A front page investigative CNN article outlines how the Environmental Protection Agency reversed a decision to protect the most valuable salmon fishery in the world, giving the go-ahead for the Pebble Mine, one hour after the head met with the CEO of the Pebble Mine partnership. SAFS professor Thomas Quinn comments in the report: “This is the jewel in the crown of America’s fisheries resources – these salmon. 

Science magazine reports that faculty members Luke Tournabene and Adam Summers have a new mission in life: CT scanning all the vertebrates in the world, with fish and frogs well on their way. All the scans will be made freely available for researchers to have access to unprecedented 3-D images of the skeletal structure of 80% of all vertebrates.

A CT scan of a pirañha (Serrasalmus medinai), picture by Adam Summers and Matthew Kolman 

Ray Hilborn, UW professor of aquatic and fishery sciences, will receive the 2016 International Fisheries Science Prize this week at the World Fisheries Congress in Busan, South Korea. 

“If reforms were implemented today, three-quarters of exploited fisheries worldwide could reach population goals within 10 years, and 98 percent by mid-century,” according to a report in PNAS co-authored by SAFS Professors Ray Hilborn, Trevor Branch, and Research Scientist Mike Melnychuk. 

The Seattle Times Reports “Puget Sound salmon are on drugs — Prozac, Advil, Benadryl, Lipitor, even cocaine. Those drugs and dozens of others are showing up in the tissues of juvenile chinook, researchers have found, thanks to tainted wastewater discharge.”
A research team of NOAA and UW scientists, including SAFS’ professor Dr. Graham Young, have documented levels of over 80 “chemicals of emerging concern”, pharmaceuticals and personal care products in estuarine waters and in juvenile chinook salmon and Pacific staghorn sculpin at sites in south Puget Sound impacted by discharge from wastewater treatment plants. 

Through the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, Sarah Schooler, ’15, spent six weeks in the Alaskan bush, collecting the same data in the field she’d been studying in the classroom: salmon and the hungry habits of grizzly bears.
Sarah Schooler and UW staff and students placing a fishing net on lake Aleknagik. 

Students from around the country worked together as part of a class on the ecology of infectious marine diseases, taught by SAFS professors S. Roberts and C. Friedman, to examine how genes express themselves in sick and healthy sea stars. 

Recent SAFS alumna Susan Harris spent 10 weeks at UW’s Friday Harbor Labs on San Juan island studying zoology and botany. UW Today featured a profile on Susan’s experience. 

A warm water mass in the Pacific Ocean is impacting forage species and stirring up more conversations about the need for ecosystem-based fisheries management. SAFS Professor Tim Essington weighs in. 

SAFS Professor Ted Pietsch and SAFS graduate student Rachel Arnold recently relocated an elusive tropical frogfish, last seen in Australia in 1980. After collecting specimens and testing the DNA, they discovered they’d found a new genus and species of fish, now named the red-fingered anglerfish.