Southern eagle ray sampling at Seacliff beach

The FAME lab joined the Southern Shark Ecology Group (Huveneers lab) down at Seacliff beach to conduct catch and release field work on the Southern eagle rays for Emma Kerr and Chloe Roberts PhD research.

This catch and release work includes taking swabs and collecting mucus from various regions of the skin to obtain microbial samples. In addition to this, blood samples and tagging of the rays was also completed before finally releasing the rays back into the water.

We wanted to share some photos from one of the sampling days to highlight this interesting and important work.