Rachel Mawer

Releasing pollack at depth could benefit their long-term survival University of Plymouth news: New research led by the University has suggested changing how pollack are released after being caught by recreational...

🌊Our latest research suggests releasing pollack close to their catch depths can result in their survival rates increasing from 56% for surface-released fish to more than 80%!

#MarineScience #Fishing #OceanResearch #Plymouth #PollackFISP

www.plymouth.ac.uk/news/releasi...

Really nice to have our #pollack paper out 🎣 full paper here! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Bending back the biodiversity loss curve of sharks and rays. The loss of sharks and rays to date has involved serial depletion of the largest, most evolutionary and functionally distinct species, and the increasing prevalence of smaller-bodied species that have benefited from release from predation.

New paper out today in @natrevbiodiv.nature.com by the #GlobalSharkTrends team: Bending back the curve of shark & ray biodiversity loss;
Read the paper here: rdcu.be/eZ9n9
@sfu.ca
@sfubiosciences.bsky.social
@earth2ocean.bsky.social

A Northern Rockhopper Penguin bends down to look quizzically at the camera.

Happy #PenguinAwarenessDay

Ever wondered how scientists go about counting penguin colonies? It’s pretty challenging when no-one stays still and everyone looks alike...

Read on to find out the answer from our penguinologist Antje Steinfurth

Full story: www.rspb.org.uk/whats-happen...

#seabirds 🧪🌎

This Thursday! Come chat with @rtbecard.bsky.social about kaltoa - a package for Kalman filtered time-of-arrival positioning of acoustic tag detection data. Check the User Guide linked here, and come by Study hall this Thursday for questions with James! rtbecard.gitlab.io/kaltoa/

That's me 👇! I'll be giving a quick overview of my #acoustictelemetry positioning and clock synchronization toolset this thursday at the OTN study hall.

Very exciting preprint for those of us working with aquatic telemetry! As someone currently working with (a few) 3D fish tracks, this has been on my mind. Looking forward to having a proper read later 🐟

Shark scientists want their research to help save threatened species, but don’t know how. Our new paper can help. Sharks are some of the most threatened animals on Earth, and accordingly many scientists who study sharks want their research to be useful for conservation. However, most scientific training does n…

ICYMI, we have a new paper out offering advice to shark scientists who want to perform policy-relevant research but don't understand the basics of science-based policymaking.

Here's the press release/ lay summary. The open access paper is linked within.
🧪🦑🌍🦈

Animal tracking with particle algorithms informs protected area design Particle algorithms strengthen the value of acoustic telemetry for conservation.

Interesting read this morning - new paper on #elasmobranchs and #acoustictelemetry led by Ed Lavender - integrating acoustic telemetry, archival data and particle algorithms to investigate space use within + beyond an MPA, well worth a read! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Beautiful winters day to tag some skate - today is also our first tagging trip with our ultrasound scanner to start collecting reproductive data alongside our movement data 😁

End of another great conference #EEA2025 - so much elasmo science across the whole spectrum in the last few days 🦈

Day 3 at #EEA2025 , great to hear from Steven Benjamins about the current status of Skatespotter, a flapper skate photo ID database I was briefly involved with in 2018/19 for my masters! One individual has been recaptured 28 times in 6 years!! 🤯 Very cool

Great start to #EEA2025 today! Lots of interesting talks on elasmos & the chance to present some of our skate tracking work in the Bristol Channel 😁

The next International Statistical Ecology Conference (ISEC) will take place in Mérida, México, on January 8-15, 2027. Very exciting!

The organisers are inviting submissions for workshops and round table discussions: statisticalecology.org (Deadline: November 15th)

Two great days this week tagging skate in the Bristol Channel - we managed to catch + tag individuals across four species of skate 🥳 These skate will be tracked for the next few years across our channel-wide array so we can learn about their movement patterns and spatial usage #trackingnotslacking

This week we've deployed another line of acoustic receivers across the Bristol Channel 🥳 hopefully, these receivers will give us a better idea of when our tagged fish, sharks + skate migrate out from the channel, and maybe detect some animals from further afield 👀

Tristan da Cunha: The lobsters keeping Earth's remotest town afloat The most remote inhabited island is racing to protect its seas – and only source of income.

Really nice to see this article on the sustainable lobster fishery and marine conservation at Tristan da Cunha - a great example of a community closely entwined with conservation and the challenges with enforcing a huge no-take zone (687000 km^2!) in such a remote area www.bbc.co.uk/future/artic...

Victoria Paterson and I are abseiling off a building here at the University of Glasgow to raise money for student expeds. This is to help disadvanaged students take up these amazing, life changing opportunities @uofglasgow.bsky.social
www.justgiving.com/page/paterso...

We'd appreciate you support

Fishermen & divers of the UK we need YOU! Our #octopus bloom surveys have been extended to Sept 21st. If you haven't already done so, please fill out the fishermen's survey survey.alchemer.eu/s3/90884550/... or divers survey survey.alchemer.eu/s3/90886025/... Thank you! Please share widely! 🐙

hmmTMB: Hidden Markov Models with Flexible Covariate Effects in R by Théo Michelot <p>Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are widely applied in studies where a discrete-valued process of interest is observed indirectly. They have for example been used to model behavior from human and animal...

The hmmTMB paper is finally out in the Journal of Statistical Software!

An R package for hidden Markov models with random effects, flexible spline-based covariate effects, and fast inference using TMB or Stan.

Check out the GIthub repository for more examples.

doi.org/10.18637/jss...

Using a pre-existing photo-ID database, Mawer et al. identified potential signs of reproductive behaviours in flapper skate, which suggest a winter-spring mating period doi.org/10.1111/jfb.70044 #FishSci #JFB

Yesterday out downloading receivers along the Gower, perfect day for it and a highlight being the sunfish we saw on the way out 🤩

#JFB: Using citizen science photographs to identify reproductive events in an oviparous elasmobranch doi.org/10.1111/jfb.70044 #FishSci

New paper out today! 🦈
We tested whether blacktip reef shark dorsal fins are reliable for photo ID – they are!
✅ Stable over time
✅ Unique among individuals
📍Long-term dataset from French Polynesia
Led by Physioshark
🔗 doi.org/10.1111/jfb....
#SharkScience #MarineBiology
@jcuofficial.bsky.social

It's #worldalbatrossday ! I was lucky enough to see lots of adult Atlantic yellow-nose albatrosses nesting back in September, such gorgeous birds 😍

Jaws, Feathers, and Family Abolition - JSTOR Daily Well-researched stories from The Revelator, Smithsonian Magazine, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

Oh wow- my article about what's happened to sharks since Jaws came out 50 years ago is featured in today's JSTOR Daily newsletter!

daily.jstor.org/jaws-feather...

@fao.org released their 2025 report on the status of marine fisheries resources (openknowledge.fao.org/items/ac6d51...).
In talking to the media about the report at #UNOC FAO stated that ~57% of sharks stocks are sustainably fished (t.co/fVFnZkY4vQ).
This fact is WRONG
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Put this on your reading list: Continuous-time HMMs for animal movement data.

I saw Dom present a great intro to this work at ISEC 2024. The gist is it's a very fast model for fitting HMMs to temporally irregular data (based on maximum likelihood).

Global tracking of marine megafauna space use reveals how to achieve conservation targets The recent Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) sets ambitious goals but no clear pathway for how zero loss of important biodiversity areas and halting human-induced extinction of thre...

NEW in @science.org Global tracking #MarineMegafauna shows <8% of areas used overlap w/ existing MPAs, while >75% of important areas overlapped by threats like #fishing #shipping & ocean warming - 30x30 goal will be insufficient for their conservation www.megamove.org @thembauk.bsky.social

Multiple sensitivity metrics are needed to adequately assess a species’ sensitivity for conservation and management Abstract. Fish populations are declining globally due to increasing anthropogenic pressures. While research has been carried out to understand the impacts

Delighted to see the first chapter of my PhD published in the @icesmarine.bsky.social journal of marine science!

This paper discusses developing a holistic understanding of the sensitivity of fish species in our seas and offers practical recommendations for enchanced species mgmt & protection. 🦈🐟