Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊

Thanks to all who turned out to hear me talk about sharks and culture!

Research Details Devastating Toll of Colonization on Pacific Northwest Wildlife

“Under colonization, the total mass of pink salmon and chum salmon dropped by 40 percent. Forage fish — such as herring, eulachon, surf smelt, and anchovy — declined by 99 percent, and sturgeon were nearly wiped out.”

e360.yale.edu/digest/pacif...

In contrast, a good take:

openletter.earth/open-letter-...

Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence? Maybe not as we’ve known them. But, in the ruins of the old curriculum, something vital is stirring.

This is… a bad take.

www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Sea Slug, Climate Change Warrior A species of sea hare has an impressive tolerance for heat and a penchant for gene mixing

More on Taylor’s sea hares from Nautilus this April!

Here in Puget Sound we’ve seen more, and larger individuals, this year than in my lifetime.

nautil.us/sea-slug-cli...

Some quiet underwater moments from this week of good viz: perennial fave ratfish, Taylor’s sea hares so massive they weigh down their blades of eelgrass, and so many jellies that the entire surface layer felt like a big soft invisible ball pit.

Yes. I am right. I am seeing how Chat GPT is ruining students critical thinking and writing skills in real time. It is not the future. It is a tool designed to render the populace helpless, to make people doubt their innate intelligence, and to foster overreliance on technology.

I finished The Buffalo Hunter Hunter a few weeks ago— it’s absolutely extraordinary.

“WHO THE F--K IS TOM BRADY?” —Ichiro

Ok we do have one king in Seattle. #ichiro #nokings

American flag amid marchers.

My sign, which reads “No one is illegal on stolen land,” in front of the Space Needle.

Seattle showing up as usual! 70,000 on this gorgeous PNW day. 🌲🌊✊

(The monorail even gave us a beepbeep and everyone lost their minds 😹💙)

#nokings #noICE

Hey Michelle, I’m current working on the history of basking sharks in the Pacific, but most of my research heretofore has been marine monsters in the British Isles, so if I can’t help I should be able to point you in the direction of someone who can!

That was the exact nudi portfolio I had under Fauntleroy ferry dock this week! The Cockerell’s were an especially fun surprise— I’d only seen them subtidal heretofore! Great pics!

Can’t wait to read!

Fugitive Ivories, or, Enslavement and the Walrus What is at stake in considering the Arctic as a landscape connected to Black enslavement?

#BlackHistoryMonth Reading

"What does it mean to paint slavery iconography onto a pair of walrus tusks, and what is at stake in considering the Arctic as a landscape connected to Black enslavement?" - Bart Pushaw

niche-canada.org/2022/09/01/f...

#envhist #arthistory #arctic

Along the lines of how one sour patch kid would kill a pilgrim…

(Epigraph to Ch. 44: “I would not creep along the coast, but steer / Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.”)

Can’t wait to read Dolly!

Oof.

What’s the best fish in the Salish Sea, and why is it the Pacific Spiny Lumpsucker (Eumicrotremus orbis)?

Today I'm tuned into this symposium on the North Pacific Right Whale (one of the world's rarest and most endangered whales) facilitated by the wonderful folks at @nprightwhale.bsky.social!

www.northpacificrightwhale.org/symposium

🐋

My favorite read yet of 2025.

Spectacular postdoc opportunity at WHOI, in science OR policy, generally #coastal or specifically #Arctic!

☺️

Can’t wait to read!

Tall blonde female teaching in front of classroom wearing a plaid flannel shirt because she thinks it strikes the right tone between scholarly and outdoorsy.

Classroom window which looks out onto Puget Sound. It’s a calm gray misty day.

It’s the first day of Winter Quarter and I’ve got the best classroom in town!

BIOL110 is my interdisciplinary Salish Sea marine bio course, anchored in ecology but with an arts/hum kaleidoscope for a lens.

And happy to be at Highline supporting an 80% BIPOC and 60% first-generation student body!

(And a bonus #6 for our Giant Pacific Octos here in the Salish Sea that are pretty common if you know how/where to look but never ever get old! 🐙)

1. Dolphins swirling around us in the Red Sea

2. Hairy frogfish doing “the yawn” in Indo (then a 💩) 🤦‍♀️

3. Humpback mum and calf in the ice in Greenland

4. Polar bear mum grabbing a seal for her cubs in Nunavut

5. Basking sharks, a leatherback, and my first right whale from the deck of SSV Cramer!

And for a couple of my favorite cephalopod poems, check out Sarah Lindsay’s Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower which includes these lines in “The
Common Octopus”:

“She can be a tassel,
she can be a web.”

(5/5)

Resisting both anthropomorphism and anthropectomy, I’ll just say that it was a privilege to witness her complete her life cycle without human interference. (4/5)

I shot this clip of her a few months ago to show students that within a literal stone’s throw from our urban environments here in Seattle/the Northwest exists an entire sphere of existence that many folks don’t spend much time thinking about, but whose future is inextricable from our own. (3/5)

While I was in Honduras this week they finally hatched; now her work is complete. She’s been dying since she laid her eggs, has used her last reserves of energy to care for them, now her body is already gone from the den and reabsorbed into the cycle of birth/life/death in her (our) ecosystem. (2/5)