Saving Ghana's Guitarfish: Inside West Africa's First Shark Science Program

Dr. Issah Seidu didn't set out to become West Africa's first dedicated shark and ray scientist. He started his career studying dragonflies, damselflies, amphibians, and even elephants and crocodiles as a terrestrial wildlife biologist in Ghana, a country whose university programs, like most in the region, simply didn't study marine species. That changed on a visit to his uncle, a fisherman in a coastal community, where he watched sharks and rays being landed and sold on the beach and realized nobody in Ghana, or almost anywhere in West Africa, was studying them at all. Today he's the founder and team leader of AquaLife Conservancy, a lecturer at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, a Regional Vice-Chair for Africa on the IUCN Shark Specialist Group, and a 2026 Whitley Award winner, one of conservation's most prestigious honors, for his work protecting Ghana's guitarfish.

Andrew and Dave talk with Issah about what it actually takes to build a conservation program where none existed before: the funding that mostly has to come from outside the country, the near-total absence of local mentors in his field, and the years it took just to convince his first fishing partners that his research wasn't a threat to their livelihoods. Issah walks through the hard math behind his work, sawfish already functionally extinct in Ghanaian waters, wedgefish not seen since around 2010, and four species of guitarfish now at real risk of following them, and explains why Ghana's own high demand for shark and ray meat as a protein source makes this a food security question as much as a conservation one. He also shares how a broad early career studying insects and amphibians turned out to be the best possible training for pioneering an entirely new field, and what he tells young African conservationists who ask him how to get started with no roadmap at all.

This is a conversation about what it looks like to build shark science in a part of the world that the field has largely overlooked, told by someone doing it in real time, with real fishing communities, on a coastline most Western listeners have never heard mentioned in the same sentence as sharks.

Takeaways:

• Ghana has four documented guitarfish species (common, white-spotted, blackchin, and spineback), and Issah's research shows they're on the same extinction trajectory that already claimed the country's sawfish and wedgefish populations.
• Sawfish are functionally extinct in Ghana, with no confirmed sighting since the 1980s; wedgefish haven't been caught since around 2010.
• Building trust with fishing communities took years, not months. Issah's first two committed fishing partners took roughly six months of repeated visits and conversations to win over.
• Ghana's own high domestic demand for shark and ray meat as a protein source, not just export markets, is a central driver of the fishing pressure Issah is trying to manage.
• Issah's advice to young conservationists starting out with no local mentors or funding: be bold, be committed, and above all be persistent, since changing fishing behavior takes years of sustained relationship-building.

Connect with Issa Seidu:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/antwiseidu88/

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Dave: 
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Andrew:
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