SASC's First Interns

A new era for SASC... Interns!

Woah, Meag and the team weren’t lying when they said it would be a busy couple months! Now that things have finally settled down, for now, we’re endeavouring to tell you all about all the amazing events and activities we have been up to.

SASC’s inaugural interns, Nic (marine biology student from Southamption, UK) and I (environmental scientist from Sydney, Australia) arrived on 1^st September with varying levels of drama; contracting a bad bug on the plane and ending up so ill as to need wheelchair transportation on arrival (Nic), and huge flight delays and missed connections from Mozambique during the food riot violence (me).

We soon got to know our way around this awesome office, with its demersal shark tanks and intertidal organisms touch tank in the Shark Lab, pretty marine education centre with Shark Camp painted walls and posters (like “I Love sharks Becose: They are speshel”), loads of shark and marine biology reference books, and the list goes on! On Nic’s third, but my second, day at work (I missed one due to my own bug!) we were already dissecting white-spotted smoothhound sharks for Nic’s honours thesis studying their stomach contents! What else? draining and cleaning the algae out of the tanks; measuring, tagging and releasing our resident sharks, then ‘chumming’ with squid/pilchards to hand-catch more, this list goes on J

And bugs aside, I can’t really complain about coming from a southern Mozambique manta ray conservation internship with humpback whales breaching in front of our dive boat every day, to a Western Cape shark conservation internship with Southern Right Whales breaching out the front of our office window every day! I could go on but there are many events to cover so I’ll leave you with some photos of our first days at SASC, and SASC’S first few days having interns J Next entry, cage-diving interns!

Cheers,

Christine