Dr Vincent Raoult
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sawsharkman.bsky.social
Dr Vincent Raoult
@sawsharkman.bsky.social

Ecologist and fisheries biologist specialising in sharks and rays. Stable isotope expert and general technology aficionado. Senior lecturer in marine ecology, Griffith University (he/him)

Environmental science 71%
Geography 18%
Pinned
2024 saw a global bleaching event, but bleaching doesn't always mean corals die. Using drones, we found the 2024 bleaching event killed over 90% of shallow corals at Lizard Island. 🧪🦑🧵

We have to act now.

@griffith.edu.au JCU MQ @geonadir.bsky.social CSIRO

link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Coral bleaching and mass mortality at Lizard Island revealed by drone imagery - Coral Reefs
Quantitatively assessing mortality post coral bleaching at scale is inherently difficult, yet can be achieved with georeferenced imagery from aerial drones. Here, we assess the coral bleaching mortali...
link.springer.com
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
🦑🐟🧪🌐🌊🎣
Survival and recovery of three shark species in North-East Atlantic recreational fisheries
Abstract. Understanding how sharks respond to catch and release (C&R) recreational fisheries is an important requirement for effective management. Post
academic.oup.com

and obviously insinuates there was nothing special about his life!

Actually a really interesting sci-fi book written in part by Arthur C. Clarke on this topic called 'In the light of other days'. Hypothesizes the most 'viewed' historical event would be Jesus' life.

I remember diving to collect receivers off Coogee and seeing actual toilet paper in the water. Not sure how people swim there. This is what happens when government ignores experts when the outflows were designed...

This is a cool idea and would be a great way to encourage environmental stewardship while helping to fill government coffers, but come on, what are the odds there will be 50 loopholes that all the obvious bad actors will just avoid?

The fact the talk is about *profit* is the obvious issue

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!

Co-designer/pilot of Deep Sea Challenger is also a dead giveaway!

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."

Damn I love that place!

Absolutely, a whole lot of ethical issues with made-up references. Shows a break with the scientific process given science is nothing without previous work

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!
a cartoon character is standing next to a toilet with the words oh that 's al on the bottom
ALT: a cartoon character is standing next to a toilet with the words oh that 's al on the bottom
media.tenor.com

Yup. References and citations are almost mindless now that I'm used to using a manager. Just a tidy up at the very end.

Reposted by Vincent Raoult

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.

It's an interesting justification for not employing more people. They're saying they needed consultants because staff were experiencing burnout. So... hire more staff? $85k pays for a fair bit of salary...
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...
Modernising sea cucumber surveys using remotely operated vehicles and aerial drones - Coral Reefs
There is an urgent need for improved monitoring approaches to rapidly and accurately assess sea cucumber populations at ecologically relevant scales. Timely surveys are critical for informing effective fisheries management and decision-making. Traditional surveys, undertaken via snorkelling, manta tows, or SCUBA, are limited to shallow and accessible areas; however, sea cucumbers inhabit a broad range of depths, including areas beyond safe diving limits and exposed shallow waters inaccessible by boat. To overcome these limitations and increase the rapidity of field collection, we propose the use of remote sensing technologies to survey sea cucumber populations across a range of depths. Here, we evaluated the effectiveness of aerial drones and in-water remote operated vehicles (ROVs) for assessing sea cucumber species and abundances across various depth ranges (< 50 m) on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia. Aerial drone orthomosaics and ROV video footage were compared to more traditional snorkel and SCUBA-based assessments conducted at similar depths. The vast majority of pairwise comparisons between in-water ROV video counts and snorkel or SCUBA assessments found no significant differences in sea cucumber assemblages. Counts from aerial drone-derived orthomosaics, however, were significantly lower, counting approximately half as many sea cucumbers as snorkel counts. This was largely attributed to poor weather during the drone surveys. Remote methods were significantly faster in the field for surveying a given area than traditional methods. Given that towed ROVs can efficiently cover a broader depth range and aerial drones are effective for survey shallow areas under suitable weather conditions, we recommend using a combination of aerial drones and towed ROVs to survey sea cucumbers, with tool selection guided by prevailing weather conditions. This approach offers the advantages of collecting multiple types of data from a single data source, vastly increasing survey efficiency, and providing a historical record for future assessments. The methods have the potential to be used to survey other benthic–associated species.
link.springer.com

I used to feel awkward even when doing it on dead sharks 😅

Reposted by Vincent Raoult

Eastern Australian humpback whale population now well above pre-whaling levels, report finds - ABC News 🦑🧪🌎
These whales were hunted to 150 individuals. Now there's 50,000 of them
Once hunted almost to extinction, the population of humpback whales currently migrating down Australia's east coast has bounced back and is now greater than before whaling.
www.abc.net.au

Reposted by Vincent Raoult

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

This great anecdote speaks to the character quality of both Jane Goodall and Gary Larson.
I knew the first half of this story— that Gary Larsen’s cartoon joking Dr. Goodall was sleeping with chimpanzees caused her Institute to lawyer up only for her to find the comic super amusing upon her return from the field— but I’d never heard Larsen got attacked by a chimpanzee!
I knew the first half of this story— that Gary Larsen’s cartoon joking Dr. Goodall was sleeping with chimpanzees caused her Institute to lawyer up only for her to find the comic super amusing upon her return from the field— but I’d never heard Larsen got attacked by a chimpanzee!

Reposted by Vincent Raoult

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

Oof, a 4m tiger is no joke, he's very lucky that it wasn't worse. Hope he recovers quickly!

Isn't this directly a result of liberals falling apart? The racists just moved from one party to the other once they saw they were on a sinking ship...

Vale Jane. A giant.

Reposted by Vincent Raoult

A true giant of conservation and humanity. What an amazing legacy Jane has created. Vale. www.theguardian.com/science/2025...
Jane Goodall, world-renowned primatologist, dies aged 91
Jane Goodall Institute says ‘tireless advocate’ for natural world died in California during US speaking tour
www.theguardian.com

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!