Sea Monster

Author: Helen Scales

  • 5 things everyone should know about lionfish

    [vimeo]https://vimeo.com/54441445[/vimeo] Shot on location in Abaco, Bahamas, July 2012.

  • Diving with goliaths

    Earlier this year I came face to face with some of the biggest and quite possibly the most endangered fish I’ve ever met. For my PhD I studied humphead wrasse and spent a lot of time in their company underwater so I’m quite used to seeing big fish. But goliath groupers are massive. Like humphead wrasse, dozens…

  • How to make fish-friendly trawl nets

    Dan Watson has just won this year’s James Dyson award, a student competition with the simple brief “Design something that solves a problem”. The problem Dan chose was bycatch – the capture of types of sealife that fishermen don’t want and throw back either because there’s no market for them or they have no quota for them.…

  • When I got lost at sea

    A little while ago I got lost at sea and washed up in an old lighthouse in London’s docklands. As luck would have it, I found myself in a room full of people sitting on blue and white striped life rings on the floor. Turned out I was in just the right place for the…

  • A pair of seahorses for your weekend

    Tomorrow I’ll talking at the Royal Institution about seahorses. In my moochings around the net for cool things to show the kids I found these awesome vids by liquidguru of a severn’s & a pontohi’s pygmy seahorse. So tiny! They come from a clutch of recently described mini-seahorses from SE Asia. (check out the enormous…

  • Argonaut pops out of its shell

    This week fishermen off California snagged an unusual visitor to their temperature waters – a beautiful female argonaut. They took her to the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium and here’s a video of her popping out of her shell. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCBFypLcgtE[/youtube]

  • Seas without a shore

    Tintype seahorses. Very nice. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qH5wPa4djA[/youtube] I love Chris Anthony’s images of dried seahorses and strange people in masks climbing out of the sea in his upcoming book Seas without a shore. And he’s just made his target over on kickstarter. HT Huff post.

  • Illegal fishing in Sierra Leone stamped out by locals

    Local fishing communities in Sierra Leone have been policing their own waters and stamping out illegal fishing. EJF raised money to equip a surveillance boat with gps and camera gear to allow communities to record and report the boats, mainly trawlers, that operate illegally in protected inshore waters. So far the project has been a huge…

  • Senegalese seahorse caught on camera

    For the first time ever a rare West African seahorse (Hippocampus algiricus) has been caught on camera. Kate West from Imperial College London has been in Senegal on a joint project with Project Seahorse and ZSL. During her investigations into the growing trade in seahorses from this part of the world, she spotted fishermen hauling…

  • Manta rays – the low down

    Hot off the presses, a new study has just come out that brings together all that is known about manta rays and their close relatives the devil rays. Over the past few years, some incredible discoveries have been emerging from scientists around the world who are finding out more about these beautiful and mysterious beasts.…