Ocean News

The Save Our Seas Foundation is proud to support research and conservation in different ways. While it funds many individual projects that start and finish over the years, several key relationships with partner organisations have been fostered to continue into the future. Research and education are the focus of the…

A new study published in Marine Policy this month has shown that less than a quarter of the commercial elasmobranchs (species of sharks, rays and skates) are adequately accounted for in fisheries data from the Mediterranean and Black Seas. The poor quality of data reported in fisheries is a lost…

Picture this scene: you’re a young college student from the Midwest having grown up fishing around tiny lakes and ponds your whole childhood. With a slight interest in ocean science, and curiousness as to what a living, marine…

Sea anemones can ingest plastic microfibres in seawater, and it seems that stressed, bleached sea anemones are more at risk when it comes to consuming and retaining these plastics in their bodies. These are the key findings from a new study published in the journal Environmental Pollution. The response of…

While the Save our Seas Foundation has focused on projects that prioritise the conservation of highly threatened groups such as the shark-like rays, and urgent focal themes of research such as fisheries, this year has also seen 17 projects supported across a range of scientific questions and key challenges. Included…

Although 2018 was a slow year on the shark scene, Shark Spotters have stayed at the top of their game watching over Cape Town’s busiest beaches. The organisation continues to use innovation as well as ongoing training to…

Sharks, rays, skates and chimaeras form an important part of catches in fisheries around the world. When they’re monitored, fisheries can give researchers an important window into what’s happening with the status of many species and are a reserve of really valuable information. However, more often than not, we know…

Shark-like rays are some of the most threatened species in our oceans, but surprisingly little is known about most of them. In many cases, critical baseline data is needed to know where we might still find these species, how their populations are faring and understand how they live out their…

FLAWS: Shark Bites and Emotional Public Policymaking was published in April by Palgrave Macmillan and launched at SEA LIFE Sydney Aquarium. The book is written by Dr. Christopher Pepin-Neff, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney, and explores different policy responses to shark bite incidents around the world. We…

Stefany Rojas, Project Leader for the Peru Mobulid Project, tells us about her involvement in the recent Manta Festival held in Los Organos in Peru – a special event to celebrate the oceanic manta rays that visit their…

Since 2016, when we started searching for live sawfishes in Mexico we have switched our main sampling efforts from old-fashioned fishing gear surveys assisted with flying drones, to our current chief tool: eDNA (environmental DNA). So far, we…

We arrived in Goare, a small village situated on the western coastline of the Kikori River Delta, after a mammoth month of travelling the Turama and Bamu Rivers. I was on a joint research trip with Mathew Young…