Southern African Fisheries Ecology Research Lab

06/02/2026

This week has been an absolute whirlwind 🌪️😵‍💫

Despite the desk-based activities we found ourselves bound to over the past five days, work carried on like normal, with tagged fish, sharks, rays and turtles happily pinging away. Some more receivers (Southern African Fisheries Ecology Research Lab) were rolled over too, this time along the Port Alfred coastline. But, more on that another day.

For now, it’s FRI-YAY!

📷 MSc student, Jessica Morrison

24/10/2025

05/10/2025

Two Oceans Aquarium Foundation’s Ocean Campus has a combined role of Marine Sciences online teacher and FET classroom teacher position available. This…

04/10/2025

It has been a great week talking recreational fisheries in Mombasa, Kenya this week at the 13th WIOMSA symposium. Yesterday we had a great special session about the complexities of managing recreational fisheries in Africa. Special thanks must go to Roy Bealey and IGFA for helping organise and this special session. Watch this space….An African consortium of recreational fisheries research is in development to source funding for capacity building in Africa for sustainable recreational fisheries management. Delegates from South Africa, Kenya, Mozambique and Reunion were in attendance.

31/07/2025

SAFER Lab does it again........ Congratulations to Josh for winning the Eskom Expo Regional Science Fair and a year free tuition at Rhodes University!!! As he is a passionate angler, it was great to see him thinking about the consequences of fishing, even when we release fish, and particularly how these may change in a future climate. This is the second year that a scholar has partnered up with the SAFER Lab and won first place at the Expo.

22/07/2025

We as the SAFER lab are proud to a part of this flagship South African MSc program under Rhodes University. We look forward to teaching and supervising student projects associated with this initiative.

Interested in pursuing a Master’s Degree in Applied Ocean Sciences in 2026?

Apply now for the flagship intake of the Applied Ocean Sciences (AOS) Master’s course. This is the pilot course for the South African Master of Ocean Sciences (SAMOS) programme — a joint programme led by nine South African universities, the NRF, and five European partners, supported by the EU ERASMUS+ CBHE (2025–2028).

Learn more/apply: https://samos-edu.eu/

07/07/2025

28/06/2025

Let’s hope we detect your smoothies in Kleinies!!!

SUCKERS FOR SMOOTHIES

Since 2016, the ATAP, together with Save Our Seas Foundation, has been able to award an annual transmitter grant for projects on sharks, rays and skates in South Africa. The grants have been awarded to 10 different researchers conducting work on 11 different species!

We were in a fortunate enough position last year where we were able to award two grants, including a study on smoothhound sharks in the Port of Ngqura led by Dr Matt Dicken. Through the fishing skills of Dames and Franna van Zyl, 15 female smoothhounds were able to be caught and acoustically tagged over a period of two days in February 2025! While these data are yet to mature, we are hopeful that we will be picking up their movements as they leave the port, venturing further out in Algoa Bay. We’re excited to see what these smoothies get up to in the future.