Photo Selected for Daily Dozen by National Geographic

Really pleased that so far one of the photographs from our South American trip has been recognised beyond this website. The above photograph was selected as one of the daily dozen on the National Geographic website for the second week of March (http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/your-shot/daily-dozen). As a reminder from a previous blog entry, we spent over two hours with this exhausted Magellanic Penguin on one of the beaches close to Punta del Diablo, Uruguay. The chest feathers were covered in a petroleum residue, the result of a recent oil spill. This was one of the birds still alive, but we also came across a number of dead birds washed up on the beach.

South Africa Seizes Shark Fishing Boat

Cape Town - South African authorities have seized a Taiwanese fishing boat accused of violating limits on shark fishing. Inspectors confiscated 1.6 tons of dried shark fins from the vessel and said it was "the biggest alleged illegal consignment during recent years." The boat's permit was valid for just 100kg of shark fins. The environment ministry said the amount of dried shark fin suggested that the vessel had caught at least 30 tons of sharks, nearly 15 times what the crew claimed to have caught. In a statement on Saturday it said the vessel would remain in Cape Town pending criminal proceedings and would be blacklisted worldwide. Shark-finning is fuelled by big profit margins with shark fins estimated to fetch between $400-$700 per kilogram.
- SAPA - (http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/News/0,,2-7-1442_2485681,00.html)