Save Our Seas Blogs

So, I’m now back at our base in Jeddah, on the Red Sea coast, and have been office bound for a while. Spending weeks catching up on a back log of e-mails, tape logging, and receipts from our Bahamian adventures is the penance you pay for getting to go to these amazing locations in the first place. After two weeks of this boring stuff I decided enough was enough and I had to get back out on the water.

At this time year the Red Sea comes alive (even more so than usual!). We see blooms of moon jellyfish, and are most likely to see whale sharks at this time of year. We also see much higher numbers of reef and pelagic sharks now, including scalloped hammerheads, silvertips, gray reef, and last but by no means least, silky sharks.

(more…)

The London Aquarium (LA) is in a fantastic location at the very heart of London and receives hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, including school groups on a daily basis. LA is committed to marine conservation, running its own projects and also putting a lot of effort into educating its visitors as to the importance of preserving the marine environment.

Over the past few months, the aquarium has undergone a major re-vamp, with lots of new exhibits and displays being installed. SOSF has had a great affiliation with the aquarium for a couple of years, and now we’ve been give the opportunity to expand upon this affiliation by installing educational displays in two different rooms.

(more…)

So it’s our penultimate day here in the states, tomorrow we’re homeward bound.

Today myself and Tom spent the day with Mahmood Shivji, filming and photographing his projects at the Guy Harvey Research institute.

By all accounts today could very easily have been a complete disaster. I’ll explain why. Upon arriving in Fort Lauderdale yesterday evening, I found that not all of our luggage had made it onto the flight. More specifically, one essential piece of equipment had not arrived; my tripod. Its was a small aircraft that bought us to the states from Eleuthra, and apparently our gear didn’t fit into the cargo hold. What would have been nice is the airline had told about this at the time, so we could say which boxes we needed and which we didn’t. Unfortunatly, we didn’t find out until we landed.

(more…)

It generally seems to happen that just as you’re getting comfortable in a place, and really getting to know the people you’re working with, its time to move on again.

I’m very lucky in that I get to travel to a lot of amazing places around the world, visiting and documenting interesting projects. Its amazing diving in such a diversity of locations and with so many fascinating animals. The best thing about traveling to these places, is however, the people. I’ve met so many great people on this trip to the Cape Eleuthra Instituteand The Island School that if felt very sad to leave. This really is a special place, where fantastic work in being done.

(more…)

No, its not the name for an x-rated movie as it might sound (actually, it probably is somewhere in the world), but rather a description of the marine life we spent our morning with.

We’re running short on days here in Eleuthera, and we need images and video of sharks swimming around the BRUV’s to edit together with the footage that the BRUV camera itself will be recording. As a surefire bet we decided to head to the local fishing marina (yes, crime scene for the bull shark killing that took place a couple of days ago). Nurse sharks are seen here most days, attracted by off-cuts of fish that are thrown into the water by sport fishermen.

The shot to the right is of a tawny nurse shark, and was taken in the Seychelles. The sharks we were diving with today were unfortunately not as brave as the one pictured, as you can see, he’s almost bumping into the camera.

There are a few different species of nurse shark. The one pictured is called the tawny, or Indo-Pacific nurse shark (Nebrius ferrugineus), and the ones we were trying to film today are simply called nurse sharks (Ginglymostoms cirratum).

(more…)