Sofia Green, from the Galapagos Whale Shark Project, has recently completed her MSc thesis on tracking whale sharks. I talked to her while she was back at home base in Quito, Ecuador, after another stint in the Galapagos Islands.

Dr. Elitza (Ellie) Germanov, a Senior Scientist at MMF, is a world expert on manta rays and ocean pollution. She started the Microplastics and Megafauna project in Indonesia as part of her PhD work, which studied the impact of the smallest plastics on the largest marine animals. Janis Argeswara joined the project as a Research Assistant in 2018 and is now leading a project on the reproductive ecology of manta rays. I talked to them from their research base on Nusa Lembongan, off Bali’s southeast coast.

Lukas Mueller grew up in a small inland coal-mining town in Germany, but developed a love of freediving as part of The Watermen Project, where he used his breath-hold skills to work with large predatory sharks. He is now a PhD candidate at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and a project leader within MMF, developing a bull shark research program in Mozambique. Lukas has recently been in the field for several weeks, so I talked to him while he was in home self-isolation back in Germany.

Nakia Cullain is the manager of the Závora Marine Lab, an MMF manta ray scientist, and has just started her PhD on manta ecology and research at Dalhousie University in Canada. I chatted to her from her base in Závora, Mozambique, where she has lived for the past six years.

MMF Principal Scientist Dr. Chris Rohner has been working on tracking marlin recently. This was the first time that MMF researchers have worked on these amazing, highly-migratory oceanic predators. Chris has now published two of the first scientific papers on black and striped marlin movements in the Indian Ocean, so I chatted with him to discuss the results.