Ocean News

An interesting article from National Geographic highlights a surprising yet substantial source of demand for shark products: the manufacture of vaccines, in particular those used against swine flu. Shark livers have high concentrations of an organic compound called squalene, which happens to be an effective immunologic adjuvant. Adjuvants stimulate the…

Apologies for the notably infrequent posts over the festive period. Rest assured news updates should now return to something approaching regularity, but here’s a brief catch up of stories from the past week or so. The troubled Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in Denmark concluded on December 18th, yielding what has…

When most people think of mangroves, they unfortunately envisage smelly malaria infested swamps full of dangerous and deadly beasts. The mangrove’s bad reputation, which dates back to the age of Victorian explorers is tragic because these tidal forests, which effortlessly straddle the realm between land and sea are one of…

More so than you might think. Amongst marine researchers, the critically endangered hawksbill turtle is notoriously difficult to study in its natural habitat. Like tortoises, turtles are often viewed as slow, lumbering reptiles, but any scuba diver fortunate enough to see one in the wild will appreciate that encounters tend to…

Today the ongoing research into basking sharks off the coast of Scotland by SOSF scientists Dr Mauvis Gore and Dr Rupert Ormond was featured on BBC One programme Animal 24:7. Their work aims to build a comprehensive photographic database of UK observed basking sharks, while simultaneously using satellite tracking to…

The Save Our Seas Foundation (SOSF) White Shark Research Team together with the Shark Spotters tracked a 3-metre great white shark for 24 hours straight. This was the first successful overnight continuous track of a white shark in False Bay. Following reports from the Shark Spotters of shark sightings close…

What a beautiful Cape Town evening for the surf film at Clifton 4th Beach last night, writes Wavescape technical dude Paul van Jaarsveld, who lives in J-Bay, and gives us a fresh perspective on a magical evening. Cape Town was windy last night with a strong SSE tearing up the deep…

Held at the trendy Café Depasco in Cape Town, the Save Our Seas Foundation Wavescapes Surf Art exhibition auction was a party to be remembered. The event, which also served as the launch of the Wavescapes Surf Film Festival, aimed to raise R 100,000 for ocean charities such as the…

With the recent controversy surrounding the Copenhagen Climate Summit top of mind, Capetonian surfer, activist and creative director Conn Bertish has come up with an innovative idea to highlight the plight of our oceans. As part of the Wavescapes Surf Art Exhibition, Bertish has shaped a life-size surfboard sculpted entirely from…

The future of our Oceans, the life force of our planet, is under serious threat. A new era in conservation has started. A significant shift from awareness to action has begun. Time is not on our side, but the will to make a difference is. On Wednesday, 2 December 2009,…

Have you ever wondered why hammerheads have their eyes out on organ stops? So have countless scientists since the first hammerhead species was described over 200 years ago, but now the mystery of their bizarrely shaped head is starting to be unravelled. The hammer-shaped head, or ‘cephalofoil’, must have posed…

Having previously announced the discovery of a second manta ray species, SOSF funded Dr Andrea Marshall has now published the specifics of the differences between the two in leading taxonomic journal Zootaxa. Prior to Andrea’s analysis of their morphological characteristics manta rays throughout the world’s oceans had been accepted as…

SOSF funded Professor Mahmood Shivji of the Guy Harvey Research Institute and Save Our Seas Shark Centre at Nova Southeastern University has been tracking the international trade in shark fins using methods that wouldn’t look out of place in an episode of Crime Scene Investigation. By sequencing mitochondrial DNA of…

If you had ordered tuna, would you be able to tell if it wasn’t?

It was recently revealed via genetic analyses that the already critically endangered common skate (Dipturus batis) in Europe is in fact two different species: the flapper and blue skate (D. intermedia and D. flossada). Consequently catches of the smaller, more resilient blue skate have in fact been masking the more rapid…