Stephanie Wenclawski, an undergraduate at NC State, has joined our lab to work on our ongoing project that is using drone footage to investigate the distribution of coastal marine megafauna in developed and non-developed areas on Abaco.  Over the past two weeks she has been diligently analyzing our footage and has found some really interesting observations. In one video from one of our ‘non-developed areas’, only lasting ~12 minutes, she recorded 47 green sea turtles! To put that into an area/density perspective, each drone survey roughly covers 1-3 hectares. We have not gone through all the footage of course, but at this one location we have found sea turtles, bonnetheads, lemon sharks, southern stingrays, and barracudas. I am very excited for the information that is beginning to accumulate with our footage and wanted to share. Keep a look out for a more formal report from Stephanie in the next couple weeks on our findings thus far. Happy Fish Friday!

To learn more about this project please check out  “Drone Diaries of The Bahamas” with Save Our Seas Foundation.