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fishteph.bsky.social
Fish ecologist at UC Berkeley. Working towards better futures for rivers, fish, and their people. Queer. Web: https://nature.berkeley.edu/carlsonlab/about/
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Prolific Poster

Elon Musk and Donald Trump have killed 300,000 people with USAID cuts. A must read in NYT www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/o...

“To recognize rivers as life-giving forces & as rights-bearing presences is a profound & hopeful position. It offers philosophical grounds for resistance to the present administration’s…drive to gut environmental regulation & reduce the natural world to dollar value” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/o...

“It’s proven difficult to track the drift of eggs, baby fish, and sometimes adults over long distances...” The same is true in freshwater and greatly limits our understanding of why fish populations fluctuate as they do

The undersea current quickly changed from horizontal to vertical. The whales rose to the surface all at once. What in the world happened at the surface of the sea...? #Illustration #CommentPls #RTpls

This threat represents an immeasurable loss to community-driven research and to the training pipeline for the next generation of collaborative conservation leaders

Reminder that comments on the Endangered Species Act's recission of the "harm" definition are due TODAY! esa.org/esablog/2025...

NOAA senior scientists in Seattle depart amid Trump cuts www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

At my final exam today, a student told me that she is the third (!) sister in her family to take my Fish Ecology class! Her sisters recommended it 😭

this is a letter to the editor from a high school track runner who came in second to a trans girl in a race. her state house rep in maine started talking about it. so she wrote this: www.pressherald.com/2025/05/14/r...

Denying an actual genocide while believing a fake one - both with US tax dollars.

Incredible love story

Science isn’t like tap water, you can’t just turn it on and off. It’s like an oyster: it builds over time until it eventually creates pearls. This sort of senseless destruction is going to haunt us for a long time.

Super neat study showing stream-swapping by coho salmon! Expands our view of juvenile rearing habitat to include multiple drainages esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

NYT: One estimate finds that DOGE’s “firings, re-hirings, lost productivity and paid leave of thousands of workers” will actually COST taxpayers “upward of $135 billion this fiscal year.” @nytimes.com 🤡 www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/u...

Coast Guard rescue missions failing after running into unexpected currents. Surprise atmospheric river storms. Seafood contaminated by unseen algal blooms. CA scientists fear these scenarios, and more, are possible under the Trump admin’s recommendation to reduce NOAA’s budget by $1.7B. Gift link:

When the habitats that species rely on are destroyed, the species will disappear. Someday, and I hope not too late, we’ll understand that when we lose a species, we lose so much more. Their fate is intertwined with our own. www.hcn.org/articles/tru...

To new Bluesky peeps: I'm currently working on another book, on the organisms nearest my heart. It's fundamentally about fish as engineers—both of ecosystems & human affairs—and how we revitalize their roles in our waterscapes & lives. If this aligns with your interests & expertise, cast me a line!

Wrecked by another note from a colleague at NOAA-Fisheries announcing their premature retirement (they are coming daily now). I weep for my colleagues and friends, for the fish they dedicated their lives to, and for the people who will be most impacted by these actions

“It was a reminder of the importance of conserving diversity within populations to give these [salmon] populations options in the face of variable and extreme conditions,” Stephanie Carlson @fishteph.bsky.social @natureatcal.bsky.social told @sfgate.com

The agency forecasts weather, manages fisheries, and researches the world's oceans, atmosphere, and climate. The proposed budget cuts would slash the climate work entirely.

🧪 are you a trans entomologist? arachnologist? parasitologist? malacologist? carcinologist? diplopodologist? vermeologist? 🐛🐜🪱🦗🕷️🦀 if you a trans scientist studying any kind of bug or crawling/slithering invertebrate that is existentially bug-like, I would love to interview you for a project!

"eliminate all funding for [NOAA] climate, weather, and ocean laboratories and cooperative institutes" "ending the operations of a huge host of earth science satellites" "closure of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center"

A new UC Berkeley study reveals how one dry winter decimated salmon and trout populations across Northern California — and how they made a comeback. 📰: www.sfgate.com/local/articl...

A study of the 2012–2016 California drought chronicles how low river flows during the breeding season caused Chinook salmon to shift downriver and caused steelhead and coho salmon to fail to breed entirely in some tributaries and watersheds. In PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

if you were laid off from NWS or NOAA today and you'd like to talk about your experience with a reporter, please email me: simbler at defector dot com. 🧪

Delighted to share our new paper in Ecology Letters: Variation in Salmon Migration Phenology Bolsters Population Dynamics but is Threatened by Drought. With @fishteph.bsky.social, Ted Grantham, and Mariska Obedzinski. #rivers #fishes #salmon 🧪🐟 🧵(1/8) doi.org/10.1111/ele....

A 12-year-long study led by @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social and @caseagrant.bsky.social researchers finds that the alternative life histories of coho salmon have made their populations more stable. Read more at the Stone Center for Environmental Stewardship site. nature.berkeley.edu/stewardship/...

when the AI red-flags bioDIVERSITY

What a good way to ring in the new year! Our new paper is (finally) out in Ecology Letters! doi.org/10.1111/ele.... We looked at climate driven phenological patterns across food webs in the San Francisco, Chesapeake, and Massachusetts Bay estuaries.

Re-upping this post. Maybe you or a creative student of yours has a talk/poster that would work in this session. Abstracts are due 28 January.

Took advantage of a break in the rain for a walk at #SibleyVolcanicRegionalPreserve. Beautiful day with big blue sky, Ghibli clouds, and piercing cries from the red-tailed hawks soaring above

defector.com/blob-headed-... @sabs.bsky.social ‘s description of this wonderfully weird blob-headed armored catfish is everything. More of this on the TL please. Also, look at the soft swollen snout on this character!

Klamath Chinook salmon returned home! More than 6,000 fish passed the former Iron Gate Dam site during the second half of October. caltrout.org/news/the-num...

Back to Lagunitas today for more coho spotting! This video shows a female digging her nest followed by a male encouraging her with a quiver

Incredible few days at the river watching coho salmon spawn. Amazingly good for my heart and head

Very heartening to see so many coho salmon spawning here on the central California coast. 🐟🧪🌎

This is truly one of my favorite episodes of Water Talk to date. There’s so much here on the linkages between disability and the environment, new and evocative ways of thinking about groundwater, and environmental justice efforts in the desert. There’s no way to do it justice without a full listen!

Post a picture of yourself from a different era (peak confidence in fourth grade)

Couldn’t help but weep when I heard Sade’s new song, “Young Lion” - a beautiful and tender apology & love letter to her trans son, Izaak. What an incredible thing to be seen “With such a heavy burden You had to carry all on your own Forgive me, son I should've known” youtu.be/IFMmnMjFiPk

new here! I’m a queer ecologist dedicated to rivers, fish & connected peoples. working to do good work & in a good way. Interests: ecologically & culturally important fishes, habitat mosaics, life histories, interconnections & interconnectedness, justice, music, cooking, gardening & being outside