Wednesday, April 06, 2005

April 7, 2005

By Ruthie Seeley, PR Intern

PLEASE SEE PHOTO CAPTION BELOW.

Wilmington -- Frederick S. Scharf, an assistant professor in the department of biological sciences at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, shows that working with students goes hand-in-hand with research and education. Scharf’s hard work was acknowledged when he was given the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools’ achievement award for new scholars on Feb. 27.

Winning the award was a surprise for Scharf. “It was just really nice to be recognized at that level by a group of administrators. It showed me what they think of my potential as a younger faculty member,” he said.

Scharf’s research focuses on the role that ecological processes play in structuring aquatic communities and their implications for population dynamics of marine and estuarine fishes. He is particularly interested in identifying factors that affect the survival of early juveniles and extending knowledge of individual processes to understand interactions among size-structured populations.

As important as his research is to him, it is his students that really fuel Scharf.

“I didn’t want a job that was really focused on research and not dealing with students at all,” he said, “UNCW has a unique mix, allowing people to develop independent research programs while maintaining a strong connection at the university level with undergraduates.”

Scharf involves several students at various levels of education in his research. Right now three of his graduate students are directly involved in his research. “In fact, they do more of it than I do,” he said.

Scharf also has undergraduates working in the lab. “The goal for me is to always have students that are smarter than me working in my lab,” he said.

The research Scharf does now fits under a broad umbrella of population dynamics.

He is currently conducting studies of growth and mortality of the red drum fish in the first year. By counting the rings of the red drum’s otolith, or ear bone, the way one counts the rings of a tree, Scharf can determine the age of the fish when it died.

Scharf is also studying Southern Flounder in the New River system, trying to estimate the exploitation rate on that population.

Scharf studies many things as a fisheries biologist, including the number of fishes in a system. “But counting fish is hard,” he said. “As I tell my students in fisheries biology all the time, counting fish is like counting trees, except they’re invisible and they move.”

Scharf likes to have a broad mix of applied and basic research. A lot of the research that Scharf does with the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries is done to help manage fishes’ user groups.

“By understanding the ecology we are better able to predict how the fish populations will respond to different management actions: so if we change the size limit, if we reduce the amount of fish people catch, if we let them catch bigger or smaller fish or if we close the season at a certain time, we can better predict how those changes will impact the population directly,” he said.

Scharf can be reached at 910/962-7796.

PHOTO CAPTION: Associate Professor Frederick Scharf holds a portion of an inner ear bone from red snapper, called the otolith, in a research lab for marine science at Friday Hall. Like counting the rings of a tree, Scharf and his student researchers use the polished bone to determine the age of various species of fish. UNCW/Jamie Moncrief