In the UBC Fisheries Centre annual report for 2010-2011, Dr. Rashid Sumaila, Director and Professor of the UBC Fisheries Centre states:

The years 2010 and 2011 have been very exciting for those of us here at the Fisheries Centre. We welcomed two new faculty members, increasing the number of faculty at our Centre to twelve. First, we hired Dr Sang-Seon Yun, who comes to us from Kunsan National University in Korea, and is working with the Aboriginal Fisheries Research Unit in examining chemical communication systems of fishes. We also welcomed National Geographic Fellow Dr William W.L. Cheung, who obtained his PhD at UBC in 2007 and has returned to work on global change biology and fisheries.

The year 2011 also included the launch of a new website and visits from very distinguished guests thus helping the Fisheries Centre to ‘persevere in [its’] scholarly productivity and outreach efforts, with the goal of cultivating local and international fisheries awareness’.  Click on ‘View/Open’ to read the rest of the report in cIRcle at: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/43679.

Did you know?

There are 190+ items in the Fisheries Centre collections in cIRcle. Explore these titles – Modelling the trophic role of marine mammals in tropical areas (2009); Total marine fisheries extractions by country in the Baltic Sea: 1950-present (2010); Trade in seahorses and other syngnathids in countries outside Asia (1998-2001) (2011) and more. Or, browse the Fisheries Centre collections by Author, Title, Subjects and By Dept. Affiliation.

Map of population trends of native and invasive species of jellyfish by LME.

Jellyfish are increasing in the majority of the world’s coastal ecosystems, according to the first global study of jellyfish abundance by University of British Columbia researchers.

In a study published in this month’s edition of the journal Hydrobiologia, UBC scientists examined data for numerous species of jellyfish for 45 of the world’s 66 Large Marine Ecosystems. They found increasing jellyfish populations in 62 per cent of the regions analyzed, including East Asia, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, the Northeast U.S. Shelf, Hawaii, and Antarctica.

“There has been anecdotal evidence that jellyfish were on the rise in recent decades, but there hasn’t been a global study that gathered together all the existing data until now,” says Lucas Brotz, a PhD student with the Sea Around Us Project at UBC and lead author of the study.

To read the rest of this article, click the link provided here: http://www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/2012/04/18/jellyfish-on-the-rise-ubc-study/.

You can read now the full report in cIRcle, UBC’s Digital Repository in the Fisheries Centre Research Reports collection at: https://circle.ubc.ca/handle/2429/37052. And take a moment browse through this growing collection found at: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/41821.

Did you know?

Three members of UBC’s Fisheries Centre won the UBC Library’s Innovative Dissemination of Research Award in 2012 for The Sea Around Us portal. To find out who they were and to learn more about this award for new and innovative ways of communicating and disseminating knowledge, visit the Scholarly Communications @ UBC website at: http://scholcomm.ubc.ca/events-awards/award/.

Above partial excerpt in italics and image are courtesy of the UBC Public Affairs website at The University of British Columbia.