South African Elasmobranch Monitoring

If I asked you to name different sharks that occur along the South African coastline, I'm sure you could name some of the biggest and most popular ones (for e.g. great white shark, Zambezi shark or ragged-tooth shark). But did you know that Southern Africa is the fourth most biodiverse area for chondrichthyans (i.e. sharks, rays, skates, chimaeras) in the world and that we have 204 species in our waters? A recently published study sheds some light on this shark diversity in P

The Department of Environmental Affairs has recently published a new government gazette with a list of marine species that are threatened or in need of protection. Therefore certain activities such as hunting, catching, exporting, feeding or attracting of these species are prohibited. The document lists 16 Elasmobranch species plus all members of the Sawfish family. To our current knowledge these include at least two but possibly four species of Sawfish occurring in Southern

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

We are a week into the New Year and thought it is time to celebrate a new exciting feature: The interactive ELMO Map! It illustrates all the data that we are receiving on eggcase finds as well as Elasmobranch sightings in two separate layers. To explore our Elasmobranch populations, use the zoom function and click on the symbol for details of every data entry. As you will see, there are still large gaps outside of Plettenberg Bay - so please help us to paint an even better pi