Exciting new citizen science study!
Cape RADD is proud to announce that our students will be participating in a new collaborative research project from the South African Elasmobranch Monitoring team (ELMO). In their words, “ELMO is a citizen science project, which serves as an interactive database to help monitor Southern African shark, skate and ray populations through public participation.”
Our students will be assisting the project by collecting data on shark sightings and shark egg cases, or “mermaid’s purses” throughout our dives and along the local coastline during beach clean-ups. The data they collect will be freely available to Cape RADD’s scientists, ELMO, and scientists around the world. Researchers can then use the information to identify where sharks breed, define distribution, abundance and diversity, and reveal more information about the life histories of South Africa’s endemic shark species. Over 4700 egg cases and 1200 shark sightings have been documented to date! We are excited to add ELMO to the list of projects that Cape RADD students will experience during our field course.
The eggcase of a Leopard catshark (Poroderma pantherinum), endemic to the temperate and subtropical inshore waters of South Africa. Females produce two egg cases at a time and secure them to underwater structures by the long tendrils of the case. Image courtesy of http://www.elmoafrica.org