A while ago I blogged about our attempts to find out more about the occurrence of sharks in Fijian rivers. The results from the interviews with locals living along various Fijian rivers have now been published in Environmental Conservation. I will present parts of this paper including additional results from our shark fishing surveys in rivers on the southern coast of Viti Levu at the upcoming Sharks International conference in Cairns.
Comments (0)18 May 2010
3 August 2009
The Shark Reef Marine Reserve: a marine tourism project in Fiji involving local communities
Shark Reef marine reserve in Fiji. Photo: Klaus Jost
It is with great pleasure that I announce the publication of a paper published in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism that reports on the concept, implementation and success of the Shark Reef Marine Reserve in Fiji. The Save Our Seas Foundation has been supporting this small-scale conservation project in the South Pacific almost from the beginning through the funding of the Bull Shark Tagging Programme that uses Shark Reef Marine Reserve as a superb site for field work.
Comments (0)18 June 2009
Tracking bull sharks with hand-fed intra-gastric acoustic tags
In principle, there are two ways to equip sharks with acoustic tags: you can either attach the tags externally or internally. For both methods there are good examples to be found in the scientific literature. If done internally, you would usually catch the fish for surgical tag implantation. An alternative method can be feeding acoustic transmitters to sharks. 
Stomach tagging can be an interesting option and it allows you to, for example, monitor the stomach temperature of the animal in addition to obtaining presence-absence data. However, the indigestible tag will eventually be regurgitated, most likely via stomach eversion, and therefore tracking time is limited. In order to feed a tag to a shark, all you need is the tag wrapped in bait and a site where you know you can attract the sharks close enough to a feeder. There’s no better place than the Shark Reef Marine Reserve in Fiji to test the feasibility of stomach tagging and to estimate tag retention time. And so we did. The superb photograph on the right (taken by Klaus Jost) gives you an idea of how it looks when you hand-feed a tag to a good-sized bull shark in Fiji.
