We have been out on the boat every day that the weather allowed and the hard work has paid off for our Darwin Plus project with the Cayman Islands Dept. of Environment (DoE). We had a very slow start in catching sharks, although we had a number of our camera traps set around Little Cayman. By yesterday, we had caught 9 Caribbean reef (Carcharhinus perezi) sharks, a blacktip (C. limbatus) and 7 nurse (Ginglymostoma cirratum) as well as 2 southern stingrays (Dasyatis americana). The team is great, with Johanna Kohler and Pete Davies from MCI and Keith Neale as DoE skipper, and we are really excited. Now we want to know where the sharks are going as they have acoustic tags and they should pass the array of receivers that we have around the three Cayman Islands.
Indian Ocean Surveys, February-April 2016
We had another good season in the Amirantes this year. We went a little later this year to try and catch better weather and this worked. We were able to deploy our camera traps in all of the study sites, even with some tropical downpours and storms in between. We have almost finished analysing the videos and can begin the exciting part of working out what the shark populations are doing this year in comparison over time. Shark conservation is the aim for healthy reefs, but we are also focusing on the predatory snappers and wily groupers as well. We have seen some wonderful behaviour by the sharks and groupers, just fascinating!
Indian Ocean Surveys, February-April 2016
We had another good season in the Amirantes this year. We went a little later this year to try and catch better weather and this worked. We were able to deploy our camera traps in all of the study sites, even with some tropical downpours and storms in between. We have almost finished analysing the videos and can begin the exciting part of working out what the shark populations are doing this year in comparison over time. Shark conservation is the aim for healthy reefs, but we are also focusing on the predatory snappers and wily groupers as well. We have seen some wonderful behaviour by the sharks and groupers, just fascinating!