Ocean News

Training the front lines: working with fisheries to reduce manta and devil ray bycatch Fisheries bycatch is one of the greatest threats facing manta and devil rays, otherwise known as mobulid rays. To address these threats a team…

Why start a project in Angola? Angola is a country with insufficient marine data, no environmental conservation awareness and lack of policies regarding conservation and fisheries. I have a strong personal bond with this project because I am…

There’s something surreal, uncomfortable but definitely magical about something you know will never happen again. The Shark Lab’s annual juvenile lemon shark survey (more commonly referred to as PIT), as the name suggests, happens every year from the…

I teach a Marine Conservation Biology course at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, and on the first day of class, I talk with my students about the inherent tensions built into the…

“You is a Bahamian, what you doing swimmin’ with sharks?” I think this is the most common question I received from the locals during my time in Bimini. Every time I spoke, the locals would immediately look at…

For a newborn blacktip reef shark (Carcharhinus melanopterus), having a big mama may give you a significant headstart in life. Shark pups born to larger female sharks are fatter and bigger than their counterparts, conferred with fat reserves inherited from their mothers. This energy-rich store sustains shark pups at the…

When I first dipped my toe into the world of manta ray research in 2010, these critters were largely flying under the radar. Divers loved to see them in the water, but manta and devil rays were only…

When I embarked for my first field trip to Guyana, I did not know what to expect. All I knew is that it was a small developing country in South America, that was formerly a British colony, with…

Fish come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, including sharks. The scope and scale of the diversity of morphology found in sharks is a truly impressive mix of form and function. One of the more unusual examples…

Training the front lines: working with fisheries to reduce manta and devil ray bycatch Fisheries bycatch is one of the greatest threats facing manta and devil rays, otherwise known as mobulid rays. To address these threats a team…

Out on the water With the weather settling and the BRUVS tested, we were ready to start fieldwork and excited to see what the BRUVS would reveal. As with all fieldwork, the checklist was ready to ensure that…

>Last login: Sun Aug 24 07:02:05 on ttys000 >Dereks-MacBook-Pro:~ derekkraft$ echo ‘hello welcome to my blog post’ >hello welcome to my blog post When meeting young hopeful marine biologists, I’m usually introduced as “this is Derek, he studies…