Trevor A. Branch
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trevorabranch.bsky.social
Trevor A. Branch
@trevorabranch.bsky.social

Professor at Univ of Washington @uwsafs.bsky.social I run models and synthesize data, love R graphics, and do research on the status of marine fisheries, fishing quotas, and blue whales @bluewhalenews.bsky.social

Environmental science 66%
Geography 18%
Pinned
Sorting out the history of whaling pressure on five populations of blue whales in the Indian Ocean and SW Pacific. So many years of work went into this monumental collaboration with many many coauthors. So pleased to see this paper finally published.
doi.org/10.1111/mms....
Published! Our huge effort to obtain catch series for each of five overlapping populations of pygmy blue whales. Big collaboration with 30+ coauthors using spatial patterns of blue whale song (unique to each population) to figure out where each resides 1/n

Bevan Series talk Thursday 12 Feb

Yeah, it's a crazy country this in so many ways.

Frankly I'm totally fine with this. I'm on here for the cool ocean stuff, I can find broader more traumatic news elsewhere.

This is really cool, especially zooming in to see which handles are closest to mine: including Oceana, UBC oceans, Scripps, WHOI.

Yeah... yet somehow still not as horrifying as the "How to deal with a mass shooter in your kindergarten class while volunteering" course that I once went to.

This is amazing! I know (from my mother!) how much work it is to figure out whether something is a new species.

Clearly designed by Pizza Hut

Reposted by Trevor A. Branch

CRAZY diversity of sea stars fr NEW CALEDONIA! I describe 28 NEW SPECIES,3 NEW GENERA! #echinoday #goniasteridae #openaccess. My thanks to colleagues at the @MNHN.fr in Paris! for my many visits in order to complete this research! Will share some of my favorites herein! mapress.com/mt/article/v...
New genera, species and occurrences of Goniasteridae (Valvatida, Asteroidea) from New Caledonia | Megataxa
mapress.com
I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself!

bluesky-map.theo.io

I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail
Bluesky Map
Interactive map of 3.4 million Bluesky users, visualised by their follower pattern.
bluesky-map.theo.io

An observation: U.S. college education is fabulously expensive, and yet there are almost no merit scholarships at most universities, only those based on need. We simply don't value students who studied hard, only those with very rich parents (or poor parents with aid)
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/o...
Opinion | What if the Valedictorians in America’s Schools Were the Cool Kids?
www.nytimes.com
That's a Giant Kelp holdfast or base clinging to rocks on a shallow part of a reef. The mass migration of urchins seeking food is called an "urchin stampede". The holdfast is only a fraction of the mass of a kelp stand so this behavior is very destructive. This happens when their predators are gone.

Mysterious "spot" calls are widespread in the Indian Ocean... New research ties enigmatic pygmy right whales and their little known doublet calls to the spot calls, suggesting they make both calls! Frequency declining rapidly and synchronously for both calls
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Bill Ricker told Tom Quinn that you should wait at least ten years between getting an idea and data, and publishing it, to ensure it ruminates properly. He has more highly cited fisheries contributions than anyone else.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Well done, that is awesome!

When the original authors and those who find errors in their work, pull together for the sake of correcting the record and moving science forward, it's a beautiful thing

Retracted paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I really like this model of science: pointing out errors gently, being open to being corrected, retracting papers known to be wrong.

Reposted by Trevor A. Branch

This is a beautiful case of how real science happens & serious scientists work. Kudos to both set of authors: “This has been a humbling experience, but one that speaks to the self-correcting nature of the scientific endeavor.” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
RETRACTED: Integrative phylogenomics positions sponges at the root of the animal tree
Determining whether sponges or ctenophores root the animal tree has important implications for understanding early animal evolution. Here, we examined support for these competing hypotheses by constru...
www.science.org

If you want to donate to the Edmonds Food Bank, here is a link: edmondsfoodbank.org/donate/
There are also options to volunteer and to bake bread at home for them

My local Edmonds Food Bank serves 1500 households every week, doing their thing to battle poverty and hunger. Just got some big grants to make a permanent home.
myedmondsnews.com/2026/02/city...
City of Edmonds awarded $850K in federal funding for new Edmonds Food Bank - My Edmonds News
The City of Edmonds was awarded $850,000 in federal funding toward the construction of a new Edmonds Food Bank (EFB) to support the growing number of individuals experiencing food insecurity […]
myedmondsnews.com
📢 New paper published in Scientific Data!
We present Penguin Diet Dataset v2, a global database on penguin diets 🐧🌍
A key resource to understand their role in marine ecosystems and support conservation efforts.

Read +: www.nature.com/artic...

ICM-CSIC

This timeline where even the nature photography awards involve phrases like "dragging around the severed head of his rival..."
gizmodo.com/you-wont-bel...
You Won’t Believe What’s Stuck in This Deer’s Antlers—and It’s a 2026 People's Choice Finalist
It's time for the People's Choice Wildlife Photography Award, in which the public can vote on nature's most stunning—and disturbing—shots of the year.
gizmodo.com

Original people kicked out of their island allowed back to their island to fish... ?

Structured procrastination: winner of the Ignoble Prize.

Yeah, can you please stop reminding me every three years to do it!

It's an incredible place. The cathedral of science. Love going there for the wildlife photographer of the year during a 10 hr stopover en route to my home country

What if they didn't ask you if you were OK writing them a letter but just put you down as their reference?

I do have one paleontologist but it's not very suited, thanks for the suggestion though!

Ah, thanks. Yeah for me most of the time I need this it's an old paper that's been scanned.

Reposted by Trevor A. Branch

Visited the Natural History Museum London last week and honestly: collections like this are the backbone of everything we think we know about the ocean. Absolute treasure trove.