Ocean News

For most divers seeing a whale shark is at the top of their ‘must see’ list, a once in a lifetime experience to swim with the biggest fish on our planet.  I will always remember the first time I saw a whale shark; it was just a glimpse of a huge…

An off-duty lifeguard, Sikhanyiso Bangilizwe, 26, was killed by what the Natal Sharks Board says was a Bull shark while body-surfing at Second Beach in Port St Johns on Saturday. Wavescape  have formed a donation fund to raise money for his family and we at the Save Our Seas Shark Centre…

The Save Our Seas Foundation recently sponsored the Wavescapes Surfing Film Festival 2008, which ran for two weeks during December in Cape Town, South Africa, and which was attended by over 6700 people. The SOSF award winning campaign, Rethink the Shark was the theme, which encouraged surfers who are vulnerable…

In the next few weeks, we will deploy a number of tags to bull sharks in Fiji. This includes pop-up satellite archival tags as well as acoustic tags. The satellite tags will be attached externally by approaching the shark underwater using SCUBA and a simple speargun. The tags are programmed…

One of the unfortunate and inevitable implications of mounting filming expeditions is excess baggage fines. A typical set of equipment that I take on location weighs in at around 350kgs. This consists of cameras, housings, support equipment, tripods, dive gear, lighting, monitors; the list goes on. Its not really possible…

One of the great cliché’s of wildlife film-making is the ‘final day’ scenario. We’ve all heard it before; it’s the last day of an expedition, a disheartened film crew hasn’t managed to document the rare / endemic / endangered creature in remote / hostile / inaccessible location its been sent…

The SOSF-sponsored Riddle in a Bottle film won the award for Best Children’s Film at the Wild and Scenic Film Festival in Nevada City, California, at a ceremony on January 10, 2008 in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The Wild and Scenic Film Festival is the largest environmental film…

Wow, what a busy summer holiday period we have had! It began with the Wavescape Film Festival that the Save Our Seas Foundation sponsored, and continued until now with hundreds of kids and adults coming to the Centre, either just to see what we are up to, meet up with…

The Bull Shark Tagging Programme aims at a better understanding of the behaviour, ecology and aspects of population biology of bull sharks in the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean using direct and indirect observation methods as well as genetic techniques. Direct observation of bull sharks provides insight into the secret life of…

Since we first planned to come and shoot in Djibouti, myself and Tom have been focused on finding a new way to film an old subject. Whale sharks are very charismatic animals but rarely exhibit any interesting behaviour other than swimming along with their mouths open. I’ve been making multiple attempts…

Whale sharks receive different levels of protection in different parts of the world. For example in the Philippines, India, and Taiwan, all fishing,  selling, importing and exporting of whale sharks is completley banned. But in other parts of the world they are a lot more vulnerable to exploitation. The whale…

Just a brief note to bring this to a bit of a wider audience…………. A crowd of 4000 recently watched as an autopsy was carried out on a great white shark at the Auckland Museum, with another 30000 people watching online from around the world. The autopsy was carried out as…

It’s been a few days since my last post, so here’s a very quick catch-up. We’re currently on our way back out of Djibouti port after spending one night on land. We went back to re-stock the boat and also we had a small change around in the group that’s…

Quite a frustrating day today. I went out on the water to try and capture some topside footage of the sharks feeding, but conditions were really not ideal. The anabatic winds that come up daily after midday had created a horrible surface chop. The winds are caused by intense thermal…

More fun and games with equipment today. I had quite a successful afternoon safe in the knowledge that I’d fixed the leak that had caused yesterdays headaches. I managed to get some nice ‘in your face’ shots of whale sharks ram feeding (a behaviour where the sharks swim through the…