South African Elasmobranch Monitoring

Our last blog post was dedicated to the most charismatic sharks one can find along the South African coastline, so this time we thought we’d share the love with some of the lesser known species. While the majority of South African chondrichthyan species are indeed sharks (our coastline is home to 117 shark species that we know of at present), our waters also play host to 79 batoid species (i.e. rays and skates) as well as 8 chimaera species (although there are probably more s

How many species of sharks, skates, rays and chimaera can you name? Maybe 5 or 20 or even 50? There are 1188 known species of cartilaginous fish worldwide and due to advances in taxonomic research and deepsea exploration this number is continuously increasing. 204 of those species are currently known to occur in Southern Africa, which makes this region the 4th most diverse Chondrichthyan hotspot worldwide. Did you know that far off the South African coast researchers have rec