Sao Vicente

Hey guys,

Sorry for my late update but internet stopped working in the bay we were anchoring for most of the time. So here are the news so far :-) We are happy to share with you guys that we successfully tagged 14 weasel sharks already in Santa Luzia Marine Reserve with the acoustic transmitters we bought from your donations!! One of our weasel sharks showed up a few days later in Sao Vicente main island. Our biggest weasel shark was a bit over 1m, a beautiful female :-) 

Unfortunately we had bad luck as a lot of team members got sick and weather did not allow us to work in Sao Vicente most of the time. However, Santa Luzia was quite a success and now we are all excited to check the receivers next year, download the data and see what our/your weasel sharks have been up to. These were the good news! 

The sad news I would like to share as well though. It is the story of Sao Vicente, the EU and Asia: Baias das gatas (bay of the nurse sharks) is the place in Sao Vicente where we have our acoustic receiver line (those things that can detect our tagged sharks). We talked to plenty of local fishermen and dive shop owners. Everywhere the same story. Until 5-10 years ago you could see sharks in the hundreds from the beach, even pupping there. Then the Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese longliners arrived and the locals started catching sharks with nets in the bays too. In simple words, foreigners catch the big sharks offshore, locals the small ones inshore. In just a few years they made this part of Cabo Verde largely shark-less. As a result, local fishermen have high difficulties to catch their main fish, which was brought to the surface by shark hunting them from below. Now, without sharks the fishes stay in deeper waters, not reachable for the locals. (At least this is the theory). 

The documentary sharkwater extinction will hopefully reveal some of the unbelievable practice the EU is doing here, it should launch in September 2017 and I can only recommend to watch it (it will also be available in German). At the moment I am ashamed to be European! Of course I cannot talk about the movie too much before it comes out but what I can say already is that the EU has a tuna agreement with Cabo Verde, however all landings we saw and all locals we talked to made it very clear, they do not catch tuna but sharks in unimaginable quantities, they call it bycatch! According to some locals, they catch up to 1,500 sharks a day by having 100km long lines with over 5000 hooks. This technique is not selective at all and I am almost sure that they will also catch protected species! I hope Cabo Verde will make it into the movie, if not I will share the whole story with you guys here!

On the other hand, this also shows how important it is to protect the remaining sharks and work on scientifically based management plans! Your contribution is helping us with that, the whole team would like to thank you all again for that! We are still positive that for the weasel sharks it is not too late yet, but time is running. 

Although this was hard to see for the whole team it is quite motivating too as now we are in Maio, another island in Cabo Verde. The international fleets have not arrived here yet and we hope we can contribute with our work to ensure it stays a shark paradise! It is not known if weasel sharks do migrate between Maio and Sao Vicente, we hope to bring light into that. If they would, weasel sharks from Maio would of course experience the fishing pressure from Sao Vicente and we would need to address that in any conservation planning. 

The plans for the next days is to tag some bigger sharks with larger tags we had left from last year. I will update you as soon as possible how this goes :-)

Ps: Some good news in the end, the Cabo Verde skate, a ray-like species that only occurs in Cabo Verde, was recently seen close to our receiver line in Sao Vicente. The last official catches of this species were a couple of years old and I am happy that this species is still around! 

I will try to upload a little picture sequence here, not sure if internet is fast enough though...

All the best from Maio