Seychelles News

Walking in the shallow waters of St Joseph Atoll, it soon becomes clear the area has an abundant ray population. Tiny mangrove whiptail rays,  Himantura granulata, dart to and fro. Additionally, large adults frequent both the shallows and deeper waters of the lagoon. So while we’ve inferred that the atoll environment…

Although relatively infrequent visitors to D’Arros Island, we currently have an influx of boobies around our field camp in St Joseph Atoll. Tall casuarina trees are, for the past few months, the favoured roosting grounds of roughly 3,000 red-footed boobies (Sula sula). Although an avid birder myself even before my first booby…

Capturing the Secret Lives of Sharks In St Joseph Atoll, lemon sharks are a frequent sight. And yet little is known about how these sharks function and behave over time and space. With this in mind, we’re using the technology found in Accelerometer Data Logger (ADL) tags, or activity trackers,…

Activity Trackers On Sharks: Building the Observation Pen As part of our ongoing project on lemon sharks in St Joseph Atoll, we observe captive sharks for a brief time to collect baseline data. Thus, we built a tidal pen to hold a single shark for observation. In an afternoon’s work, four of us…

Discovering the Secret Lives of Sharks What if researchers could put the same sort of activity trackers used by health conscious humans on sharks? Imagine what we could learn about the daily activity, behavior, habits and, ultimately, the secret lives of top predators in the ocean. Traditionally, our understanding of many a…

How high can a frigatebird fly? Seeing a frigatebird from a plane window raised the question for D’Arros based Clare Daly. A recent study provides an answer. The small plane that carried me back to D’Arros after a month away shuddered and pitched as we descended through a cloud, awaking…

— The other day a friend asked me whether I worked for Save Our Seas or ‘Monitor Our Seas’, the joke being that with all the monitoring we do, we’re not really saving anything. I laughed but, it got me thinking. For many people, meaningful marine conservation has a certain…

El Niño, a meteorological buzz word much in use at the moment, defines a climate cycle in the Pacific Ocean that has an impact on weather patterns around the world. The phenomenon begins when warm water in the western tropical Pacific Ocean, which typically pools near Indonesia and the Philippines,…

— In my previous blog I talked about some of the terrestrial invertebrates that we come across at D’Arros Island. When someone says invertebrate I automatically think of bugs. However, there is a vast diversity of creatures under the sea that don’t have a back bone either. Surprisingly, sea sponges…

The broad definition of an invertebrate is an animal that lacks a back bone. This very diverse group constitutes 97 per cent of all known species, from sponges to jellyfish, fruit flies to centipedes and more. Even D’Arros Island, a tiny speck in the middle of a large ocean, has…

Last week, the International Sea Turtle Society (ISTS) awarded Dr Jeanne Mortimer with a Lifetime Achievement Award for her dedication to sea turtles, a vocation that has spanned four decades. The award was announced at the 36th Annual ISTS Symposium, which was held in Lima, Peru, last week. Dr Mortimer…

The D’Arros and St Joseph reserve in the Seychelles is so pristine and remote that it seems like it could exist only in a dream – or a movie. Unless you’ve been there, you can’t imagine it; if you have a memory of it, it’s hard to describe. However, there…

Being able to recognise individuals within a population is often a starting point for ecological and conservation studies. It provides researchers with crucial information about: – population size (how many individuals there are in a population) – population composition (the sex and size of individuals in the population, for example)…

The Seychelles Bird Records Committee has classified 28 of the islands’ bird species as annual migrants, which means they use the tropical habitat of the Seychelles as a wintering ground – a warm place with ample food, where they escape the harsh winter months of their breeding sites. Seventeen of…

For a sea turtle, life is both complex and risky. The first major challenge occurs immediately after birth, when the hatchlings are forced to run a gauntlet of hungry crabs and birds on the beach. The lucky ones that make it to the sea are pummelled by waves and find…