ABOUT.
BORN OF THE OCEAN.
Alannah Vellacott is a marine ecologist, science communicator, and ocean advocate with 17 years of experience working in marine research, conservation and education in The Bahamas and the Caribbean.
Alannah was born and raised in The Bahamas and had the privilege of having the ocean as her backyard. She grew up in a fishing community that bordered an expansive mangrove creek system. This, combined with her father being a biology teacher with a childhood dream of one day being a marine biologist, and her mother a locally loved humanitarian, Alannah believes she was fated to fall in love with the ocean, the science behind it, and to share that love and knowledge with anyone who would listen.
Alannah’s career began in 2008 after receiving the Bahamas Environmental Steward Scholar award (BESS Scholarship) to attend The Cape Eleuthera Island School and take part in the Shark Research and Conservation internship at the Cape Eleuthera Institute. This experience gave her raw passion for the ocean a direction – marine research, education, and conservation. Alannah is a PADI Ambassadiver and a scuba instructor with 18 years of experience in diving and has travelled The Bahamas and The Caribbean working on a variety of marine research and outreach projects with various leading local and international organizations in the field: Cape Eleuthera Institute, BREEF, Bahamas National Trust, Community Conch, The Nature Conservancy, Perry Institute for Marine Science, OceanX, and most recently, Coral Vita LTD.
Alannah’s skill and passion for the ocean and its inclusion of women and BIPOC community members in ocean spaces landed her features in documentaries and magazines – most notably, ‘Enslaved’ documentary featuring Samuel L. Jackson, Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, PBS Nova, and Essence magazine. This exposure afforded her with over 27k followers on social media where she uses underwater visuals and relatable media to advocate for ocean awareness and protection. Additionally, Alannah’s experiences, personal journey, and skillset has awarded her sponsorships from companies such as GoPro, Fourth Element, PADI, and SUUNTO, as they support her message and adventurous lifestyle themed in marine research and advocacy. In her spare time Alannah is an active member of Black in Marine Science, she enjoys distance running, beekeeping, and freediving with a personal best of 39m in constant weight bifins. Alannah uses her freediving ability to partner with underwater photographers to create moving imagery that illustrates the plight of our oceans through underwater modelling. Alannah is seeking to set a record for Bahamian women in freediving in the near future.
Currently Alannah aspires to attend graduate school at Scripps Institution of Oceanography to continue her studies in marine ecology, specifically in coral reef ecology. In her short lifetime, Alannah has witnessed first-hand the degradation and slow crumble of the extensive, technicolor reefs of The Bahamas and is dedicated to further understanding reef health and its restoration and protection. By combining her commitment to marine research, platform in ocean storytelling and advocacy, and her intersectionality as a Black woman from a small island developing state experiencing major negative effects of climate change, Alannah feels it is her personal mission to extend ocean discovery, literacy, and optimism to marginalized communities, especially women and BIPOC members, for she firmly believes that these communities must be included in climate action and ocean protection conversations to secure a healthy future ocean for us all.
MARINE
SCIENCE.
Currently:
COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT LEAD
AT CORAL VITA
Currently, Alannah is the Coral Restoration Specialist at Coral Vita, a company whose vision is to restore our world’s dying coral reefs by creating a global network of land-based coral farms.
Alannah most recently was the Community Development Lead at Coral Vita, the world’s first land-based, commercial coral farm for the restoration of reefs where she worked daily to revitalise the world’s dying coral reefs. With her team, Alannah worked on perfecting coral husbandry, micro-fragmentation methods, and coral propagation techniques to grow corals that are resilient to the world’s changing climate, that when outplanted, will bolster coral reef resilience and biodiversity. Alannah also engaged local community members including government officials, community organizations, students, and visitors to the island through leading informative tours and developing events and educational programming.
You can help Alannah and Coral Vita protect our coral reefs by adopting one of their corals! Visit the Coral Vita website below.
APPEARANCES.
TV & SOCIAL MEDIA
As a science communicator, ocean advocate, and experienced diver, Alannah has been featured in documentaries, inspirational shorts, and science-based television shows.
In an onscreen role as a Principal Diver in the documentary, ‘Enslaved’, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Afua Hirsch, Alannah told the story of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade through diving shipwrecks involved in the trade of African captives and goods. Operating under the non-profit group ‘Diving with A Purpose’, Alannah investigated untold stories of the slave trade through diving in Costa Rica, Jamaica Lake Michigan, the English and Bristol Channel, and by trekking the jungles and sailing the rivers of Suriname. Enslaved aired on the Epix channel on CBC, BBC, and National Geographic in October 2020. Alannah also regularly appears as a marine ecologist in Discovery Channel’s Shark Week. In 2020 Alannah appeared in ‘Adam Devine’s Secret Shark Lair’ and this year in ‘Tiffany Haddish Does Shark Week’ and ‘Monster Sharks of Andros’. In each show Alannah was a technical assistant to the principal investigators leading the shark research. She has educated celebrity guests on the importance of sharks to ocean health and introduces them to shark research through taking them on shark dives to collect data valuable to their protection.