Bob Ellis 🐟

Biology and Ecology of Sharks and Their Relatives (Online & Field) — Center for Wildlife Studies

Friends, I am excited to announce that I am running a version of my graduate-level shark biology and ecology course through Center for Wildlife Studies! There are two versions you can take, both of which can offer graduate course credit or continuing professional education credit!

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Scientists have released the closest images ever taken near the sun, captured by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe flying 3.8 million miles above the solar surface.

See more images of solar eruptions on the sun: wapo.st/3Irm3P3

Kershaw is one of my favorite baseball players ever, but I will never buy or were his jersey/number because I also believe he's an awful person.

Annie Dillard wrote, "I am really here, alive on the intricate earth under trees."

She sure can write a fucking sentence. AD knows where to put the commas. Could've put one after earth, but what a mistake that would've been. Could've used a word inferior to intricate. Instead, perfect sentence.

What Ocean Ramsey does is not shark science or conservation: some brief thoughts on “the Shark Whisperer” documentary Netflix has a new (sarcastic air quotes) “documentary” out about Ocean Ramsey, who longtime readers and followers know is a serial wildlife harasser who also coordinates massive online …

Enough of you asked me about this that I wrote some brief thoughts on Ocean Ramsey's particular brand of pseudoscientific nonsense. I believe this addresses almost all of the frequently asked questions I receive, but as always I am happy to answer serious questions asked in good faith.

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Just received a grant proposal result months overdue. Not awarded, but the main takeaway for me was out of 76 proposals, only 7 will be funded!

Overfishing Social Fish Social learning is common among vertebrates, including fish. Learning from others reduces the risk and costs of adaptation. In some longer-lived species, social learning can lead to the formation of ...

Fascinating paper on something I never thought of: When we remove big old animals from wild populations (like fish) we might be losing important cultural transmission in species that learn from elders - Essentially culling transmission of collective knowledge onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

A chocolate cake with red and white decorations and lit candles shaped as the number 75. Bold text reads: ‘The NSF Turns 75 Today. What has it done over the past 7 decades?’ The background is a celebratory red with a spray-paint texture.

HAPPY 75th, NSF!

We’re celebrating this milestone by highlighting some of NSF’s most transformative accomplishments—innovations that have shaped our world and continue to drive progress in health, technology, the environment, and beyond.

Read on 🧵(1/11):

NONE in Life science?! NONE?!

Volunteer Track The $10 Billion Blow To American Science Grassroots efforts support court case against the NIH

Nearly 4,000 federal science grants terminated.

A group of volunteers built Grant Watch to track it—now their data is showing up in court.

I talked to Noam Ross about how it started and what it means.

www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

#ScienceIsEssential #GrantWatch #NIH #NSF #ACLU #DataJournalism

Neglecting to consider mortalities can create bias in telemetry studies. The R package 'mort' identifies potential mortalities &/or expelled tags in passive telemetry arrays, filling an important gap in workflows when analysing passive telemetry data🐾👇
buff.ly/YFB55q0

Lucky me, YouTube suggested one of those "classical composer listens to Radiohead for the first time" last night and now I've got OK Computer on as loud as my ear buds will allow, waiting in Key West for an airplane

Toxic to the rule of law, and yet another example of ICE/CBP deliberately *not* looking for all those supposed criminals, drug traffickers, terrorists, etc.

They're going for literally the least dangerous, most law-abiding people they can find, the ones following every rule. The easiest targets.

‘Going to increase prices on everybody’: US energy department workers sound alarm over cuts Employees say cuts and deregulation undermine department’s ability to function and will cause cost hikes

The non-partisan thinktank Energy Innovation calculated the average US household will see its utility bills rise by over $230 by 2035 as a result of cuts to renewable energy investments.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

This budget proposal will make your life worse.

Call your elected officials and oppose it.

Seems odd that ICE started with the actively employed (and paying taxes! Without receiving benefits!) and those showing up for their court appearances, right?

NSF, NASA and NIH budgets per year, inflation adjusted from 2000-2025 along with the proposed cuts. NSF includes research component only. Massive cuts across all sectors, well below support spanning 25 years.

How bad will it be? Catastrophic.

Proposed cuts to #NSF, #NIH, and #NASA will set the US R&D landscape back 25 yrs+, cause economic and job loss now, and undermine innovations to come.

But, this is the WH's *proposed* budget.

Speak up now before it is too late.

(inflation adjusted $-s below)

But it's not just social media. I heard about this "storm" yesterday from a colleague whose spouse works in insurance. They were already deep into their decision matrix on halting new policies. Anec-data, I know, but highlights how deep the effects from cuts to NOAA/NWS will run.

As a recently retired Southeast U.S. NWS MIC, I would instruct my staff and advise partners to not take significant notice of the GFS model tropical cyclones until Days 5-7 and especially if other deterministic and probabilistic models didn't show anything.

Question from a livestream viewer: “How many lives are collectively impacted by [NOAA's] monitoring and rapid response work.”

John Cortinas: “I don’t have any exact numbers, but I would probably start by saying the entire population of the United States…"

Believe it or not, all three of these fish are the same species… the bluehead wrasse. Wrasses are protogynous hermaphrodites, meaning they transition from female to male over the course of their lives. Each phase can look radically different from each other as evidenced here #coralcitycamera

The average dog is bigger than two of the three types of humans, apparently. And cats pee slightly faster than horses?

Absolutely critical information here:

If you are the PI of an NSF project and have navigated difficult decisions about how to rescope work with regard to Broadening Participation, I'd love to talk offline and confidentially for peer to peer support and knowledge sharing. If that's not you, please ignore this. DMs open, etc.

Or the time when a senior scientist at my org suggested I look into "trophic ecology" and stop working on movement. Because their lab has movement in the name, I should do something else. (I still work on movement ecology)

I'll never forget standing in Home Depot buying supplies for my graduate research when a professor from a different uni called to tell me I wasn't allowed to do my study. (I did it anyway)

NO!

It's gonna take longer than you think!

Unsplash image of the Earth, mostly the nightside with a tracery of city lights on every continent.

OK, this is wild.

In September 2023, geophysicists across the world started monitoring a very odd signal coming from the ground under them.

It was picked up in the Arctic. And Antarctica. It was detected everywhere, every 90 seconds, as regular as a metronome, for *nine days*.

What the HELL?

1/

A photo from an undersea robot or ROV, the robotic arm is reaching out towards a small rock partially buried in the seafloor sediment, with a translucent white colonial tunicate growing on it.

A different rock, picked up from the seafloor and displayed with a ruler in front of it. It has sponges, anemones, and lots of other tiny invertebrate life growing all over it.

I heard it's #DeepDay, so here's a fun deep sea fact: we picked up 18 rocks from deep in the North Atlantic and looked at every single animal that was using those rocks. In total, we found ONE HUNDRED (and one) species* of invertebrates on those rocks alone 🧪

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...