Simon Elwen

Born and raised in South Africa, I’ve always loved both the sea and animals. After graduating as a biologist, I have had the privilege to travel and work in several other countries including the UK and Gabon. Most of my work since my PhD has been in Namibia running the Namibian Dolphin Project, where I’ve been focussing on Heaviside’s and bottlenose dolphin ecology. More recently, I have moved back to Cape Town to setup Sea Search as a base of operations to make it easier expand my research within South Africa. Sea Search is now one of the largest marine-mammal focused research groups in Africa - our work covers ecology,conservation biology, behaviour of cetaceans and other marine megafauna and has a strong bioacoustic focus.

Although I’m interested in all aspects of the ocean, I’m particularly interested in the behavioural adaptations that cetaceans make to different environmental conditions. This is an important line of research these days due to the increasing number of changes that have occurred in the marine realm from human impacts.