iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

Thanks to all who turned out to hear me talk about sharks and culture!

Me talking in front of a lecture hall with a black and white image of a basking shark protected onto the screen. I’m wearing a plaid flannel and looking very northwesty.

Reposted by Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊

Ben Goldfarb @bengoldfarb.bsky.social · 19/07/2025

“Under colonization, the total mass of pink salmon and chum salmon dropped by 40 percent. Forage fish — such as herring, eulachon, surf smelt, and anchovy — declined by 99 percent, and sturgeon were nearly wiped out.” e360.yale.edu/digest/pacif...

e360.yale.edu

Research Details Devastating Toll of Colonization on Pacific Northwest Wildlife

35116

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 22/06/2025

More on Taylor’s sea hares from Nautilus this April! Here in Puget Sound we’ve seen more, and larger individuals, this year than in my lifetime. nautil.us/sea-slug-cli...

nautil.us

Sea Slug, Climate Change Warrior

A species of sea hare has an impressive tolerance for heat and a penchant for gene mixing

020

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 22/06/2025

Some quiet underwater moments from this week of good viz: perennial fave ratfish, Taylor’s sea hares so massive they weigh down their blades of eelgrass, and so many jellies that the entire surface layer felt like a big soft invisible ball pit.

260

Reposted by Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊

Roxane Gay @roxanegay.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

Yes. I am right. I am seeing how Chat GPT is ruining students critical thinking and writing skills in real time. It is not the future. It is a tool designed to render the populace helpless, to make people doubt their innate intelligence, and to foster overreliance on technology.

11977762329

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

I finished The Buffalo Hunter Hunter a few weeks ago— it’s absolutely extraordinary.

030

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

Seattle showing up as usual! 70,000 on this gorgeous PNW day. 🌲🌊✊ (The monorail even gave us a beepbeep and everyone lost their minds 😹💙) #nokings #noICE

My sign, which reads “No one is illegal on stolen land,” in front of the Space Needle.

2413

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

Hey Michelle, I’m current working on the history of basking sharks in the Pacific, but most of my research heretofore has been marine monsters in the British Isles, so if I can’t help I should be able to point you in the direction of someone who can!

030

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

That was the exact nudi portfolio I had under Fauntleroy ferry dock this week! The Cockerell’s were an especially fun surprise— I’d only seen them subtidal heretofore! Great pics!

010

Reposted by Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊

NiCHE Canada @nichecanada.bsky.social · 21/02/2025

#BlackHistoryMonth Reading "What does it mean to paint slavery iconography onto a pair of walrus tusks, and what is at stake in considering the Arctic as a landscape connected to Black enslavement?" - Bart Pushaw niche-canada.org/2022/09/01/f... #envhist #arthistory #arctic

niche-canada.org

Fugitive Ivories, or, Enslavement and the Walrus

What is at stake in considering the Arctic as a landscape connected to Black enslavement?

1257

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

Along the lines of how one sour patch kid would kill a pilgrim… (Epigraph to Ch. 44: “I would not creep along the coast, but steer / Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.”)

010

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

What’s the best fish in the Salish Sea, and why is it the Pacific Spiny Lumpsucker (Eumicrotremus orbis)?

1201

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

Today I'm tuned into this symposium on the North Pacific Right Whale (one of the world's rarest and most endangered whales) facilitated by the wonderful folks at @nprightwhale.bsky.social! www.northpacificrightwhale.org/symposium 🐋

northpacificrightwhale.org

Symposium | Save the NPRW

031

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 11/01/2025

Spectacular postdoc opportunity at WHOI, in science OR policy, generally #coastal or specifically #Arctic!

020

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

It’s the first day of Winter Quarter and I’ve got the best classroom in town! BIOL110 is my interdisciplinary Salish Sea marine bio course, anchored in ecology but with an arts/hum kaleidoscope for a lens. And happy to be at Highline supporting an 80% BIPOC and 60% first-generation student body!

Tall blonde female teaching in front of classroom wearing a plaid flannel shirt because she thinks it strikes the right tone between scholarly and outdoorsy.

Classroom window which looks out onto Puget Sound. It’s a calm gray misty day.

190

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

(And a bonus #6 for our Giant Pacific Octos here in the Salish Sea that are pretty common if you know how/where to look but never ever get old! 🐙)

040

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

1. Dolphins swirling around us in the Red Sea 2. Hairy frogfish doing “the yawn” in Indo (then a 💩) 🤦‍♀️ 3. Humpback mum and calf in the ice in Greenland 4. Polar bear mum grabbing a seal for her cubs in Nunavut 5. Basking sharks, a leatherback, and my first right whale from the deck of SSV Cramer!

170

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

And for a couple of my favorite cephalopod poems, check out Sarah Lindsay’s Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower which includes these lines in “The Common Octopus”: “She can be a tassel, she can be a web.” (5/5)

030

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

Resisting both anthropomorphism and anthropectomy, I’ll just say that it was a privilege to witness her complete her life cycle without human interference. (4/5)

130

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

I shot this clip of her a few months ago to show students that within a literal stone’s throw from our urban environments here in Seattle/the Northwest exists an entire sphere of existence that many folks don’t spend much time thinking about, but whose future is inextricable from our own. (3/5)

110

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

While I was in Honduras this week they finally hatched; now her work is complete. She’s been dying since she laid her eggs, has used her last reserves of energy to care for them, now her body is already gone from the den and reabsorbed into the cycle of birth/life/death in her (our) ecosystem. (2/5)

110

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

Since July, we’ve been visiting this enormous GPO (Giant Pacific #Octopus, Enteroctopus dofleini) caring for her eggs in her den… (1/5)

150

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 28/12/2024

I need it! (One section of my Winter Marine Bio Canvas page is CFtBL themed 😹)

020

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 28/12/2024

Happy Hanukkah! We’ve lit our whale menorah in Virginia, Bahrain, Florida, and now Seattle! 🐳🕎

Bright blue, generically whale-shaped menorah with three candles lit.

2767

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

This photo is from three weeks before her death. I’ll miss her forever. We can —we must— honor her life by continuing her work toward decolonization. ᖁᔭᓐᓇᒦᒃ. (3/3)

Kelly B. hugs Kelly F. while the latter takes a photo in the mirror of a women’s bathroom somewhere in Norway.

031

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

If you’re not familiar with her work, start with “Looking for a Seal”— one of my favorite songs to teach alongside my Arctic Ocean lit units (even though now I cry when I teach it). youtu.be/jXYetVShLiA?... (2/3)

youtu.be

Looking for a Seal (feat. Paul Mucpa)

YouTube video by Kelly Fraser - Topic

131

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

ᐅᖓᒋᕙᒋᑦ 💙 Christmas Eve marked five years since we lost Kelly Amaujaq Fraser. She was a fiercely caring and loyal friend, a brilliant artist, teacher, activist and musician who reached far beyond the Arctic. (1/3)

Us in Tromsø November 2019: A blond woman (me) and a woman with black hair (Kelly Fraser) looking at the camera with big smiles.

271

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 26/12/2024

As my fam and I said to each other before we made our latkes today… To minimum knuckle grating! 🕎 Happy Hanukkah!

020

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 24/12/2024

My all-time favorite, by Tim Andraka. Season’s eatings, and toothy kisses under the abyss-tletoe from me and mine to you and yours!

A cookie cutter shark reimagined for Christmas with its mouth in three different festive shapes: candy cane, tree, and gingerbread man! It’s shown biting a concerned-looking great white.

041

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

Yes! I came here to say Geisel (my undergrad library). The views from the 8th floor were incredible, but nobody talks about my favorite part: the underground floor with plants that was lit by a moat of daylight. Cool during the summer and cozy during May gray and June gloom. Brutally awesome💙

020

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

Wow I can’t wait to hear more about this project!!

000

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

Arctic and Antarctic folks! I’m in this one along with a bunch of way ❄️cooler❄️ (sorry) people.

031

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Today’s whimsical holiday sea-scene: Grunt Sculpin (Rhamphocottus richardsonii) looking skyward in front of Strawberry Anemones (Actinia fragacea). These colors look like they belong in the tropics, but they’re right here in the Salish Sea in 51F water! #fishmas #marinelife

1203

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

As I'm now midway through my research fellowship on the NE Pacific population of C. maximus, I'm increasingly preoccupied by what the "integrated" part of those conservation strategies above entails and how we get there. (Rather, *if* we get there before it's too late.) /5

000

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

"Integrated conservation strategies are crucial for long-term shark survival." "Ecological corridors should balance protection and human impacts." 4/

100

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

"The results indicate that chlorophyll, sea surface temperature, silicate and mixed layer depth are the primary factors determining habitat suitability for basking sharks." 3/

100

Kelly P Bushnell, PhD 🌊 @drkelpy.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

"Under high-emission scenarios (Shared Socioeconomic Pathway, SSP5–8.5), our model predicts a shift toward the higher latitudes of the northern hemisphere in basking shark habitats, including temperate and sub-Arctic waters." 2/

100