It had been a disappointing weekend. I’d been looking forward to joining an excursion to see pelagic seabirds. Now, I know nothing about birds, pelagic or otherwise, but I liked the idea of travelling 25 nautical miles out to sea, to the Grand Canyon of the ocean, where the continental shelf falls dramatically away and […]

For most of us, summer spells sand, sea and sun, but for Monwabisi Sikweyiya, it spells shark! “Every day is a headache for me,” says Monwabisi Sikweyiya, field supervisor of the shark spotters. As we speak, his attention and hands are continually drawn to the two-way radio that beeps intermittently throughout our conversation. “I never […]

Finding new wasp species is Simon van Noort’s passion. He explains, “You have to be an explorer. It’s one of the last frontiers of natural history. Wasps are so hyper-diverse and there are so few taxonomists that I can go into your back garden and collect 10 new species of wasps.” There are 145 000 […]

Roughly half of the troops on the peninsula occupy home ranges which include coastal land. Nevertheless, while the shoreline extends an open invitation to forage in the tidal pools for mussels, limpets and the occasional shark’s egg, baboons have foresworn their indigenous marine diet in favour of raiding from humans, whose nutrient-rich packed lunches and […]