Ocean News

I am coming to the end of another fantastic trip to the Maldives. As Chairman of the Manta Trust’s Board of Trustees, I try to use some of my annual holiday to make the trip to Baa Atoll…

Chimaeras are fishes closely related to sharks, skates, and rays. You may never hear about them, because they commonly live in deep waters up to 3000 meters, and it’s challenging to study them in their natural habitat. Chimaeras…

Bimini, Bahamas is a well-known shark hotspot. The research conducted by the Bimini Sharklab has traditionally been focused on using the lemon shark as a model species to understand important aspects of life-history, movement, behaviour, and personality in…

Summer is nearly here in the Southern hemisphere, and for those of us living on the coast, that means only one thing… it’s beach time! Whatever your activity of choice, be it surfing, swimming, paddling or diving, there…

Each year on 17 October, we celebrate the curious group of rays called sawfishes. With their serrated, blade-like snouts that we call their “rostrum”, and their tall dorsal fins and low-slung bodies suited to cruising the seafloor, these extraordinary fishes make our seas the otherworldly place at which we all…

The Myeik Archipelago, located in the southern tip of Myanmar, is comprised of hundreds of islands and contains some of the best-preserved mangrove forest that we had seen in our journey through parts of South East Asia searching…

Many of the ways in which activists and non-profit organizations communicate about the threats to our planet are built around fear, sadness, or anger. This tendency is understandable, as our actions have led to planetary changes in climate,…

Back at the end of May, my department held our annual student symposium where I presented some very preliminary insights from this project. In previous blogs, I spoke about some mark-recapture basics, and the advantage the computer vision…

Nobody had seriously assessed shark and ray diversity in Papua New Guinea since the 1970s. Even back then, field trips were often centred around major towns and ports or were short in duration. However, this was for good…

It is my ambition to help reduce the target and bycatch of mobulid rays, as well as other threatened elasmobranch species, and motivate young Indonesian scientists to conserve their tremendous biodiversity. In an ideal world, we would switch…

The poet John Wells’ said ‘No man is an island’, and this could not be more true for the conservation world, where partnerships are vital for success, and in particular, long-term, sustainable conservation efforts rely on multi-stakeholder cooperation…

I was recently at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) conference of parties in Geneva as a member of the IUCN delegation. These meetings happen once every three years, and are where the parties (=…