It’s a cold January Sunday as I sit writing this column and what’s a more perfect topic to write about on a day like this than eels? Our friends down here from the great lakes region are familiar with a nasty bloodsucking fellow up their way called the lamprey and we’re glad that you didn’t bring him with you.
Dec
10
We’ve all probably heard of the dog Spot in the old “Dick and Jane” stories that we learned to read in the first grade. In the Gulf there’s a fish that doesn’t look like a dog with the common name spot (Leiostomus xanthurus). The spot is a member of the scianidae family like the croaker and red drum.
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Nov
9
You’re bugging me! How often have we said that to our children, a gnat or mosquito? Well, sometimes fish appear to feel the same way.
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Sep
21
The sheepshead (Archosargus progatocephalus) is a member of the porgy family (Sparidae), which is made up of about 120 species. Sheepshead is its common name in the Gulf of Mexico but other areas of the United States it is convict fish, sheephead, seabream and southern sheepshead. Some other common names around the world include kubinskiy morskoi karas’ (Russian), rondeau mouton (French), sargo (Spanish), sargo-choupa (Portuguese), and sparus owczarz (Polish).
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Aug
30
Fish have swim bladders to help them maintain neutral buoyancy in the water, otherwise they’d have to up and down in the water column. Gas is added or removed from the bladder as the fish changes depth.
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Aug
9
As best it can be figured it began happening quietly and slowly around 15 years ago. An insect called the emerald ash borer arrived from its native China in wood used to make crates. This borer is a beetle loves our ash trees. It flies from ash tree to ash tree laying its eggs in the bark. The eggs hatch and the larvae bore into the tree and block the flow of water and nutrients. The US experience with this pest is that every infected tree dies and once a tree is infected it dies within three years.
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Jul
6
In an era of terrorist attacks and global warming it sounds a bit ridiculous to fight over fish but it’s a war that has been going on for centuries all over the globe and it has only intensified over the last 100 years.
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Jun
17
When we look at the animals in the world around us, its hard see that the ways animals use to survive has any bearing on the humans. We think of how we adapt to a changing world as an intellectual process. If something changes we reason out a method of dealing with it – if it gets cold we find a way to generate heat, if there’s a hurricane or drought we move somewhere else.