Ocean Giants

Marine mammals and sea turtles often get entangled or entrapped by fishing gear such as nets, traps or lines, resulting in grave injuries or mortality of the animal. Bycatch due to direct fisheries interactions is recognised globally as a major threat to the survival of marine megafauna populations. This incidental catch, or bycatch, is frequently discarded at sea and remains grossly under-reported.

We aim to help reduce the unintentional capture of non-target marine life, specifically dolphins, dugongs, and sea turtles, along the Indian coastline through an integrated participatory approach while ensuring the sustainability of the community’s livelihood needs. Our approach focuses largely on building an understanding of on-ground reality through participatory research tools to inform and drive our community-based initiatives on marine megafauna conservation and management. We conduct outreach workshops and awareness programmes for key stakeholders and build inroads to establish crucial partnerships with fisheries societies and government agencies.

We also catalysed the establishment of the Marine Mammal Consortium of India, an informal coalition of managers, researchers and other conservation practitioners from India and abroad working towards the shared aim of protecting India's marine mammals and their environments by sharing updates, targeted networking and fostering collaborations.

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Team

Anant Pande 

Anant has a PhD in Wildlife Science from Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun. His doctoral research focused on understanding breeding patterns and genetic connectivity between distant breeding populations of climate-dependent Antarctic seabirds. He has previously worked upon a multitude of marine taxa including Antarctic krill, dugongs, pelagic seabirds and baleen whales. He also served as a key team member in developing the National Biodiversity Targets, revision of National Biodiversity Action Plan and reviewing Marine Protected Area network in India.  

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Abhishek Medhi

Abhishek earned a master's degree in marine biology from Pondicherry University. His master's thesis focused on the taxonomy and biometrics of spotted sardines from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. He previously worked for BNHS on the Mumbai Trans-Harbour Link Project and interned at Aaranyak's Wildlife Genetics Lab. He has also worked at IIT Guwahati on molecular and microbiology laboratory techniques. He is currently working on strategies and tools to assess marine megafauna bycatch and identify bycatch hotspots. 

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Harshada Sable

Harshada holds a Master's Degree in Environmental Science from Fergusson College, Pune. She has worked as an Intern at Mangrove Foundation of Maharashtra on the topic 'Causes of mortality in marine mammals’. For her post-graduation thesis, she worked on ' Marine Protected Areas in India & Community Perception'. Harshada Joined the WCS- India Marine Team in October 2022 under the Marine Megafauna Project. In her current role, she assists the implementation of tools & methodologies to support marine megafauna conservation, including bycatch reduction and community awareness programs. 

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Pradip Chogle

Pradip's initial curiosity about the ocean and fisheries now turned into a research career in this same field. After completing a Master's degree in Zoology, he now works to Conduct field surveys to identify areas of conservation concerning marine megafauna, assess bycatch, and facilitate collaborative on-ground actions for WCS-India. 

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R. Surya

Surya completed his Master’s in Marine Biology and Oceanography from Annamalai University. During his degree, he interned at the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust, collecting radiotelemetry data on the Mugger crocodiles of the River Cauvery. He also worked on various subjects of fisheries at Parangipettai, Tamil Nadu.

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Shripad Goenka

Shripad is a graduate of St Joseph's University, Bengaluru. During his bachelor's, he worked on a systematic survey to quantify variation in water hardness in Bengaluru for his thesis. He is curious about a wide range of topics in popular science from evolutionary biology to human-wildlife interactions and likes to stay up to date with cutting-edge research in biology.

He first joined WCS-India as an intern under the Ocean Giants team in 2023 and is currently assisting the marine programme with GIS, database management, and exploratory analysis.  

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Recent Publications

• Seal, S., Bayyana, S., Pande, A., Ghanekar, C., Hatkar, P. S., Pathan, S., Patel, S., Rajpurkar, S., Prajapati, S., Gole, S., Iyer, S., Nair, A., Prabakaran, N., Sivakumar, K., & Johnson, J. A. (2023). Spatial prioritization of dugong habitats in India can contribute towards achieving the 30 x 30 global biodiversity target. Research Square. Link

• Prajapati, S., Pande, A. et al. (2022) Understanding dietary differences in Indian dugongs through opportunistic gut sampling of stranded individuals. Current Science, 123(10), 1259. Link

• Dudhat, S., Pande, A., Nair, A. et al. Spatio-temporal analysis identifies marine mammal stranding hotspots along the Indian coastline. Sci Rep 12, 4128 (2022). Link

 

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