Tales of a Marine Scientist

Well it took until week four, but for the first time in the study I was pushed outside my comfort zone, and I'm glad it happened. I started out this week full of bluefish and behind on the blogging. I was hoping to be able to come up with one of my new species quickly and have time to cook it up and eat it before the weekend. While I wasn't as lucky as I'd hoped, I'm pretty excited with how the week turned out. Come Monday morning, my week four species were... Summer flounder/Fluke ( Paralichthys dentatus ) Mahi Mahi ( Coryphaena hippurus ) Blue Crab ( Callinectes sapidus ) Butterfish ( Poronotus triacanthus ) As any of you that are actually reading this (is it even anybody?) may be getting a sense of by now, this is where I state my expectations of what would be easy to find this week, what I wouldn't find anywhere, and what I'd likely end up eating. Well my immediate assumption was that, although still a bit early in the year for it, my easy find of

Week three came and went and I can barely remember it already, especially since week four is almost over now as I write this. In my best attempt to not fall behind on posting, and because this past week was relatively uneventful and with a predicted outcome, I'll be keeping this post fairly brief. My species for week three were... Spot ( Leiostomus xanthurus ) Bluefish ( Pomatomus saltatrix ) Mackerel ( Scomber scombrus ) Cunner ( Tautogolabrus adspersus) After a quick look at my species, I again had a feeling of what I would be eating this week, and this time I knew I could make it come true. I catch cunner in our trawl net at work on a regular basis, but I've never seen a single one larger than about four inches, so I'm incredibly surprised to see that as a species on our list. I've since studied up and found out they get much larger than that, and I had absolutely no idea. Spot is a new one for me, but after reading a little bit, it sounded like it may be