The Semmens Lab at Scripps Institution of Oceanography

04/02/2026

Lab friends -- our work on shark and ray conservation is one of the featured campaigns for UCSD's Triton Giving Day. If you love sharks/rays and citizen science, consider supporting! -- REEF Reef Environmental Education Foundation

01/29/2026

It’s that time of year again…

12/25/2025

Merry Christmas and happy holidays from (most of) the Semmens Lab peeps!

11/01/2025

Max “maximum effort” Titcomb strikes again! I’m not saying our lab has the best students in all of academia, I’m just saying no lab has better students in all of academia. Let’s gooooooo!

10/04/2025

10/04/2025

Tabling at the Walter Munk Foundation Day event!

08/08/2025

Let’s goooooo!

When “All the Sharks” premiered on Netflix this summer, Brendan Talwar, a postdoctoral scholar at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, emerged as a local fan favorite.

06/27/2025

Our postdoc, Dr. Brendan Talwar, is a contestant on the new Netflix reality show All The Sharks, debuting July 4! Follow along as he leverages our SHARKY KNOWHOW (tm) to his team’s advantage. Let’s gooooo! Scripps Institution of Oceanography REEF Reef Environmental Education Foundation

A first of its kind competition series where four teams of shark FINatics travel the world trying to find and photograph every shark imaginable in hopes of c...

05/30/2025

Silky shark population structure in the pacific — cool new research out of the lab led by postdoc and shark whisperer Dr. Brendan Talwar. Conservation without information is guesswork. We’re taking the guesswork out of shark conservation. 💪 🦈

For the first time, researchers have mapped the population structure of silky sharks in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, offering new insights that could guide future conservation and management of this vulnerable species.

03/12/2025

Squid 🦑 😍

Theodora Mautz is a second-year PhD student studying marine biology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. Mautz grew up in Portland, Ore. and received her undergraduate degree in neuroscience from Harvard University. At Scripps Oceanography, she is advised by Brice Semmens in the S...

02/25/2025

Grouper Moon Project 2025: Where Did the Groupers Go? ❓

This was an unusual year for the Grouper Moon Project! Our team was recently in Little Cayman conducting research on Nassau Grouper spawning aggregations. They normally spawn around the first winter full moon, when water temperatures drop. This is typically in late January, but when the full moon falls early in the month, this creates a “split moon” effect, where spawning also occurs in early February.

At least, that’s what we thought! This year, instead of the anticipated turnout of thousands of groupers, only a few hundred showed up at the spawning site in February. This raises big questions: Where are they? Did they spawn early? What caused them to change their behavior?

Despite the unexpectedly low numbers of fish, our team collected critical data, including eDNA samples, Nassau Grouper facial recognition images, and acoustic array replacements. Even though the fish were scarce, our work continues to shed light on their behavior and conservation.

What do you think? Where did the groupers go? 🌊

The Grouper Moon Project is a conservation science partnership between REEF and the Cayman Islands Department of Environment , Scripps Institution of Oceanography, The Semmens Lab at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Oregon State University.

Learn more about the project at www.REEF.org/groupermoonproject.

📷: (c) Grouper Moon Project/photo by Stacey Henderson

01/11/2025

We’ve been doing this for over a decade now! Here’s hoping all those young and inspired minds are now closing in on the seats of power. Education = conservation in the long run.