A whole lotta shipments!
June 20, 2026
Congratulations to Elisabeth Reuter, a Marine Science Master’s student from the Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa (FCUL), who was awarded 1.500 euros from the Flying Sharks Research Fund back in May 2025!
(Slowly, we’re catching up on our late Research Fund posts… 😉
Elisabeth’s project, “Pelagic Pioneers: Expanding shark research in Boa Vista, Cabo Verde”, builds directly on the recent discovery of a multispecies shark nursery in Sal Rei Bay on the island of Boa Vista. This area already hosts newborn and juvenile sharks from several species, but the surrounding pelagic ecosystem is still largely unexplored.
Her approach combines gill-net monitoring, stereo-BRUVS deployments, structured local interviews, and seasonal underwater video systems to map shark and ray presence across habitats and seasons. By adding AI-assisted video analysis via SharkTrack, she will be able to scale up processing and extract much richer ecological patterns from long-term recordings.
The project stands out for blending traditional field ecology with modern computational tools and, importantly, for embedding local ecological knowledge from fishers and divers into the scientific framework. Together, these elements will help build one of the most complete baseline datasets for elasmobranchs in Boa Vista to date.
In a region where shark populations face mounting fishing pressure and habitat stress, this kind of baseline work is exactly what conservation decisions depend on.
So congratulations to Elisabeth — working in Cabo Verde armed with cameras, nets, and algorithms, ready to meet sharks on their own terms.
Just don’t let the sharks peer-review your field methods too aggressively.
