Only one elephant remains in the Knysna forest and surrounding fynbos: a mature female. There is enormous pathos and tragedy in this finding as she is the last truly wild, free roaming elephant in South Africa and the southernmost in the world. The finding was recently published in a scientific article titled And Then There [...]
“India is rapidly gearing up its blue economy and its ocean sciences research,” says Hyderabad-based Dr Satheesh Shenoi, director of the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services, and co-chairperson of the IIOE-2 steering committee. “We are building more ports and harbours so that many more goods can be transported by ship, which is far [...]
Bottlenose and common dolphins, the endangered Indian Ocean humpback dolphin, southern right, humpback and Bryde’s whales, South Africa has them all, and people come from all over the world to experience them up close in the oceans off our south-east coastline, where boat-based whale-watching operators offer up close encounters with our dolphins and whales. Over [...]
You can see the first light of day on the tips of the cattle’s horns; you can hear the downtown hustle and the chants of the Xhosa ancestors; you can feel the rolling rhythms of the Eastern Cape; you can touch the world through its folds: London, Paris, Milan, New York, Berlin, Amsterdam, Oslo, Tokyo, [...]
He was a gigantic, unsung character with unsurpassed knowledge and understanding of South African plant species, veld types and veld management. Landbou Weekblad salutes South African botanist and man of the veld, the late great John Acocks. By Heather Dugmore In the Footsteps of Acocks is the working title of a book about the contributions [...]
Nelson Mandela University, the only university in the world to carry Nelson Mandela’s name has its first woman Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sibongile Muthwa. She is joined by two other top-ranking women in leading the university: the new Chancellor, Dr Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, and the new Chair of Council, Ambassador Nozipho January-Bardill. All three assumed their posts in [...]
From the wildebeest migration to the ice floes of Alaska, we are so inundated with hype and overbaked replays that life’s miracles have become boring. “Oh whaaaw they’re approaching the Maaahwra – look at all those craaacs just waiting for them,” we’re told as the camera zooms in on yet another wildebeest migration crossing the [...]
It has been 46 years since the first Free Peoples Concert was held at Wits in 1971. Back then, as always, music was a way for everyone to imagine and be part of a different South Africa – starting on campus. It was South Africa’s Monterey, Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock; a platform for counterculture with music as [...]
Stocks of some of our iconic angling fish species – such as red and white steenbras, black musselcracker, dageraad, kabeljou (kob) and seventy-four – are now so overexploited that they fall within the red list of threatened species as tracked by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Professor Nadine Strydom a marine [...]
Algoa Bay in South Africa’s Eastern Cape has unusually large group sizes of common and bottlenose dolphins. The reason for this is being researched by dolphin and whale (cetacean) specialist, Dr Stephanie Plön, an ocean health researcher from the Earth Stewardship Science Research Institute at Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth. “My research team and [...]
