Oceans Research Institute

With tourism, marine wildlife, and even the sub-Antarctic islands at risk, lack of funding cannot be an excuse—we must empower organisations like @seasearchresearch to lead the monitoring needed to prevent a larger crisis.

We need proactive, strategic, and targeted testing of carcasses to understand whether infections are plateauing or escalating. COVID-19 showed us the cost of waiting.

Representing Oceans Research Institute at the Seal Rabies Workshop in Cape Town, Director Dr. Enrico Gennari stressed that South Africa has reached a critical point: testing only the obvious cases is no longer enough.

That is the true beauty of field work and what comes with choosing to dedicate our lives to an ever-changing and highly dynamic ecosystem.

So get soaked, shout, laugh, shiver, hold on tight, and embrace it! We PROMISE it's worth it!

#fieldwork #fieldresearch #oceansresearch #marinescience

🌊Sometimes the sea is rough, reminding us of the true power of the oceans we love so much.

🌬️Sometimes the breeze is exceptionally strong, leading to messy hair and attempts to shout over the whistling wind.

One thing that comes with working in the field is accepting the unpredictability of the environment!

🦀Sometimes tides aren't as low as expected leading to difficult but hilarious intertidal assessment shifts.

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You reminded us why we do this.
It’s been a privilege to explore the ocean with you — and I hope it stays with you, long after your boots dry.

Wishing you all the best on your journeys ahead — stay curious, stay salty, and never stop asking questions.

You jumped in (sometimes literally), asked the right questions, stayed eager through early mornings and tricky conditions, and brought your full selves to every task.

July, you’ll be hard to forget. 💙

To this month’s incredible group of students — thank you.

Thank you for showing up with energy and curiosity, even when the days were long, the wind was howling, and the tide wasn’t exactly in our favour.

From whistles to clicks, every sound tells us something about dolphin behavior, communication, and their environment.

It’s one thing to see these incredible animals in person — it’s another to hear them and start uncovering the patterns and meaning behind their sounds.

As part of our bioacoustics training, we’ve been learning how to analyze underwater sounds using Raven software — a tool that helps us visualize and interpret marine mammal vocalizations.

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🐬 Bioacoustics in Action: Dolphin Encounters & Sound Science 🎧

During one of our recent shifts at sea, we were lucky enough to have a pod of dolphins swimming right alongside our boat. But it wasn’t just a magical encounter — it was also a moment for science.

Having a standard way in which data is collected is important to prevent data skewing and minimize human error.

#intertidal #invertebrates #tidepooling #oceansresearch #fieldresearch #fieldwork #birdseyeview #standardisation.

If we were to be lifting rocks and looking under ledges, this could be hard to replicate at other sites during different weather conditions, and at varying tidal levels, and create unnecessary biases

The reason is simple, standardisation!

Having a birds-eye view allows us to have a very simple standard and method by which we count our invertebrate organisms!

Standardisation in science:

Why is having a birds-eye view of your quadrat during intertidal assessments so important? A question often asked by our students.

Read all about what our Captain Fanplastic Recycling winners, Ridgeview Primary, got up to during their prize VR experience!! 🌍♻️🌊🏴‍☠️

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These species of chimera typically inhabit depths of up to 374m, so when the currents and ocean conditions are on our side, we get the rare opportunity to find these alien looking egg cases!

#eggcases #mermaidpurse #skates #sharks #sharkresearch #elasmobranchs #chondrichthyans #chondrichthyan

This incredible fish was caught by Oceans Research Institute while fishing 2 years ago, and a photo has been included so you all can see their amazing anatomy!

The anatomy of this snout allows for the Cape elephant fish to cruise along the sea floor, detecting invertebrates (one of their main prey sources) beneath the surface of the sand with precision.

What makes the Cape elephantfish unique is its elongated snout, covered in hundreds of sensory structures called Ampullae of Lorenzini.

Yesterday our students came across the egg casing of a Cape elephantfish, Callorhinchus capensis!

These animals are from the subclass Holocephalii, a cohort of Chondrichthyans characterized by having fused jaw bones.

This week, our students found more nurdles during a beach survey in Mossel Bay—proof that plastic never really disappears.

🌊 One ocean. One spill. Ongoing impact.
🙌 Every pellet removed makes a difference.

#Nurdles #PlasticPollution #Microplastics #BeachCleanup #

🟡 Still finding nurdles in Mossel Bay—seven years later.

Back in 2017, a shipping container spilled 49 tons of nurdles (tiny plastic pellets) into the ocean off Durban. Since then, these microplastics have made their way down the South African coastline… and are still washing up on our shores.

🩺Assessing animal health using thermal sensors that can measure skin temperature as well as track respiration rate

Finding more noninvasive ways to observe, track, and assess wildlife is always a great development in the science community.

#marinescience #whales #drones #oceansresearch

🤧Collecting biological samples like mucus from cetacean blows while being completely noninvasive to the animal (shout out SnotBot!)

🐋Detecting whales using thermal cameras that can pick up on the heat signatures of "fluke-prints"

But how does this relate to marine science?

Drones can have many practical uses in science such as:

🏃‍♀️Live animal tracking as imitated by one of our students, which can be used for short term monitoring and behavior analysis of many different types of animals

🌅Where the sky meets the sea🌅

Recently, we have begun incorporating the use of drones into our program here at Oceans Research Institute.

Students have started learning to develop their own flight paths, including adjusting settings like velocity, photo frequency, overlap, and image quality.

This was the best place on Earth to see great white sharks—then they vanished A new study based on two decades of data shows what happens in an ocean ecosystem without great white sharks.

Great white sharks have vanished from False Bay. Orcas may be the trigger, but humans are the real long-term threat.
Nets, bycatch, climate change, and shrinking habitats are pushing them out — and ecosystems are feeling it.

Read more: www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/arti...

With us, students gain the special experience of learning ethical wildlife handling, spaghetti tagging, morphometric data collection, and fishing skills!

❤️We love and appreciate our beautiful endemic species!❤️

#marinescience #sharks #sharkawarenessday #sharkresearch #oceansresearch #sharktagging