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 was at Seal Island when we got a call from the Fish Hoek shark spotter that a large white shark had just entered the bay. We immediately rushed over because no sharks had been tagged close to shore yet and we wanted to tag the animal to try and understand why the sharks come into the area, how long they stay for and whether it’s the same sharks coming into the area. The law enforcement and shark spotters closed the beach while the shark was in the bay. We did not manage to tag it that time because it was moving fast through the area and every time we tried to approach it, it swam away or dived. Thus, people should not panic about the photo and email, the shark spotters were well aware of it in 2006 and in fact the local papers wrote an article about the incident at the time and we recorded it in the shark spotters newsletter.
http://www.sharkspotters.org.za/pdfs/newsletter%202.pdf.
The photograph is copyright protected and unauthorized use is prohibited.
Photo Enrico Gennari / Copyright Alison Kock
Click here for more information on the white shark research.
Any queries please contact Alison Kock at alison@saveourseas.com
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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 managed to set only twelve longlines so far with another twenty four left to do this month. Exciting things have happened already on some of the surveys though. We caught our smallest tiger shark to date – an 85cm male that was probably only six months old which would suggest that it might have been born not too far away. The really cool thing is that a faculty member’s daughter, Harriet Dahlstrom was on board and got to tag her first shark – aged six! On the same set we hooked our first great hammerhead that unfortunately got off the line before we could work it up. The sightings of our first hammerhead on the baited video surveys and now our first one on the longline bodes well for the remainder of the longline sets. Fingers crossed we shall see some more.
The lull in sampling has also allow me to go through the all the best bits of the baited video footage. Click here to have a look at the highlights so far……..
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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 saltier the seas – however, being as the climate appears infinitely complex and my mind often appears infinitely small, it just never crossed my mind that it would turn out to be true! The work, carried out by the UK Met Office and Reading University ties in with another piece of research that we’ve highlighted within this site investigating the potential for rising CO2 levels to also increase the acidity of the world’s oceans.
While salt n’ vinegar maybe a favourite flavour of crisps in the UK, the long-term effects of potentially saltier & more acidic areas of ocean remain unknown; as we’ve discussed within these pages before, while change might have always been a constant in nature, it’s the rate of such human induced changes that may present the real challenge to the planet.
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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 productivity.
As a consequence there have been very few whale sharks around with our aerial surveys generally running at less than one shark per hour, compared to our maximum annual average of just below 7 per hour in 2006!
Activities were further delayed when our microlight aircraft was flipped over by prop-wash rotors on the runway, necessitating us to rapidly import another aircraft to continue the season…
Then the weather continued to conspire against us by developing a tropical depression (which matched the mood of the monitoring team!) that stopped surveys for a further four days!
So here we are in the last few weeks of the season, but things are back in full swing once again and we are beginning to see increased sighting rates, above three per hour on some days. We have also been able to get numerous photo IDs and biopsy samples and whale shark Copepods for DNA analysis.
The Save Our Seas funded satellite tags have also arrived and, fingers crossed, we hope to have an action packed end to the season!
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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 pleasure and fortune of seeing incredible numbers of dolphins and other marine creatures.
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