Historical records show that rivers worldwide once held many more fish and other fauna than they do today. Overharvesting seems to have been one principle cause of steep declines in recent centuries. Although it is hard to estimate ...

Jennifer Jacquet of Shifting Baselines has a new blog, called Guilty Planet. Go and have a look, and welcome the new blog to the blogosphere! Read the comments on this post......

Hopefully you are wondering what the heck is going on. As I mentioned in my last post (days turned to weeks and it is just moments before a whole month has gone by), I am currently a visiting researcher in the Conservation Scienc...

Fraser River haul circa 1900. Leonard Frank via Vancouver Public Library Special Collections Collective memory is a fickle thing. We all know about the decimation of the American Bison...

It is already February! And I cannot believe I let so many January stories get away from me. So I would like a recap a few of shifting baselines repute now: 1) This article, Deep Sea-crets, ran in the San Diego Union Tribune abo...

Image from Shifting Baselines Over at Shifting Baselines, Jennifer Jacquet, a PhD student at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Fisheries Centre (who is working with the renowned Dr. Daniel Pauly), writes about a new study o...

Jennifer Jacquet over at Shifting Baselines is the lead author of a new study, "In Hot Soup: Sharks Captured in Ecuador's Waters" in the journal Environmental Science. Using data from Ecuador from 1976 to 2004, the study shows the c...

After gorging on whitefish and lox at Barney Greengrass (the shifting baselines of Ashkenazic Jewish food is a post for another time…) and loading up with babka and rugelach and rye bread at Zabar’s, we ambled across the park and do...

Loren McClenachan is a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, McClenachan scours old newspapers, travel photos, ships' logs, cannery records, and other records to get a sense of fish populations an...

As our friends at Shifting Baselines noted, the Science Times has a great piece today about Alexandra Morton, a self-trained biologist who went from studying Orca populations to battling salmon farms in British Columbia. She argues ...

By Erik HoffnerHere's a guest post from Jennifer Jacquet of the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia, and blogger-in-chief of the Shifting Baselines Blog. ----- Ask a scientist to give a good example of a we...

Today at Dot Earth, a short but hard-hitting video about shifting baselines that compares the observations from a Pacific ocean voyage 50 years ago with one this year, on the Junk Raft. read more...

The latest video from Randy Olson's Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project is here and highlights the differences between two sailors' experiences: one describing his voyage in 1958 and one (the leader of the junk raft expedition) d...

Just a quick delurking call. This site doesn't get a whole lot of traffic, but myself and Jennifer over at Shifting Baselines were thinking of seeing if there are any readers in Vancouver who want to say hello. More on this later,...

As noted by our friend over at Shifting Baselines, apparently Aussie cats are consuming more seafood than their humans. Excuse me? That's correct. The country's cats consume on average 11 kg more fish and seafood than the average ...

Josh Donlan at Shifting Baselines writes about killing owls in order to save them. Barred owls are outcompeting endangered spotted owls in the Pacific Northwest - what to do? Peter Etnoyer explains why everyone on the entire West Co...

I heard from a couple of different sources that Sizzle's opening went quite well, and we are eagerly awaiting commentary from Shifting Baselines and The Intersection. But in the mean time, please visit A Blog Around the Clock to re...

Three days ago, ScienceBlogs did something it hasn't done before. ScienceBloggers were given screener DVDs of a new movie by one of our own, Randy Olson of Shifting Baselines. The movie, Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy. The idea was...

I wanted to like Sizzle. I really did. I like Randy Olson's contributions here on ScienceBlogs to Shifting Baselines. Randy is a former marine biologist and I have a degree in marine biology. He thinks the climate crisis is one of i...

Given that Randy Olson is not only a director but also the founder of the Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project as well as my co-blogger, you might expect that I have favorable things to say about his latest film--and I do. It was...