South Africa’s freshwater fish face extinction
12 Mar 2021
Half a century ago, Clanwilliam sawfins thrived in most of the rivers draining South Africa’s spectacular Cederberg Wilderness Area. Today, this muscular rugged-finned freshwater fish is listed as ‘near threatened’ by the IUCN Red List, with just 11 riverine populations now remaining. Predation by invasive bass on young sawfins is the number one cause behind the recent population declines. (Jeremy Shelton)
Sarah Fransman remembers how, 30 years ago, Clanwilliam sandfish swirling in the Biedouw River Valley in the Cederberg looked like a golden, shimmering wave. “The whole school would stretch from one side of the river to the other,” she recalls in the Saving Sandfish project series.
10th March 2021
VIRTUAL VOYAGER: An online view taken from RV Celtic Voyager s wheelhouse with below marine biology students ashore! taking in the live-streaming from tutors while in Dublin Bay.
Credit: Marine Institute-retweeted
RV Celtic Voyager of the Marine Institute, Ireland s national agency for marine research, development and innovation, has been working in south Dublin Bay this week,
writes Jehan Ashmore.
The 31.4m ship to be replaced next year by a Spanish newbuild, to be named the RV Tom Crean (52.8m), has since the start of this week carried out ship-based training albeit for land-based marine biology students given the lock-down restrictions.
New dolphin footage off Irish coast fuels speculation Fungie could be alive irishmirror.ie - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from irishmirror.ie Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Updated / Thursday, 29 Oct 2020
15:00 The dolphins we thought were missing, presumed dead were actually missing, moved
Good news: Fungie may well have moved from Dingle up the coast to Tralee. This possibility has been raised by Dr Simon Berrow from the Marine and Freshwater Research Centre at the Galway Mayo Institute of Technology. Berrow spoke to Bryan Dobson on RTÉ Radio 1 s News At One about how dolphins who were thought to have died, like the most famous one in Ireland, were later discovered alive. We started studying the Shannon dolphins in May 1993 , explained Berrow. We called them the Shannon dolphins because they re a resident group who are always in the Shannon estuary. Every year, we do transits around the estuary looking for individual dolphins we know about from markings and we see how they re getting on.