Five Ways to Fight Illegal Fishing

By Lindsay Jennings, RJD Intern  The issue of illegal fishing has, deservedly, been getting international attention recently but it should be noted that this ‘great ocean heist’ is not a new phenomenon. For far too long fishing boats have been misreporting or underreporting their catches. There simply are not enough fish for these boats to […]

Watered Down Medicine: The Influence of Marine Organisms in Medicine

By Gabi Goodrich, RJD Intern Ancient people worshipped, prayed, and sacrificed to the ocean for the powers of healing and power it possessed. While the mentality has changed, the influence over people and medicine today has not. With more and more focus on disease and sickness, the search for new and better medicines are an […]

Effects of Anthropogenic Noise on Marine Mammals

By Daniela Escontrela, RJD Intern A topic of concern in the past few years has been noise pollution in the ocean. Particularly, noise pollution has been thought to affect marine mammal populations since they are so reliant on acoustics for navigation and communication (Erbe 2011). Marine mammals are of special conservation concern because they have […]

Shark Tagging with SLAM Academy

By Hannah Calich, RJD Graduate Student Last Friday was a great day of shark tagging. Not only did the RJD team get to spend the day with the fabulous students and teachers from SLAM academy, but the day was documented by a CBS film crew! The RJD team met at Crandon Marina at 8 am […]

Shark Tagging with Big Brothers Big Sisters

By Jessica Wingar, RJD Intern When I woke up on Saturday morning, I was incredibly excited to be going shark tagging. I had been looking forward to this trip all week, and I saw that the weather was going to be perfect. It was going to be sunny and high 70s to 80s all day. […]

Small-Scale Fisheries and Food Security: Preventing Overexploitation

By James Keegan, RJD Intern Artisanal, or small-scale, fisheries provide food and employment to hundreds of millions of people in developing countries, making these fisheries’ sustainability essential (Johnson et al. 2013). In tropical developing countries, 60% of the people depend on fish for 40% or more of their protein demand (Hussain et al. 2010). Growth […]