Seasons end and what a hard season!!

Well what a hard season!

As the last of the interns leave we have time to look back over the last ten weeks and reflect on what we have managed to achieve despite having four full weeks lost due to bad weather.

What we wanted to see every day but a rare occurrence this season...

Julia & Susie take control... kind off!

The loss of so much monitoring time obviously had an impact on the number of encounters we recorded and the number of sharks seen, but even so, it was certainly an interesting year!

Too rare a sight this season but the ones we got were great!

Of the 32 sharks identified this year, 20 were repeat sightings giving a massive 62.5% of the total… the highest resighting rate we have had in the history of the monitoring programme! So although the numbers were down it was mainly the transient sharks, those only ever seen once that were missing.

The team doing what they do best...chasing sharks!

The aerial survey is a more representative comparison between seasons and 107 sharks were seen in 134h 24 minutes of survey, so an average of 0.8 sharks per hour, so down on the 2010 numbers of 2.78 sharks per hour, but above our 2008 low of 0.6 sharks per hour…

Johan does a low fly-bye... don't get the wheels wet!

Despite being a hard season, our interns did a remarkable job and when the weather didn’t let us get the boats out they helped out with a number of other MCSS projects, as well as having a bit of time to themselves!

Darren, Mr Optimistic, was hard at work turtle monitoring or beach profiling when he couldn't find any sharks...

Local sculptor Antonio directs Susie and Sam in the use of the magic staff... serious science you know...

Leah, Mark and Julia, having some time out....

So a big thank you to the interns of 2011!!