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Sea Search

@seasearchresearch

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Sea Search conducts scientific research and conservation of marine mammals in Southern Africa.

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Our new website is live!

We’ve been busy tinkering away in the background, working on updating the online home of Sea Search Research and Conservation: www.seasearch.co.za

On the new site you can:
🔬 Explore our research projects, from Cape fur seal health and humpback whale acoustics to killer whales, humpback dolphins and Heaviside’s dolphins
👩‍🔬 Meet the scientists and students behind Sea Search
📰 Catch up on our latest news
📚 Browse our peer-reviewed research outputs
💙 Find out how you can support our work or get involved

With plans in the future to add plenty more resources…

Take a look and please let us know what you think! by @seasearchresearch

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11 days ago

Port & Starboard aren’t just famous for their sharky diet, but also for almost always being together

From our records, we’ve documented over 100 separate encounters where they were sighted side by side. But sightings of them apart? Very few and much more rare

Over the last two weeks, however, Starboard has been seen alone multiple times around the Cape Peninsula and in False Bay, while Port has only been recorded once, alone as well..

But absence in the same sighting doesn’t necessarily mean complete separation. Killer whale calls can travel several kilometres underwater, and with Port & Starboard both being notoriously difficult to spot or relocate once they move through an area, it’s entirely plausible they remained in acoustic contact but at a distance too far for observers to see

HOWEVER this doesn't mean they've not gone to completely different areas which may just well be the case, and issues many more questions like how do they rendezvous!?

Regardless, this is an interesting development and as we continue tracking killer whale movements along the coast through photo-identification, we’re also closely monitoring Port and Starboard to better understand the dynamics behind their unique partnership taken in Cape Town, South Africa by @seasearchresearch

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7 months ago

When we take the time to be in nature, something within us begins to slow down. Away from the noise, expectations and distractions nature reminds us to reconnect with ourselves _ with what feels natural, honest and true. Come amd spend time with us in nature and reconnect with these beautiful ocean souls 💙, Heaviside dolphins. Video: DylanDewit taken in Cape Kayak Adventures by @seasearchresearch

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3 days ago

Another day in the office 🦭🐬🐙

Popped out to check on the seals and keep our Heaviside’s photo ID project ticking over. Two Heaviside’s spotted in Hout Bay that we saw in Granger on 02 Sept! So great to have confirmation that these animals are moving regularly over this scale (likely both males, as these were two of the animals involved in our last post about NSFW behaviour by dolphins).

Also found a small group of duskies in the cleanest, bluest water off the Apostles and a seal taking out a GIANT octopus.

Seals looking great too – loads of big, fat fatties, to use the scientific term. And the biggest of big boys, Buffel, lying with a huge donut of empty rock around him. Turns out, if you’re really grumpy and kill any smaller seals that come close to you, then eventually they all leave you alone.

Incidentally, this is one of the behavioural cues we look for to identify potentially rabid animals: isolation. Seals have evolved and learned behavioural boundaries that they all ‘agree on’ to limit excessive injury (like dogs barking, but not biting). Rabid seals are not following these ‘rules’. Our postdoc, Rachel Probert, is working to quantify these behavioural characteristics as a tool for identifying potentially rabid seals in the wild.

📸Photos by Simon Elwen and Kieron Dunn. by @seasearchresearch

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12 days ago

A huge thank you to @guardiansofthedeep.oceanlegacy and @tenacitycomputing Cape Town for donating a new desktop computer to Sea Search!

More desktop computers mean we can run more programs for longer without relying on personal laptops or on students with access to technology. With so much data sitting on our servers, having wired-in computers makes a real difference when analysing data such as acoustic recordings and sorting through photo ID data, saving us from tying up personal laptops or pulling large data files over Wi-Fi.

Thank you for helping us do more with our data! 🐬💻

#ReWildTech #MarineConservation #SeaSearch #GuardiansOfTheDeep #TenacityComputing #TechForGood #CapeTown by @seasearchresearch

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a month ago

Heaviside's dolphins in Granger bay doing their best to emulate last week's @fly_airlink flyover over@dhlstadium . Those little dolphins are getting some serious air...but not quite clearing the stadium just yet!

Actually we were out there photographing dolphins as part of our study investigating the numbers and residency of these little endemic dolphins. Remember - this is an open project and all citizen science contributions are welcome thanks to the magic of @happywhale_official helping us speed up the matching and host and open online catalogue --

ALL CONTRIBUTIONS WELCOME! See last photo for one of several resident dolphins we've photographed before - this guy back in 2024 and 2025

@capetownetc Love Cape Town @cityofct #southafrica @botzoo_su @stellenboschuni @ by @seasearchresearch

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a month ago

For years, bioacoustics was largely confined to academic labs and specialised research projects. But with the help of the African Bioacoustics Community, which Sea Search has run since 2017, we’ve seen a massive surge of interest from people outside traditional research and industry.

Every day, nature enthusiasts are increasingly eager to tune into the sounds happening right in their back gardens.

To bridge that gap, we've started hosting our #RecordingforCitizenScience days in the southern suburbs of Cape Town. These hands-on sessions are designed to give participants a solid grounding in the fundamentals of acoustic field recording and show them how to navigate online sound libraries.

We hosted our most recent training day over the weekend, with a full class and a broad range of participants from students to retirees, and novice bird watchers to experienced twitchers!
We'd love to share this heartwarming feedback from one of the participants:

"We had such an interesting day yesterday with Dr Tess Gridley of Sea Search learning about Sound Recording for Citizen Science.

I discovered amazing apps that can be used to record and identify bird songs super easily. I learnt about sound recording and how best to edit, and where to upload them for Citizen Science.

I also discovered more about a huge man made lake in Capricorn Business Park and was lucky enough to see and hear loads of birds, including a black headed Heron (pic attached), Karoo Prinia, sunbirds, little grebes and many more. Right on our doorstep !

Big thanks to Tess and Simon for yesterday. I will be happily occupied over the foreseeable future identifying bird sounds, recording, editing and uploading like a pro 😁"

📹🐦🐦‍⬛🦆🪿🎧 by @seasearchresearch

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2 months ago

Cruising commons by @seasearchresearch

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2 months ago

Don't you just love when a humpback whale you photographed in a supergroup off Hout Bay in Nov 2015...was then seen a few years later in 2022 by Bernophillipson Phillipson off northern KZN and then last week again (Jul 2026) by @melmakeswaves in Plettenberg Bay! (Who took the ID photo posted here)

a) this is just incredibly cool to have this ability to track our whales from photographs across the whole world in near real time (Thanks @happywhaleofficial !) - in previous years this would have involved literal years of collating photos and manually checking the IDs on a PC..

but also

b) The whales feeding off the west coast of SA were historically thought to be part of the West African population which breeds off Gabon/Angola.. but we now know from this whale (and many others) that many whales from the East coast population ALSO feed here, highlighting the importance of this area for hungry hungry humpbacks... and also as an area of potential cultural exchange for song etc etc (@Eclareza will give us some v cool insights on that soon!) by @seasearchresearch

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2 months ago

Interested in learning the fundamentals of acoustic field recording? Did you miss out before? You're in luck! We are hosting one of our Recording for Citizen Science days on the 2nd of August.

Tess and the African Bioacoustics team will take you through the fundamentals of listening, recording, and understanding bioacoustics right here in Cape Town!

Limited spaces available, so don't miss out! Book your spot via the link in our bio

#fieldrecording #bioacoustics #CommunityScience #listeningforlife by @seasearchresearch

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2 months ago

World Orca Week seemed like a good time to share my very own first half decent photos of killers. Balancing three cameras, data forms and a crossbow in three metre swell and 30+ knot winds, I somehow got a few good enough for ID

These were taken some 40 miles southwest of Cape Point in the tuna grounds from a commercial tuna fishing vessel. After two weeks at sea without seeing a single killer, this group of four popped up and hung around as we decided to head into port

These four are special as they are the first individuals linked between commercial fishing grounds and coastal waters, our first clue into the movements of killers encountered "offshore". Also interesting is that I saw them twice that day and both times within a hundred metres or so of long-finned pilot whales, supposed killer whale bullies or, as is the case in SA, killer whale lunch..

As always, there are more questions than answers and with a limited team, data, and coverage the answers are difficult to find but encounters like these take us one step closer

#orca #killerwhale #worldorcaweek #worldorcaday #research by @seasearchresearch

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3 months ago

You might have seen some of the media articles doing the rounds - the good news coming out of this paper has been widely shared. Led by Dr Bridget James during her post doc with us last year and including sightings from the Namibian Dolphin Project, Jean Paul Roux, Monique Radford and John Paterson -- This was originally just a little note compiling sightings and strandings of the BLUE and FIN whales around Namibia and the southern Benguela off W. SA as we kept bumping into them... but it's turned into a useful piece of science!

Prior to 2007 (Trevor Branch et al's global review of all blue whale sightings)...there were only TWO sightings of Blue whales off southern Africa (post whaling) . There have been a lot more since then - indicating that population recovery is under way. lets hope it keeps going and we see more of these amazing animals (preferably alive and at sea!)..

@namibiandolphinproject Dyer Island Conservation Trust @botzoosun @stellenboschuni @upmri @moniq.radford by @seasearchresearch

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3 months ago