2 SV Antsiva

Read the full report here: BIOT report_Antsiva filming trip_March 2020

The team on board the SV Antsiva included a film crew of four from ZDF in Germany to make a documentary for their popular series Terra X, provisionally called ‘The undersea garden of the Chagos Archipelago’. Five experts (from ZSL, Oregon State and Stanford Universities) provided the local knowledge and technical information to inform the documentary. We experienced complex logistics due to rapidly changing travel plans due to the global Covid-19 situation, resulting in the unfortunate premature cancellation of the expedition on the 18th March 2019. The team were incredibly grateful for the support of Rachel Jones, Emma Levy, the Bertarelli Foundation and BIOTA for their help in securing the relevant permissions and associated logistics for our safe return.

During our time in BIOT, we were able to opportunistically collect data on seabirds, terrestrial invertebrates and plastics. We serviced eight receivers from Speakers Bank, Egmont and the Grand Chagos Bank, deployed two acoustic tags on mantas and one tag on a silver tip shark, and collected isotope samples from seven fish species. The ZDF crew were able to secure 7.8 hours of raw footage for their documentary and we secured some recordings for use in podcasts.