OceanX impartial now now not too lengthy ago helped in the conducting of a look for of megafauna in the northern Red Sea, and boy hi there, did scientists web loads.
The look for used to be the ideally worthwhile thus a long way of elasmobranch species in the northern Red Sea.
The mission recorded, for the first time ever, rare species display camouflage on the northern latitudes of the Red Sea. Crucially, it identified that 75% of the species stumbled on are of conservation arena, and now now not decrease than four species are critically endangered. The crew peaceable over 450 hours of surveys maintaining a tall preference of habitats, from shallow seagrass beds and coral reefs the total way correct down to depths of 1,700m/5,577ft.
Some of the megafauna findings contain:
407 sightings of elasmobranches and sea turtles, including 28 diversified species
Four species of rays and nine species of sharks now now not previously recorded in Saudi Arabia
A differ extension for the purple whipray (Himantura fai) and the spherical ribbontail ray (Taeniurops meyeni) into the Gulf of Aqaba
These extremely rare and threatened species win made their dwelling in the Red Sea web site, sparking hope that threatened species can live to whine the tale safely in this ecosystem, the scientists certain. Their findings are serious for encouraging the to blame administration and constructing of the Red Sea web site to make certain the habitats of those rare species are right.
Primarily essentially essentially based on a scientific paper outlining the look for’s findings, the authors write:
“Our findings present original insights into the distribution patterns of megafaunal assemblages over smaller spatial scales in the web site, and facilitate future learn and conservation efforts, amidst ongoing, big-scale coastal traits in the north-jap Red Sea and Gulf of Aqaba.”
Learn the elephantine paper here.
John Lianghttps://www.deeperblue.com/
John Liang is the Information Editor at DeeperBlue.com. He first got the diving bug while in High College in Cairo, Egypt, where he earned his PADI Delivery Water Diver certification in the Red Sea off the Sinai Peninsula. Since then, John has dived in a volcanic lake in Guatemala, among white-tipped sharks off the Pacific Waft of Costa Rica, and diversified locations including a pool in Las Vegas serving to to interrupt the arena list for the ideally worthwhile underwater press convention.
