Seychelles News

October was an intriguing month for new marine creatures found around D’Arros and St Joseph. Three new species were added to the species list at SOSF-DRC, all of them cryptic by nature. While changing receivers in St Joseph Atoll, SOSF-DRC Research Assistant Luke Gordon spotted three tiny bumble bee shrimp…

Arriving on D’Arros Island to start my time as research assistant I was aware of the general outline to the specific research projects I would be involved in, Manta Rays, was one of those. Since 2012, D’Arros Research Centre has used photo identification to build a database of individual reef…

The Franklin’s Gull, a small, black-headed bird with a breeding range stretching across the northwestern United States and Canada is commonly sighted throughout interior prairie habitats during the summer months. While knowledge of this species’ long term winter migrations to the coasts of Peru, Chile, and other areas of the…

A Great Migration   When someone mentions the word migration, your mind might race to the great wildebeest migration through East Africa, of sea turtles covering multiple oceans in order to nest in their region of birth, or of one of the many bird species that cover vast areas to…

Parents erNest attempt at giving chicks a great start in life! Being on a tropical island, one would imagine spending every moment snorkelling or diving to look at fish and marine animals. But as a birder, I found that it was the opportunity to learn about seabirds, a group of…

Due to the high quality of the natural environment and the resulting abundance of many types of animals on D’Arros Island, interactions between species are often observed and even photographed.  Recently, several predation events have been captured that highlight some of the interesting food webs present in these dynamic terrestrial…

The Save Our Seas Foundation recently announced the winners and partners of the 2017 grant funding cycle. The Save Our Seas Foundation – D’Arros Research Centre is excited to host six researchers that are recipients of continuation grants and Keystone grant winners. SOSF-DRC looks forward to welcoming Terence Vel, winner…

What comes after the fun in the field? SOSF-DRC Project Leader Chantel Elston sheds light on the transition from her atoll attire to a lab coat. Her extensive research on stingrays in St Joseph Atoll requires a lot of lab work. Here she provides a glimpse of the other side of fieldwork. There will…

One of the benefits of living on a small island with few passerine birds means that it is easy to quickly learn to identify all the common species. Thus when vagrant shows up, they’re hard to miss. Case and point was the arrival of a Common Redstart, Phoenicurus phoenicurus, spotted hawking…

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…