Where are you from?

Hi, there! My name is Daphne, I am 23 years old and from the Netherlands.

What project did you sign up for?

I signed up for the 6 week Kruger to Coast project and chose Childcare as my voluntary work. My role was to assist the NCP teacher, educate children between 3 to 5 years of age and concentrate on the language, motor, basic academic and social skills of a child in order to prepare them for primary school. In the afternoons, we had the Homework Clubs with older children, most of them are NCP graduates, from the ages of 12 to 17. We helped them with their homework and if they did not have any, we would played mind games.

What do you do for a living?

Actually, I obtained my Master of Science degree in Marketing Management the Friday before I started the program. At this moment, I am looking for a job.

What does volunteering mean to you?

In my opinion, volunteering means giving something back to a world where there cannot be enough help. In my case, this world was the local community of where my NCP was in. I managed to give something back to the local community in a sense that I helped the kids in writing and learning small English phrases. Afterwards, I never expected that volunteering would mean that much to me. It is impossible to describe the feeling you get when you manage to get a smile on the kids’ faces, or when they – after a couple of times of trying – write a certain word correctly.

Click here if you would like to know more about our Childcare (Eswatini)

The Journey to a Masters Degree by Research in Mozambique

After diving for the first time in 2012, my whole future pivoted towards marine biology. I was in my first year of an ecology and conservation bachelor’s degree at the time when I completed both the Open Water and Advanced. Upon returning to university I changed my degree to Marine Biology. To say I was hooked to the underwater world is an understatement. After completing the bachelor’s degree I fulfilled a few of my other dreams, such as a ski season in Canada and completing an Ironman triathlon.

After these things, I was ready to get re-submerged in the world of marine biology – I emailed a dive centre in Tofo, Mozambique, and enrolled into a 3-month Divemaster internship. I had heard that there was a lot of active research conducted in Tofo, and with a view to finding a master’s degree topic, I got to work with meeting everyone I could. It was then that I met Katie, the marine research director of All Out Africa. Katie quickly became and continues to be an invaluable source of knowledge and help. I was also lucky enough to be offered a job at a dive centre, allowing me to stay in Tofo. After some deliberation stingrays became the family of interest as, despite a global distribution, so very little is known about our pancake-fish friends.

Being able to stay in Mozambique while I complete my research is a privilege. With every dive, I learn more and more about not just stingrays, but all the incredible creatures the ocean holds.

All About Stingrays – Jenny Keeping

Stingrays have had a bad reputation; Steve Irwin’s fateful interaction and the menacing barb on their tail does not comply with their docile, relatively quiet existence. It is actually the last resort for a stingray to use its barb, they would much prefer to take flight than fight.

Stingrays (in their current form) have been flapping around in the oceans for 150 million years. They are a close cousin to sharks, as they also have a skeleton made of cartilage instead of solid bone. You can see this close relationship with some species which have co-evolved with the stingray and shark families, such as the Guitarfish family, which looks like a shark’s tail has been stuck to a stingray’s head.

Stingrays are a valuable part of the marine ecosystem. They provide a link between apex predators, like the requiem sharks, and lower trophic levels, such as the crabs and shrimp they munch on just under the sand. Unfortunately, they face a threat operating at an unfathomable scale. Stingrays like to hang out on the sea floor, which is where some fishing methods, like trawling and gill nets, will entangle and drag them up by mistake.

The lack of baseline data for stingrays globally means it is impossible for effective conservation measures to be put in place. Some stingrays are more common than others, but herein lies the challenge for all marine researchers – how do we research things we rarely see? I can tell you it takes time, perseverance and patience. In Tofo we see stingrays on approximately 1/3^rdof dives, and every dive is recorded in the hope that the secrets of stingrays may start to be unlocked.

Click here if you would like to know more about our Marine Research Project, or our Dive Master Training Project.

In this paper 15 whale sharks satellite-tagged off the coast of Tofo had their movement patterns analysed. This showed that some travelled great distance (up to 2737km) with tags staying on an average of 27 days, sharks moved an average speed of about 28km a day. Our fastest shark moved over 70km in 1 day and our slowest just 2.6km per day! Whale sharks are big animals that have the capacity to move great distances, but most of the tagged sharks stayed within 1000km of where they were tagged. In fact one individual, MZ-607, whose tag stayed on for 56 days, only moved 205km from where tagging occurred! All this shows us that, with most sharks staying within Mozambican coastal waters, Mozambique’s coastline is very important for whale sharks.

The real whale sharks were then compared to computerized ‘model sharks’ that had been generated on a computer from general movement info of the whale shark….would the model sharks move in the same way as the actual whale sharks had? Or would there be a difference between the model sharks and the real sharks….helping us to uncover what else might be affecting the choices the whale sharks made in their movements? What drives a whale shark, is it random movement within its capacity, if not what is it moving towards? The real whale sharks spent significantly more time in cooler, shallow water with higher chlorophyll-a concentrations than the model sharks. With high chlorophyll-a indicating productive waters full of food, this suggests feeding is driving their movements in Mozambican waters. Not so surprising maybe as we are all driven by our stomachs sometimes!

So what does that mean for whale shark conservation: are the coastal waters of Mozambique a safe place for whale sharks to be spending a lot of time? Or are there hidden threats off of Tofo that could put our whale sharks at risk? One of the things our volunteers do is GPS area-usage mapping….not just for wildlife but for humans impacting the ocean too! For this paper we used data from 1323 boat-based volunteer surveys of area-usage. One of the things we record is gill-net fishing activity. Gill-netting involves using large nets, typically 20-200m in length and 5-8m deep, in relatively shallow waters to catch shoals of fish. These nets are often put out in the ocean, weighted down at the bottom and left unattended, with the fishermen only returning many hours later to check for any catch. With nets commonly laid perpendicular to the shore (sticking out from shore), transient marine megafauna moving along the coast can easily become caught in the nets. I have pulled turtles, guitarfish and rays from these unattended nets myself – sometimes with a happy outcome, and sometimes not. So, are these gill-nets a threat to whale sharks? Well, larger animals are more easily caught in a net with a larger mesh-size as it more easily gets caught around their fins. With the gill-nets in Mozambican coastal waters typically having a mesh size of 5-20cm, whale sharks are at risk of being caught in the larger-meshed nets. If they get caught in the nets whale sharks can’t usually get out, so they carry on swimming with the net attached and gradually, due to friction of the water and bioaccumulation of algae adding weight, the nets saw through the whale shark’s fins, amputating them.

So, the coastal waters off of Tofo, Mozambique are important to whale sharks. Whale sharks are likely coming here to feed. And the increasing use of gill-nets in Mozambican coastal waters is a threat to whale sharks. Gill-nets pose a risk to whale shark survival and whale shark conservation efforts in Mozambique. Gill-net use stands to negatively impact the substantial economic benefits brought by sustainable whale shark tourism in Tofo, Mozambique, and potentially other areas of the world where the human-wildlife conflict of whale shark versus gill-net may occur.

If you are interested to read the full paper the link is below and it is open-source so free to read for anyone interested!

https://peerj.com/articles/4161/?utm_source=soye2018&utm_medium=email&utm_content=article_list

Written by Katie Reeve-Arnold, Director of Research, All Out Africa Marine Research Centre (Tofo Mozambique)

Important watching items

This year the 5th of August was the chosen day and it started well with a gorgeous sunrise over flat seas.  Almost as soon as the sun was up the action started, a field of tiny volcano-like puffs of water droplet-tinged breath into the air.   From a viewpoint with a 180 degree view the directional movement was evident, all whales heading pointedly either north or south with hardly any pauses and no turning around.  From just past the backline of the breaking waves through to the horizon they marched to and fro on their mission. 

Sunrise from the watch site

The humpback whales are migrating between the calm tropical and sub-tropical waters of their mating and breeding grounds, to the hectic, rough, churning and productive waters of the Antarctic where there is enough food for them to eat.

The heat of the day brought a lull in activity at lunchtime with a noticeably quieter period.  The afternoon’s reduced temperatures brought more mothers and calfs – logging in the shallows for a few moments, stopping off on their travels for a quick feed, and groups of adults – breaching in the distance, rising out of the ocean in what almost looked like slow-motion.

Katie watching hard!

Across the 11hour dawn-dusk watch here in Tofo, Mozambique we saw 314 whales!  

Keep an eye on All Out Africa social media to see how this placed us in the rankings of humpback whale watchers along the East African Coast!  

Did we see the most?

Written by Katie Reeve-Arnold

( Marine Research & Whale Shark Conservation Project Coordinator)