and Deborah C. Mash from the UM Miller School of Medicine’s Department of Neurology; Susan J. Murch and William Broc Glover from the University of British Columbia; and Timothy Divoll and David C. Evers from the Biodiversity Research Institute in Maine. The Herbert W. Hoover Foundation provided the funding for this study.

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About the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School

The University of Miami is one of the largest private research institutions in the southeastern United States. The University’s mission is to provide quality education, attract and retain outstanding students, support the faculty and their research, and build an endowment for University initiatives. Founded in the 1940’s, the Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science has grown into one of the world’s premier marine and atmospheric research institutions. Offering dynamic interdisciplinary academics, the Rosenstiel School is dedicated to helping communities to better understand the planet, participating in the establishment of environmental policies, and aiding in the improvement of society and quality of life. For more information, visit:  www.rsmas.miami.edu. To learn more about UM’s Shark Research and Conservation Program, visit www.SharkTagging.com

Photo Credit: Photo – Neil Hammerschlag, Ph.D.
Graphics – University of Miami Miller School of Medicine