Ocean News

This year we are celebrating the first-ever World Manta Day – a full day to raise awareness for and show appreciation of these gloriously mysterious creatures. Save Our Seas Foundation couldn’t be more excited to join our partners at Manta Trust in the celebration of our flappy friends! ‘Manta‘ means…

Conservation research is failing sawfishes if its outcomes are never communicated to those with the power to take action to protect sawfishes.   A scientific paper by Alifa Haque, Aparna Riti Biswas, and myself has been published today (Publish, then perish? Five years on sawfish are still at risk in…

How is COVID-19 affecting manta and devil ray projects around the world? Part 1.   The World has changed dramatically over the last few months as we have found ourselves unexpectedly in the middle of a global pandemic,…

What’s up in this episode of The Whole Tooth? Leading on from episode 1; it seems sharks have piqued your curiosity and there’s still a lot to be learned about them. Isla takes your questions to the experts,…

So it beings once again. We have arrived back on Fin Island, our most remote whale research station that BC Whales operates in partnership with the Gitga’at First Nation of Hartley Bay and WWF-Canada along the north coast…

Waking up to beautiful sunshine, blue skies and turquoise oceans is what dreams are made of, when working as part of the Maldivian Manta Ray Project these dreams become reality. My workdays consist of searching for mantas, collecting…

Across Europe, 2019 brought record summer temperatures, followed by dramatic scenes of bush fires across Australia at the close of the year and into early 2020. According to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, the global land and ocean surface temperature in January 2020 was the highest in the 141-year…

Moodhu Madharusa “Ocean School” ran for the first time in Malé Atoll’s Dhiffushi school during 2019. Marine Education Programs (MEPs) have been running since 2015 with different local schools around the Maldives with a mission to educate local…

Have you ever found a mermaid’s purse on the beach? These little capsules can be cast upon the beach where they blend in well with strands of seaweed, so you need to be looking carefully to find one! Perhaps, in the past, some people believed that they were indeed purses…

A Dubious Detection As part of an ongoing collaborative research project, scientists have been tracking the movements of smalltooth sawfish using passive acoustic telemetry. As the name may suggest, instead of actively following a sawfish around, data are…

Oceanics across oceans from the Maldives to Mexico The study into the population of oceanic manta rays in the Maldives I am working on is still somewhat in its infancy, so when I was offered the opportunity to…

Whale sharks are the largest member of the shark family and the largest fish in the world. Weighing up to 20 tonnes, they can grow up to 14 m long – that’s as long as a school bus! However, these pelagic animals do not evoke the same fearful reaction in…