Dr. Angus MacDonald has been reelected unopposed to serve his second term as the Country Coordinator for South Africa. Angus is a senior lecturer in the School of Life Sciences at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He is interested in benthic organisms and their ecology, and has been involved in a variety of studies both in the field and in the laboratory. He has  previously studied benthic environments from the Pondoland coast to northern Mozambique. His postgraduate focus was on speciation and population genetics in hard corals from South Africa.  Currently he is involved in examining relative genetic connectivity between populations of marine organisms (various) in the south west Indian Ocean region. For his second term, Angus would  like to establish better regional ties between members of WIOMSA. Political boundaries along Western Indian Ocean coastlines rarely represent biogeographic boundaries. As marine scientists our subject matter is often apolitical and thus, in order to better study it, a regional organization provides a vehicle for collaboration, dissemination and application of regionally relevant research. He hopes to build ties regionally through collaborative research and training endeavours.