Dragon boating is an ancient Chinese water sport firmly rooted in myth and tradition. It started more than 2,000 years ago as a fertility rite in southern China that celebrated the coming solstice by awakening the slumbering Heavenly Dragon through the fury of their oars.
Harry's vulnerable side is irresistible.
Bonnethead shark dermal denticles magnified 350X
I used an electron microscope for the first time recently to take a picture of shark skin. I’m not sure why this excited me so much, but I guess it felt a little like the first time I went scuba diving – like I had managed to sneak into a world where I didn’t really belong. As a kid I remember seeing photographs taken from an electron microscope and I always imagined some prestigious scientist, locked in the depths of a high-security laboratory, peering down into the eyepiece of a house-sized microscope and revealing the tiniest secrets that nature had tried so desperately to hide. Suddenly, I was that scientist – only, without the prestige or the high-security laboratory, and the microscope was only about the size of a computer. And the process was completely different from my schooldays’ experience when I’d throw a sample on a slide, wet it, cover with a cover slip and stick it under a light microscope. No, in fact, the pinky-nail sized sample of shark skin had to be completely dry so it could be glued to what almost looked like a metal thumbtack. Then, I put the skin into a vacuum-sealed machine that performed what I can only describe as a magic trick as it produced electrical current and purple light to cover the shark skin in a microscopic layer of gold dust. That’s right, I had to make gold-plated shark skin in order for this whole process to work! Apparently, anything put into an electron microscope needs to have a metallic surface to produce a proper image. The microscope fired a focused beam of electrons down onto the gold-coated shark skin, and the electrons then bounced back up into the imager and gave me a look at the bonnethead shark skin magnified large enough to see every detail of the tiny, tooth-like scales called dermal denticles. Amazing! You can’t see it with your naked eye, but these tiny scales are what make shark skin feel rough to the touch. Dermal denticles are one of the defining characteristics of sharks, and I’m using this photograph in my film The Shark Riddle, the newest episode of my half-hour children’s series The Riddle Solvers.
Comments (0)The Save Our Seas Shark Centre in Cape Town gets into the spirit of the Football World Cup…
Bafana Bafana shark outside the SOSSC (Photo: Cheryl-Samantha Owen / SOSF)
HANGING AROUND: If only Bafana Bafana had selected a couple of these guys as the defenders in their squad, they’d have had no trouble swimming into the second round. Opposition strikers would have been, well, easy meat. But while Great Whites are apex predators in the marine environment, they do not naturally target people. In fact, their undeserved reputation has seen them become an endangered species. The Save Our Seas Foundation, which has decorated this model shark outside its Cape Town headquarters with 2010 gear, is one of the conservation organisations trying to save Great Whites and other shark species, and to emphasise their critical role in the marine ecosystem. (more…)
Comments (1)The subject of shark bites was our last day of conference wake up call – a subject that the media worldwide is completely obsessed with. Dr John West, the keynote speaker, described how the general attitude to sharks has turned from “The only good shark is a dead shark” to a dawning that sharks are a natural component of our ecosystem and people now don’t automatically call for the death of sharks after there has been an incident. In fact today, most of the time the victims and their family are the first to call for the protection of sharks. We have certainly witnessed this changing attitude in both the public and the media around Cape Town. The amount of people using the ocean has increased dramatically over the last 40 years. More people are surfing and with efficient wetsuits – they are surfing for longer, and SCUBA diving continues to increase in popularity, as does swimming and snorkeling.
Dr. Shivji wins the Student's Choice Award (Photo: Cheryl-Samantha Owen / SOSF)
The rest of the morning was a lucky dip of talks from human-shark interactions, a media analysis of the changing attitudes of divers towards sharks to the use of a remotely operated vehicle to study shark behaviour. Shark filming legends Ron and Valerie Taylor, who attended the conference, were once champion spear-fishermen before they turned into marine and shark life advocates. “Marine life belongs to all of us, not just the fishermen, and we should be able to see them (the sharks and other fish) anytime we want,” Valerie exclaimed to me with twinkling eyes ready for another shark expedition or underwater adventure.
Comments (0)It was the day after World Ocean’s Day and not a scientist was stirring in the arctic temperatures of the Sharks International’s conference rooms. Instead we were celebrating underwater in the warm Coral Sea and exploring the tremendous diversity of coral life, which forms the Great Barrier Reef.
The next day we were immersed once again in a series of talks about the status of sharks on our blue planet and the many ways that researchers are uncovering their secrets. The morning began on a very different note – with a talk on shark control programs (including the shark nets off South Africa’s Kwa-Zulu Natal) by Geremy Cliff from the South African Shark Board. After listening to a series of rather depressing talks all morning on the animals caught in shark safety nets (fishing gill nets), targeted large-shark fisheries and illegal shark fisheries we were treated to an afternoon focused on genetic and molecular techniques in shark research.
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SOSF chief photographer, Thomas Peschak takes us behind the scenes in the Maldives photographing manta rays. 
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