Grateful to spend two days on the Klamath watching chinook, liberated by dam removal, return to streams from which they’d been precluded since the Titanic sank. Fish are everywhere, in numbers that stagger the mind & locations that biologists figured would take years to repopulate. Too beautiful.

NEW PAPER: Survival and recovery of three shark species in North-East Atlantic recreational fisheries. academic.oup.com/icesjms/arti... @garzonfrancesco.bsky.social @drmjwitt.bsky.social 🦑🐟🧪🌐🌊🎣

Perhaps a dumb milestone, but still amazed to see me hit the 2000 citations mark in Google Scholar. What a wild ride it's been to get to where I am!

Teaching-intensive trimesters can be tough, but it can be so rewarding to look at student feedback. Favourite this trimester: "Vince is the G.O.A.T."

I really shouldn't have to spend extra hours just checking to see if the references in student assessments are all just AI hallucinations. What a collective waste of time AI is for our society!

Did my honours lit review manually back in 1998…took me a full day working till 2am to finish. Then someone said oh there’s this program called endnote that does that for you. Saved myself hundreds if not thousands of hours since.

Use reference managers people. So many wasted hours doing it manually...

100% stand by this.

Time to move marine surveying into the 21st century. Our work demonstrates that underwater drones produce sea cucumber surveys that are equivalent to snorkellers and SCUBA @griffith.edu.au @geonadir.bsky.social @jcu @mq @gbrf link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Goniatite fossils packed throughout this piece of shale. The shells of these ancient relatives of Squid and Octopus must have littered the sea floor that covered this part of the earths surface over 300 million years ago. County Clare, Ireland

Eastern Australian humpback whale population now well above pre-whaling levels, report finds - ABC News 🦑🧪🌎

85% of Australians Agree: You Can’t “Shark-Proof” the Ocean. New research (from me) - A new nationwide survey (from me) and collected by YouGov has revealed overwhelming agreement among Australians: shark attacks cannot be completely prevented. #sharkattack #shark #nswpol #qldpol

This great anecdote speaks to the character quality of both Jane Goodall and Gary Larson.

Vale Jane. A giant.

One of my 'hobbies' it taking macro pictures of corals at night. Up close these are always beautiful, alien looking things, often with fluorescent colours. This way, you can see individual coral polyps that make up the colonies!

I am not anti-fishing. I am not anti- shark fishing. But hammerheads in particular are species of significant conservation concern, and one of the worst candidates for “catch and release” of any known fish species. And it’d be nice if media coverage *of hammerhead fishing* mentioned that

Truly incredible that we can make a wetsuit that makes you less vulnerable to getting stabbed before we make one that doesn’t give me a mega-wedgie

Worried about shark bite? We can now produce scientifically tested shark proof wetsuits that reduce the likelihood of traumatic injuries www.publish.csiro.au/WR/WR25019?f...

For those of view wondering, we had evidence this happened for decades before it was ever witnessed. This footage is amazing!

When you're marking student assignments that cite your fish science nerd mates RIP Rob Redford

The fascinating about 99% of living organisms is they're just land for another organism to live on. In this case, most sea cucumbers have little scale worms that scurry across them and call the sea cucumber home.

Calling all isotope ecologists. IsoEcol 2026 will be held between October 12-17th, 2026 at the University of Hong Kong See www.isoecol.com/2026/ for more

Some awesome news for your Monday. Critically endangered grey nurse sharks are increasing in number by about 5% a year, the first time the conservation efforts have seemed to work for this species! Still just 1500 breeding adults across eastern Australia... www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09...

Pretty amazing that I can map over 500,000 m2 of reef at 0.5cm resolution in under two hours, and then spit out a digital surface model a day later. Incredible how far drone tech has come in the last decade!

I love being able to hang out with rare and threatened species at Heron Island like this Whitespotted Guitarfish. There are a few that hang around the channel at any one time, and they typically just rest on the sand. Despite their appearances, this is not a shark but a ray!

Drone observations reveal white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) dorsal fins are highly flexible and possible investigatory structures onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... 🧪🌎🦑🦈🐠

So grateful to be able to introduce @griffith.edu.au students to one of my favourite places and some rare and fascinating species of Heron Island.

Back in paradise to teach @griffith.edu.au 3rd year marine science capstone. What a place to teach and learn marine science!

Bluesky now platform of choice for science community - Ars Technica | Media coverage of our new paper

"Sponges are the only animals that if broken down to the level of their cells, can reassemble themselves. A sponge is passed through a sieve to break apart its cells. The cells recognize each other and reform into small new sponges." #shapeoflife #spongeThursday youtu.be/ORV3qV8GFF4?...

Academia may not give you job security, flexibility, or wealth, but it will let you unexpectedly connect to eduroam in foreign cities

"Australia has the second-lowest public expenditure on tertiary education institutions in the OECD…This has resulted in an endless chase for dollars (international students & “the next big thing”) rather than thinking about what an educated Australia should look like” www.smh.com.au/national/nsw...

I've been telling most every academic to drop Twitter and move to Bluesky for over a year. Now there's evidence as to why they should do this.

I shared this obviously-full-of-ridiculously-wrong-nonsense diagram And it’s striking how many AI fan techbros say that the problem is me not understanding the power of this tool No, the problem is that it generates response that are full of ridiculously wrong nonsense and people believe it.

"AI will change medicine", meanwhile, in the real world AI is making doctors worse at basic doctor things

Pretty amazing the surfer was completely unscathed given the good chunk taken out of the board! A white shark is most likely responsible given one was seen via drone just moments later at the same beach

I'll admit, I was skeptical when they said Gemini was just like a bunch of PhDs. But I gotta admit they nailed it.

Up next at #ASFB2025… 🎤 Our first plenary speaker: Jessice Melbourne-Thomas 👇Check out all our invited speakers www.asfbconference.org.au/invited-spea... 👇Keep up with the whole program here www.asfbconference.org.au/program1 Couldn’t make it this year? Follow the action on our social media.

Hi, anyone who wants to fire my colleagues in the humanities can go directly to hell. Please no one assume “scientists” are signing on for this just because one dumbass did. The humanities are essential. We absolutely can’t do without them as educational institutions or as a society.

Here is yet another example of marine protected areas benefiting fisheries news.mongabay.com/2025/08/enco...

So, so true.

Nature giving some good material for your next horror flick as per usual. Barnacles (normally filter-feeding crustaceans) grow INSIDE deep water sharks. Some pretty hardcore piercings...

Feeling lucky to have seen Ningaloo in its prime. Devastated that my children will never have that chance.

#NingalooReef "annual surveys of the northern section of the reef in May found up to 90 per cent of coral had been bleached down to 20 metres depth", the "lowest cover of live coral" observed since 2007 "up to 50 per cent of the examined coral was dead in May" but "more would be dead now"

A result that is not surprising to any of us who have worked on the reef in the past year. The Great Barrier Reef is officially in a worse state than it has ever been. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Every single time I hear people challenge commercial fisheries, my response is 'recreational fisheries are often worse, except there's almost no management or policing of it'

This but any kind of science, fieldwork, paper, presentation...