Mass mortalities of bat rays and leopard sharks, and other less common elasmobranchs, are recurring in various areas of San Francisco Bay. Does anyone have thoughts on how to best create or curate a project for one such area that could be easily duplicated or paralleled elsewhere, linked with future similar projects (say, in other lagoons), or possibly eventually combined with a geographically larger project? I would like to avoid pitfalls, keeping this open to new observers, recognizing that precise ID of carcasses is often difficult and lots of people will forget to check “dead” (as I do), but not being flooded with useless data. I will need to fold existing observations into this project. (In case anyone is wondering: Aquatic Park, Berkeley). Thanks for any advice. If you prefer, email f5creeks@gmail.com.
I would ask @damontighe, he created the die-off project for last year’s algal bloom. Traditional projects are probably the best way to do these. You can also put a bunch of them under on umbrella project if you like.
Thanks! I will get in touch with Damon. This die-off should be I think coordinated with the I Nat project created by Eric Symons and Allison Young for the last, wider die off. It appears that some but not all observations from Aquatic Park are going into that project. I messaged Alison (through the project, as Kestrel) asking what to do, but have had no answer. It appears to me that we need some sort of guidance on these. A bunch of different practices are going to confuse both casual users and science – e.g. the existing project refers to one die-off , and the new one pretty obviously has somewhat different causes, although it may turn out the the brain-sucker is critical in both.
I hope that you and/or Alison will continue this conversation at f5creeks@gmail.com. Several of us are working in a number of ways to coordinate new environmental leadership for these lagoons.
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