Stephanie Carlson

California cracks down on water theft but spares data centers from disclosing how much they use Gov. Newsom vetoed a bill that would have required data centers to report their projected water use when applying for a business license.

First sentence says it all: "Gov. Gavin Newsom has vetoed legislation that would have required data centers to report how much water they use." Read the rest of the story though. from @ianjames.bsky.social: www.latimes.com/environment/...

Read the full story here -> aslopubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.... Thanks to the the International Associated Laboratory "MacLife" for funding! CC @matbuoro.bsky.social @fishteph.bsky.social @natureatcal.bsky.social

Opinion | Trump’s War on Nature Is Up Against a Powerful New Resistance Movement

“To recognize rivers as life-giving forces & as rights-bearing presences is a profound & hopeful position. It offers philosophical grounds for resistance to the present administration’s…drive to gut environmental regulation & reduce the natural world to dollar value”
www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/o...

“It’s proven difficult to track the drift of eggs, baby fish, and sometimes adults over long distances...” The same is true in freshwater and greatly limits our understanding of why fish populations fluctuate as they do

The undersea current quickly changed from horizontal to vertical. The whales rose to the surface all at once. What in the world happened at the surface of the sea...?

#Illustration
#CommentPls
#RTpls

This threat represents an immeasurable loss to community-driven research and to the training pipeline for the next generation of collaborative conservation leaders

Reminder that comments on the Endangered Species Act's recission of the "harm" definition are due TODAY! esa.org/esablog/2025...

NOAA senior scientists in Seattle depart amid Trump cuts Some senior scientists at a federal research center in Seattle are calling it quits after leading some of the region's most important scientific breakthroughs.

NOAA senior scientists in Seattle depart amid Trump cuts

www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

Oh my goodness, part 2: they came from graduation to say hi and we took photos! I heard about their memories from the class: sampling suckers on Strawberry Creek, learning about pupfish, using a dichotomous key. What an incredible end to an extraordinarily challenging semester. My heart is full

At my final exam today, a student told me that she is the third (!) sister in her family to take my Fish Ecology class! Her sisters recommended it 😭

Rep. Laurel Libby, R-Auburn, recently used my second-place finish in the 1,600-meter run, and that of my teammate in the 800-meter run, to malign Soren Stark-Chessa, the trans-identified athlete who finished first. One of the reasons I chose to run cross-country and track is the community: Teammates cheering each other on, athletes from different schools coming together, and the fact that personal improvement is valued as much as, if not more than, the place we finish. Last Friday, I ran the fastest 1,600-meter race I have ever run in middle school or high school track and earned varsity status by my school’s standards. I am extremely proud of the effort I put into the race and the time that I achieved. The fact that someone else finished in front of me didn’t diminish the happiness I felt after finishing that race. I don’t feel like first place was taken from me. Instead, I feel like a happy day was turned ugly by a bully who is using children to make political points. We are all just kids trying to make our way through high school. Participating in sports is the highlight of high school for some kids. No one was harmed by Soren’s participation in the girls’ track meet, but we are all harmed by the hateful rhetoric of bullies, like Rep. Libby, who want to take sports away from some kids just because of who they are. Anelise Feldman Freshman, Yarmouth High School Yarmouth

this is a letter to the editor from a high school track runner who came in second to a trans girl in a race. her state house rep in maine started talking about it. so she wrote this: www.pressherald.com/2025/05/14/r...

Incredible love story

Science isn’t like tap water, you can’t just turn it on and off. It’s like an oyster: it builds over time until it eventually creates pearls. This sort of senseless destruction is going to haunt us for a long time.

Juvenile salmonids traverse coastal meta‐nurseries that connect rivers via the sea Conventionally, juvenile salmonids are thought to migrate unidirectionally from freshwater systems to marine systems and therefore only inhabit natal drainages. Although scattered evidence suggests j....

Super neat study showing stream-swapping by coho salmon! Expands our view of juvenile rearing habitat to include multiple drainages

esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

NYT: One estimate finds that DOGE’s “firings, re-hirings, lost productivity and paid leave of thousands of workers” will actually COST taxpayers “upward of $135 billion this fiscal year.”

@nytimes.com 🤡
www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/u...

Surprise atmospheric rivers, toxic seafood: How NOAA cuts could impact California California research institutions could lose access to millions of dollars, which could impact atmospheric river forecasts and Coast Guard rescues.

Coast Guard rescue missions failing after running into unexpected currents. Surprise atmospheric river storms. Seafood contaminated by unseen algal blooms.

CA scientists fear these scenarios, and more, are possible under the Trump admin’s recommendation to reduce NOAA’s budget by $1.7B.

Gift link:

Trump administration plans Endangered Species Act rollback - High Country News Revisions to the law center on ‘harm,’ which would allow far more mining, drilling and other development that threatens critical habitat.

When the habitats that species rely on are destroyed, the species will disappear. Someday, and I hope not too late, we’ll understand that when we lose a species, we lose so much more. Their fate is intertwined with our own.
www.hcn.org/articles/tru...

Incredible!

To new Bluesky peeps: I'm currently working on another book, on the organisms nearest my heart. It's fundamentally about fish as engineers—both of ecosystems & human affairs—and how we revitalize their roles in our waterscapes & lives. If this aligns with your interests & expertise, cast me a line!

Wrecked by another note from a colleague at NOAA-Fisheries announcing their premature retirement (they are coming daily now). I weep for my colleagues and friends, for the fish they dedicated their lives to, and for the people who will be most impacted by these actions

“It was a reminder of the importance of conserving diversity within populations to give these [salmon] populations options in the face of variable and extreme conditions,” Stephanie Carlson @fishteph.bsky.social @natureatcal.bsky.social told @sfgate.com

Major budget cuts proposed for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration The agency forecasts weather, manages fisheries, and researches the world's oceans, atmosphere, and climate. The proposed budget cuts would slash the climate work entirely.

The agency forecasts weather, manages fisheries, and researches the world's oceans, atmosphere, and climate. The proposed budget cuts would slash the climate work entirely.

🧪 are you a trans entomologist? arachnologist? parasitologist? malacologist? carcinologist? diplopodologist? vermeologist? 🐛🐜🪱🦗🕷️🦀

if you a trans scientist studying any kind of bug or crawling/slithering invertebrate that is existentially bug-like, I would love to interview you for a project!

"eliminate all funding for [NOAA] climate, weather, and ocean laboratories and cooperative institutes"

"ending the operations of a huge host of earth science satellites"

"closure of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center"

A new UC Berkeley study reveals how one dry winter decimated salmon and trout populations across Northern California — and how they made a comeback.

📰: www.sfgate.com/local/articl...

Coastal steelhead trout in California.

A study of the 2012–2016 California drought chronicles how low river flows during the breeding season caused Chinook salmon to shift downriver and caused steelhead and coho salmon to fail to breed entirely in some tributaries and watersheds. In PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

if you were laid off from NWS or NOAA today and you'd like to talk about your experience with a reporter, please email me: simbler at defector dot com. 🧪

Graph with day of water year on the x-axis and count on the y axis, showing multimodal variation in the timing of fish migrating down from their natal habitat (shown in blue lines) and also variation in their timing of emigration (shown in gold lines)

Coho are typically thought to rear in their natal habitat for a year before migrating to sea. We found that many fish (44%) leave their natal habitat early and spend several months rearing in the lower portion of the creek before emigrating. (3/8)