Rivers are crucial components of human well-being, contributing water, food, hydroelectric power, and transport for millennia. Yet an estimated 2.8 million dams now divide up rivers world-wide, threatening healthy river ecosystems and reducing biodiversity in stream systems, in addition to impacts on inland fisheries that supply protein to 158 million people worldwide. Now, the first global assessment of free-flowing rivers has just been published in the journal Nature. 

Fishery cooperatives are groups of harvesters that band together to jointly fish a pooled quota. They can be set up in a variety of ways, but generally are governed by agreements among members, as well as agreements with regulators that affect all members of the cooperative. One form this may take is to have the participants be “jointly and severally liable” for staying within the catch quota limits for that cooperative; in other words, the regulator can halt the fishing of all members within a cooperative if the catches for that cooperative exceed quota limits, even if the overage was the fault of just a single member. 

Just over one-third of the world’s 246 longest rivers remain free-flowing, according to a new study published May 8 in Nature. Dams and reservoirs are drastically reducing the diverse benefits that healthy rivers provide to people and nature across the globe.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill, starting 10 April 2010 and lasting until 15 July that year, was the largest in US waters in history. This highly impactful event offers lessons that can be used to train the next generation of marine scientists. In a pair of new articles in Current: The Journal of Marine Education a group of authors that include SAFS communications specialist Dan DiNicola outlines ways in which marine educators can bring the story of the oil spill to life, including assessing the impact of oil on fish swimming behavior and vision using “fish treadmills” with the aid of an online virtual laboratory; and highlighting new technological advances that came out of research on the effects of the oil spill. 

Mapping the distribution of mobile species is a long-standing problem in ecology. For many species, there are multiple types of data available, roughly categorized into surveys of many individuals at a snapshot period in time (e.g. a systematic spatial survey recording all individuals at a point in time) compared to tracking devices that follow individuals over time as they move through space (e.g. 

Complex fisheries models are like weather forecasts for fish populations: they gather together all the available data about fish trends in numbers over time, numbers at each age, and other information, and then predict the level of sustainable catch that can be taken from the population. Over time, as computing power has grown, these models have also become more complex, and run time has remained consistently high. 

Tuna fisheries supply nutrients, food, employment, and other economic benefits to coastal states and global industrial fleets. A new analysis now examines the causes for variability in economic performance among regions and management types through Fishery Performance Indicators, which score performance on 68 questions answered on a scale from 1 (worst) to 5 (best). Benefits were greatest for tuna caught for canning and for sashimi (raw fish) markets, since these were the highest quality fish, and had access to the most valuable markets; and success was largely determined by the post-harvest sector. 

Recent advances allow for the editing of any part of the DNA of individuals (their genome), offering a chance for ecologists and conservationists to radically transform individuals and ecosystems, as outlined in a new review. The new genome-editing tools are being driven by technology called CRISPR that allows for the precise editing of DNA letters coding for key genes within an organism. 

Tracking changes in diseases over time is an increasingly important topic given changes in global temperature. Put simply, is a warmer world a sicker world? Reported rates of disease may increase over time but it is difficult to distinguish between better reporting of disease, and true increases in disease prevalence. A new study in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment now highlights the critical role of natural history collections, which contain many millions of specimens, in piecing together true rates of disease over deep time (many centuries). 

Smaller species of swimming marine mammals are often hard to count because they might be present in ones or twos or in groups of hundreds of individuals. Typical survey methods face multiple types of bias when trying to count total numbers because some individuals are missed. For aerial surveys, this is particularly problematic: individuals in a school can be missed because they are diving, too close to other individuals to be seen, or too far away to be detected in photographs or videos.