Ocean News

On Saturday November 8th I had the privilege to talk at the Ocean Optics Shark Day, held at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London. The day brought together people with a common interest in sharks to discuss both their passion for the humbling experience of encountering these leviathans first hand, but…

Among the projects presented at this year’s EEA meeting are a few that are funded by the Save Our Seas Foundation. For example, the Bull Shark Tagging Programme will be presented with a poster and a talk will focus on shark feeding in Fiji. To find out more about the programme,…

The Ocean Optics Shark Day, is being held at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich on Saturday November 8th. The day aims to celebrate and explore the world of sharks and those who work with and photograph them. Among the prestigious speakers are Amos Nachoum, Chris Walter and Michael Aw, …

There is a hoax email currently making its rounds. It shows a picture of a white shark swimming near Fish Hoek beach and says it was taken on the Saturday 25 October 2008. This photograph was actually taken on 28 September 2006. On that day the white shark research team…

The wind has been causing us some issues for the last couple of weeks – 20 knot winds are not ideal conditions in which to run longline surveys. As such things have been a little slow following the completion of the baited video survey component of this quarter. We have…

An interesting article appeared in the British newspaper The Guardian today, highlighting recent research into the possible effects of climate change on the ocean’s salinity levels. I guess at a very basic level I had always assumed that the hotter the climate, the greater the rate of evaporation, and hence the…

2008 is proving to be a very trying season…. This year the South East trade winds which generally blow constantly from May to October decided to take a two week break in August…. The end result of which was that the seas around Seychelles have remained clear and blue with very little plankton…

This week we once again had the enormous job of retrieving and deploying acoustic receivers used to monitor white shark spatial patterns throughout False Bay for maintenance and to download the season’s data. We had to travel to the four corners of False Bay and on the way we had the…

The Save Our Seas Foundation (SOSF) has won the most prestigious award in natural history filmmaking, the Panda Award, for its campaign film Rethink the Shark. The Rethink the Shark commercial was originally conceptualized by Saatchi & Saatchi, Cape Town, as part of a campaign designed for theSOSF M-Sea Programme,…

A while ago, Robin Nagy sent me an excellent set of underwater photographs shot at Chumphon Pinnacle in the Gulf of Thailand. Chumphon Pinnacle is a popular dive location offering excellent diving conditions that attract thousands of diver each year. Shark sightings at the site have consistently been reported as…

The baited video component of the second quarter of sampling is drawing to a close; indeed we shall be running the first longline survey this afternoon.  However one of our sample sites had a surprise in store for on the penultimate survey, our first greater hammerhead shark (Sphyrna mokarran) seen…

Just a reminder that we’re currently slap bang in the middle of European Shark Week. Check out this page on the Shark Alliance site for loads more information about getting active with shark conservation worldwide.

Our oceans make up 70 % of the planet’s surface and around 60% of the human population lives along the coastal zone. South Africa is bordered by two mighty oceans – the Atlantic and the Indian – both of which are characterized by individual currents, ecosystems and marine living resources.…

Things have been a bit quiet over here on the fieldwork front.  We were not sampling for September so a great deal of time was spent maintaining gear and playing with the data from the first quarter.  We got some pretty distinct spatial trends that were echoed by between the…

A recent report in the Gulf News sheds light on the major role that the UAE plays in the global shark fin trade. With exports of shark fins from the Gulf apparently rising at an alarming rate, the Emirates Wildlife Society-WWF is currently working to establish catch rates & export numbers,…