What would Jeoffrey do ?

I am just loving this in so many ways ....

They have a cave troll ...

I recently had a run in with a troll (employed by SeaWorld) after I tried to correct a comment about killer whale biology/science (and which I specifically had data and analyses on) recently. This led to a battle on Twitter, and for the sake of prosperity I decided to storify it. FYI because of the slew of tweets the troll got from marine biologists, they've stopped using that account, but they are still out there, lurking ...
Here's the storified Twitter fight ...

Love song to internet trolls

I've been having fun dealing with internet trolls recently (specifically mercenary trolls employed by SeaWorld employed to berate and make ad hominem attacks on those that oppose them) - a little more on that later. But in the meantime here's a love song to the trolls ...

71 questions of importance for marine conservation

I've recently produced a paper, which took much blood sweat and tears, with a great team of co-authors, on some of the top questions we need to have answered in order to progress marine conservation. The project was nearly three years in the making and i lost count of how many drafts were produced. The paper is now finally online (open access) via: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cobi.12303/abstract 

We had a couple of false starts - one of the first (conservation) journals we submitted the manuscript to said that it would be "of limited interest to our readers". It eventually got accepted in the top conservation biology journal and within two weeks was the second most talked about paper on social media EVER for the journal. So much for being of limited interest ... pah !

Friend, co-author and fellow blogger Megan Draheim did a nice blog entry on the article, so rather than repeat this, go visit her blog

Conservation magazine also wrote an article in the paper, that you can find here.

Salute to the bone kickers

This week at the university, we have been descended upon by a host of evolutionary biologists who study species that have secondarily gone back to the oceans (e.g.  prehistoric marine mammals). So to all my paleontologist "bone kicker" chums - this is for you .... "bones" by Ms Mr