Description
“Drop, Watch & Learn: What BRUVs Tell Us About MPAs” By Dr. Kaylee Smit
We can’t protect what we can’t see – so how do we really know what’s going on in our marine protected areas (MPAs)? One answer sits quietly on the seafloor. Baited Remote Underwater stereo-Video systems, or stereo-BRUVs, are simple visual imagery tools: a camera, a little bait, and a lot of patience and counting fish. They just watch, and let the reef tell the story.
In this talk, Dr Kaylee Smit shares what these cameras have revealed along our coastline, providing insights from her research at the Marine Remote Imagery Platform (MaRIP) at the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity (NRF-SAIAB). It’s international Marine Protected Area (MPA) day on the 1st of August, so she is going to share reef stories and footage from neighbouring MPAs, some of Africa’s oldest, and she’ll show the difference protection makes bigger fish, more of them, and species you rarely see where fishing pressure runs high. It’s a side-by-side story of what our seas can look like when we give them room to recover – told not in graphs, but in the animals themselves.
Come and see what’s really down there, just beyond the surf.
In this talk, Dr Kaylee Smit shares what these cameras have revealed along our coastline, providing insights from her research at the Marine Remote Imagery Platform (MaRIP) at the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity (NRF-SAIAB). It’s international Marine Protected Area (MPA) day on the 1st of August, so she is going to share reef stories and footage from neighbouring MPAs, some of Africa’s oldest, and she’ll show the difference protection makes bigger fish, more of them, and species you rarely see where fishing pressure runs high. It’s a side-by-side story of what our seas can look like when we give them room to recover – told not in graphs, but in the animals themselves.
Come and see what’s really down there, just beyond the surf.
