I decided to fly to the Shark Park in Durban to get a closer look at these frightening fish and although I don’t take to water like a duck, I thought I’d watch the students that had chosen to take a shark conservation holiday and find out what had motivated them to take this trip.

When I arrived at Durban, the conservation volunteers were waiting on the beach for a boat,�
which would drop them off into the centre of the ocean. The launch straight out to sea is one of the most exciting parts of the trip and the volunteers were eager to get going and swim with the sharks that they were so passionate about. The volunteers weren’t swimming with Jaws, but rather tiger sharks, a species of requiem shark that can reach up to 17 feet long and can weigh up to 1,400lb. The sharks generally hunt along at night, but the students were diving in the early morning where they would be tracking the sharks and reporting on both their long-term and short-term movement patterns. Although the students would primarily encounter tiger sharks, they would almost certainly meet other species of shark, like the black-tipped and ragged tooth sharks.    

The trip had attracted a wide range of different people from students to marine biologists, who were eager to expand their knowledge on working with sharks. All the shark conservation students were good divers and had passed their SCUBA exams prior to taking the trip (although this isn’t essential). All that was left was for them to take the plunge..; I’ll let you know how they got on next week!

You may recall a few weeks ago how the students carrying out animal conservation work at the Shamwari Game Reserve went and helped out at the AIDS Orphanage in Paterson. Well this time when the students went to help out in the community it was a little more animal-related. However, the animals that the students were encountering weren’t the exotic animals of South African game reserves, but rather the domestic pets to which they are well accustomed to at home. The students were helping out at a spay day organised by the SPCA, an international organisation dedicated to the prevention of …

On my way back from my wildlife conservation holiday in Hoedspruit, I stopped in to visit my good friend Ditch at at the Moholoholo research centre. Last week, I told you all of how Ditch was rejected by her pride, not once but twice, and how the rangers had resigned themselves to the fact that she had been away from them for too long to ever properly be accepted back. So it was once again that Ditch was returned by pick-up truck to Moholoholo. At the time the animal rehabilitation centre also had another prideless lion living on the grounds, …