I like to think of blog writing as a way to store away snippets of stories that I don’t want to forget. Often while researching a completely unrelated topic I’ll come across some interesting side path. Tempting as it might be to take a scenic detour, we are often constrained to the road upon which… Read More Dining with the Ichthyophagous Club
I’ve been away from this blog for a few months while working away on my dissertation. But, having given a draft over to my committee, I thought I should take the opportunity to articulate on paper (or “on blog” rather) a topic that I’ve been thinking about now for some time: can we bridge the… Read More The Entangled History of Oceanography and Medicine
As many of our readers may already be aware, a history of oceanography workshop, “Place and Practice: Doing Science in and on the Ocean,” is currently underway at King’s College in Halifax, NS. The guest of honour is ICHO founding member, and Dalhousie emeritus professor of oceanography, Dr. Eric Mills. In celebration of Eric – and in… Read More Oceanography: A Tradition of Song
Last night I caught up with the latest episode of Cosmos, the rebooted Carl Sagan series now hosted by Neil Degrasse Tyson. Among the many pleasures of the new series is the amount of time given over to the history of science. As academic historians, of course, we inevitably find ways of critiquing the… Read More “Cosmos”, C. C. Patterson, and “What the Fish Knew” about the Deep Sea
In 1971, the department of chemistry at Stanford University produced a short educational film unlike any made before. If you’ve taken a college biology course (since 1971) the odds are good that you watched this film in class – and that you remember it. The video begins with a formal introduction by Nobel Prize winning chemist… Read More Communicating the History of Oceanography: An Experiment
By Misha Warbanski [Former public radio reporter Misha Warbanski studies biology at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.] Pacific sardine (Sardinops sagax) is a small pelagic schooling fish that can live up to 15 years and reach 41cms in length. Its range stretches over 5,000km of coastal surface waters, from Baja California to Southern Alaska,… Read More The rise and fall of Pacific sardine in west coast waters
In the past few weeks several Canadian newspapers have covered the story of the ongoing closure and dismantling of many of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) libraries. The Ministry of Fisheries and Oceans has argued that this “library consolidation” program will save taxpayer money by closing rarely visited facilities and providing access to… Read More On the loss of historical data and the closure of the DFO libraries
Note: The following text first appeared in issue 2 of Deep-Sea Life, an informal publication for INDEEP, the International network for the scientific investigation of deep-sea ecosystems. Get your copy here. Since I first wrote this piece, the Journal of Environmental History has published a response by HMAP on the Marine Forum which can be found here.… Read More How might marine scientists and historians benefit from collaboration?
In the early 1950s it was made illegal to “phone catfish” in Alabama. Game wardens had discovered that catfish populations were being decimated using a novel fishing technique. Locals had discovered that they could repurpose the magneto component of old crank-style telephones to send an electric shock through the local fishing holes. The shock… Read More “Phoning” fish: the Strange World of Electrofishing
“Carpenter was self-confident, competent, unflappable …” – Ben Hellwarth, Sealab: America’s Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 92. The astronaut/aquanaut Scott Carpenter died today at the age of 88. In the 1960s Carpenter was an important member of the Navy’s SEALAB project and one of… Read More Scott Carpenter 1924 – 2013
History of Oceanography 