Fish biologists are using two types of tagging to understand how the physical environment constrains the population dynamics of the red drum, North Carolina's state fish.
The triangular mass in the middle of Back Sound is Middle Marsh, where Joel Fodrie’s lab studies oyster reefs and juvenile fish habitat. Some of the lab’s artificial oyster reefs are viewable as dots just below the far left of Middle Marsh.
The UNC Institute of Marine Sciences is home to the country’s longest continuous shark survey, started by Frank Schwartz in 1971. Researchers have been tagging sharks in the same North Carolina waters, spring, summer and fall, ever since.