The Intersection of Shark Conservation and Community Safety: Dr. Chris Lowe's Journey

0:00 Welcome back to another fantastic episode of the beyond jaws podcast on today's episode We have dr. Chris Lowe from Cal State University, Long Beach the shark lab we're gonna be talking about updates from the shark lab how they are working with lifeguards with outreach with schools and City counselors and it's just it's an amazing program talking about great whites We get into the deep research that they've been doing not only from a shark science perspective but also from psychology of people and how they look at great whites how they See swimming with great whites and how they are adapting to doing that. It's a lot of fun I can't wait to start the show. So here we go Hey, everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the Beyond Jaws podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, co-host Andrew Lewin, here with my co-host, Dr. David Ebert. Dave, are you ready to not necessarily go beyond Jaws, but we're going to be talking about a Jaws-like species, Absolutely, Andrew. I'm looking so forward to this. We have had Chris on a couple of years ago, one of our early episodes. Fantastic guest. He shared a lot, having grown up in Martha's Vineyard while they were filming Jaws. So he had a lot of intimate knowledge and here he is, you know, 50 years later, hate to age ourselves, but he's back out here and basically doing the same type of thing they're trying to figure out in the movie Jaws, like how to keep the communities from going bankrupt by shark activity off the beaches. And

1:31 it's a quite a high tech story. He tells something that he didn't really expect on his journey as being a shark researcher, I'm really looking forward to it and hopefully anyone listening out there, Chris is also looking for some funding to keep the shark lab going Absolutely. You can reach out to us. We'll put you in touch with Chris. If you are looking to put some money where you want to see an application on science, especially with white sharks, I think it's going to be great. So here is the episode with Dr. Chris Lowe from the Cal State University Long Beach Shark Lab. Enjoy the interview and we'll talk to you after. Hey, Chris, welcome back to the Beyond Jaws podcast. Are Well, we're here to welcome back Dr. Chris Lowe. who's a professor of marine biology at California State University, Long Beach, and he's also the director of the Shark Lab at Long Beach State as well. He's also a former president of the American Alasma Brank Society and acquisted his PhD at the University of Hawaii. And prior to that, he did his master's at California State University, Long Beach under Don Nelson, who was one of the real legends in the field of shark research, shark telemetry, and was one of the founders of the American Alasma Brank Society.

2:50 And Chris was on episode 15 of ours back in February of 2022. And he's here today to catch up and see what Chris has been up to. So, Chris, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's always fun. Cool. Yeah. So, well, so what do you so in the last couple of years, Chris, what have you been up to? with I've been keeping very busy. Yeah. So I would say the thing that's kept me the most busy is the development of the California Shark Beach Safety Program, which is a state funded program because there are all these white sharks showing up off California beaches. Funny. Yeah. And people were a little concerned. So it's actually a really cool story because it's a conservation success story for California, right? White sharks were protected in 1994. Prior to that they were caught and killed in commercial fisheries. People were probably eating them and they didn't know it. And then in 94 protection was put in place and since then we've seen kind of numbers tick up. So a lot of people keep telling me where are all these sharks coming from. And we've spent years trying to figure that out, like what explains this? But in reality, the bottom line is protection was key, right?

4:04 The babies weren't being killed anymore in the commercial fisheries because they're now protected. But it was also protection of marine mammals that was critical. And the recovery of those populations have fed the adult population, allowing probably for a lot of this recovery. And it's not just California that's seen this. The Northeast has seen this. Australia has seen this. So in other places where white sharks are protected and their food sources have come back, white sharks have too. So, you know, while us conservation people are going, yay, conservation works, not everybody was cheering. So the lifeguards who are responsible for keeping people safe were coming to us going, what is going on with all these sharks on the beach? Is it safe for people to be in the water? And that was when we got money from the state. So we had been working with all the ocean lifeguards, tagging sharks and trying to figure out how much time they're spending off beaches and where they're coming from, you know, monitoring the population size.

5:00 But we had no money. We were getting a little bit of money from Monterey Bay Aquarium. And when one of our local assembly members found out how little money we had, that was when he went to Sacramento and we co-authored a bill. And then we got $3.75 million to develop the California Shark Beach Safety Program. And the whole purpose of that program was to work directly with lifeguards to provide them with information they would need to keep people safe. But I always had to remind them that white sharks are protected in California, and we also have to focus on keeping sharks safe as well. So the whole program was kind of dedicated to that. So we get to ramp up our research program. So we really get to focus on questions like, why are these sharks here? How long are they going to be here? What are they eating while they're there? How often are they near people? When are they going to leave? That's what the lifeguards wanted to know. So by using all these combinations of technology, acoustic telemetry, satellite telemetry, BRUVs, we were doing stable isotopes, we were doing eDNA, we're flying drones, we're using all this technology to monitor a population from San Diego all the way to Monterey.

6:13 So that program, actually, we learned a lot about white sharks from those five years of funding that we got. And then, of course, we had an education and outreach program that went hand in hand with that. So our education program had certain clients, right? So one of our clients in our education program were lifeguards. So we have in California some of the best lifeguards in the world. They are really some of the most skilled lifeguards in the world, but they're not marine biologists. So a lot of them have a hard time identifying a lot of the sharks and rays that are along our coast. So we developed an education program for them. So we teach them how to identify all these animals, how to interpret shark behavior, which becomes really important in deciding if you're going to close a beach or not. So that education program is now instituted statewide. All the ocean lifeguards use that program. In addition, we have recreational fishers that are fishing off our beaches. And now there's a lot of sharks hanging out off our beaches that are actually prohibited, right? So it is illegal for them to target them. And sometimes they incidentally catch them. So we teach them how to avoid catching them.

7:18 And if they do catch them, how to release them safely for both them and the shark. So a lot of these education programs that we put together have formal curricula. We work with sport fishing groups, things like that. And then of course we have K through 12. So we have a whole education program for them. It's called Operation Stem Bait Sharks and Robots. And we have four curricula designed for different age groups. We go into classrooms, we work with science teachers, and they meet California Next Generation Science Standards. And basically, our philosophy is to get kids interested using sharks and robots in the STEM field. So can we get them interested in science, technology, engineering, and math? And if you can't use sharks and robots to get kids interested in STEM, then we've failed. So that program has been so popular, it's literally exploded. So I just got money from NOAA to run a one-year pilot, and we're paying students to go into classrooms and work with teachers to deliver the curriculum. We also have a big outreach program. So during the summer I hire a bunch of undergrads that are trained to go out. We call them shark shacks.

8:21 They're pop-ups. And we hit 26 beaches in Southern California several times. We go to all the ocean piers and we educate the public about beach safety. We talk about stingrays and we talk about sea jellies and we talk about sharks and rip currents and all those things. And the reason why we do that is we don't want to scare them, just think it's just sharks they need to be aware of. It's these other marine safety issues. Yeah. And that's really important for our Let me ask you this, going back to the beginning when you said the counselor noticed how you didn't have, like in LA, didn't have a lot of money coming through, what made the counselor, you know, start to like perk up and be like, well, we need to have like a better you know, a better system. We need to have money for this system. Was was he someone that you were connected through or she sorry, like was it was a person that was interested in sharks? Like how Actually, it's kind of funny. He's he lives right across from the university. Okay. He was kind of known for his he was a teacher before becoming an assembly member. And he was kind of known for supporting education. So he would come to the university and say, you know, how can I help the university? Can we write some legislation that will help the university? And they said, well, you know, we have all these programs. And he goes, well, I've been hearing on the news about this shark lab group going out and studying sharks. And my daughter is in junior lifeguards. And

9:53 she came back and told us all about what she's learned about sharks. So he said, and I also heard in the news that there are all these sharks in the beaches, but you don't have enough money to tag them. You have all the technology, you have the skill, you have the people, you just don't have the money. So that was what started That's fantastic. Talk about like how things happen just through connections, right? Daughter was a junior lifeguard learning about the shark program. He sees probably you or one of your students on the news. Because I know we've talked about this before on this podcast. You value science communication. And you've always had a bit of a knack for talking to the press and going out to the press to bring up and be able to talk about stories. So you just never know who's watching and Yeah, absolutely. And, and that's something that, you know, as Dave, as Dave knows, I'm on the international shark attack file board and I, and I investigate shark bites on the West coast. So, you know, one of the things that I've kind of stepped into is, you know, when these bites occur, they get a lot of media attention and it usually goes national or international. If those bites occur in spring or summer, the beginning of beach season in North America, right? So what I've been able to do is educate a lot of these reporters that I've built relationships with to get off the story

11:25 of, oh my God, there was a deadly shark bite at this beach to, you know, there are a lot of sharks around the coast. Why are they there? And why do these things occasionally occur? So, you know, I think that's one of the things that we focused on is, you know, in terms of educating a lot of groups, educating reporters has been a really important mission. and building those relationships and getting them to change the tune, right? Right. So it's going from being an alarmist to being, you know, these things do occasionally occur. Guess what? We're learning about white sharks. And I think that's really been instrumental in helping us get this money because it's taking pressure off a lot of these communities that come from kind of over overly dramatic press. And then it's helped them understand that the more they learn, the calmer people are when these things happen. So I think in terms of protecting sharks, that's really important, right? Because we're seeing shark populations come back. And the more they come back, the more they're going to be around people.

12:30 And the higher the likelihood for a negative interaction. So therefore, we've got to start educating our public on to what to expect. So I think dealing with the news and reporters has been a really important part of that formula. and has enabled us to kind of tamp down concerns based on, here, look what we're learning. This is why the sharks are there. Shark bites are super rare. In fact, this is how rare they are. Sharks are around people all the time, and they're not bothering anybody. Look at this amazing drone footage of a shark just swimming right by a surfer and not even paying attention.

13:16 When you educate the lifeguards, because they're the ones who are interacting with the public directly most of the time, have you noticed a difference? Or what differences have you noticed? with sort of the perception of sharks on the beaches, as well as, like, have you noticed any, like, more people going into the water because of these programs? Like, or can you, I'm not even sure if you can measure that at that point. What type of metrics are you using to see how this education program is working, or Yeah, actually, and that's been really important for us, right? To quantify, is this making a difference? So part of that we use lifeguard attitudes, right?

14:03 So for them, that's an important part of their job and they're very worried. In the early days, they were very worried about this because if there's a shark off the beach and somebody gets bitten and they don't pull people out of the water, Are they responsible for that, right? So there was a lot of education that needed to be done for them to build their confidence in the policies that they started to put in place. The other thing is, and we have to remember this, every time you close a beach, there's an economic impact to those communities. So there's a revenue loss because people leave that beach and they go somewhere else and they take their dollars somewhere else. And if it's their first time going to that beach and the beach is closed because of sharks, they may never go back to that beach again. So one of the things we're doing right now is I've teamed up with an environmental economist and we're trying to quantify what is the cost of a beach closure. And remember, we have cities of different sizes. So you close Huntington Beach, you know, kind of surf city, you know, the economic impact of that community can be really large. You go to a smaller beach community where the beach may only be a mile long, and a day beach closure may be a fraction of that cost, right? But nonetheless, knowing what those costs are really important. Yep. So these are the sorts of things that we have made a difference. So lifeguards, for example, can tell when our tag sharks are moving along our beaches because we've built these cool new buoys that give them real-time live data. Tag shark comes along and we kept saying this is not an early warning system. We can't tag every shark out there. That

15:37 means there could be 15 sharks swimming around your buoy without tags and you wouldn't know it. But you use the tag data to understand patterns of behavior. So, for example, in the early days when we helped them develop a policy, the policy stated if a shark is eight feet, as big as a surfboard, you might want to pull people out of the water. And our rationale for that in the early days was those larger sharks are more likely to approach something its size or smaller. Okay, we had no data to support that. That was just our hypothesis at the time. So we started tagging these sharks and then we found these sharks form aggregations and they'll be at these beaches day in day out for weeks to months at a time. Shark, there'd be an eight foot shark off this beach being detected every hour at this beach for months. Lifeguards, according to the policy, would be pulling people out of the water every hour. Okay. So they know the sharks out there, they're getting detections. No surfers are reporting seeing any sharks. So then what they started going is, why close the beach? So then what they started to do is post signs. They post signs saying, this is shark habitat. Now, as soon as they post the signs, people steal them because they're cool signs. People wanted So now we've developed permanent signage for them. So they're really cool signs. I hired art students to do it.

17:04 We use all the psychology to get people to look at the signs. We don't want them to be afraid. If you look at the signs on Cape Cod, they're kind of scary, right? Big red letters that say warning and the beautiful picture of a white shark. They see people driving and see that sign and get in their car and drive out. So we've used people's psychology to understand what's the best way to do this and not scare scare people. So those things are working. They've saved local communities millions of dollars in lost revenue from not closing beaches unnecessarily. So that's an example, I think, of where we've had success. The lifeguards see it, the city council see it, and now the public's starting to understand. So I would say our drone program is the other one that's been the most influential, right?

17:52 So when we tell people we did this study and we did all these analyses and 97% of the days that we surveyed aggregation sites, there was a shark within 20 meters of a person. You tell that to people and they're like, yeah, but that's a white shark, right? But you show them the video and they watch this nine foot juvenile white shark swim right underneath the swimmer without changing course, changing speed, like the swimmer wasn't even there. Swimmer can't see the shark. So when they see that footage over and over again, they're like, well, wait a minute. This doesn't match what I've been taught on Shark Week. And then they go, well, maybe they're not that dangerous. So it's funny to see that we have all this really compelling scientific data that took years to collect. And that has very little influence. What has the best influence is people seeing hobbyists post this footage online And then they see it over and over and over again. And they go, well, seeing is believing. So that, I think, has had a huge impact on people's attitudes about sharing the water with Chris, I've got to ask you this question because you've obviously been down there at Long Beach for quite a few years, quite a few decades now. When you were a young lad starting out, Did you, and you're doing a lot of diving, beach going and stuff, did, how, what, how do you, when you think back to those days about,

19:30 Yeah, well, I think there just weren't that many white sharks, Dave. I really don't. I think when, when you and I were grad students here, you know, the adults were aggregating around those adult feeding aggregation sites, but I just don't think there were as many. And you know juveniles in Southern California fishermen will occasionally catch him off the beaches But you know if if a fisherman caught a white shark Don would have heard about it, and we would have been right out now It's just I just never thought in all my years Dave that I would be doing what I'm doing and that I would be seeing what I'm saying Yeah, yeah, I do I get it out on cuz up here in Monterey I started spearfishing And we'd go out spearing, you know, you go out for halibut at Flounder Flats here.

20:16 And it was just, it's all sand. It's just totally open, totally exposed. You're shooting halibut. You got fish, you know, flopping around and you just never, you know, never saw sharks. And I just, you know, certainly not juveniles were like, you know, once in a while during an El Nino, you might see one up here, but I got all this, I think back all the spear fishing I used to do free diving. and just never saw sharks at all. I think back now, I don't think those sharks were there actually. It Yes. So we dive these aggregations all the time to get our receivers. And visibility is horrible. You're lucky sometimes if you can see your hands to undo the receiver. And we know there are white sharks all around. When we're dropping in, there's a drone up above us. And as the divers are dropping in, there's a white shark 10 feet behind us. You can't see it. So we've been doing this for years. We Like while you're underwater, you've never seen one. They're around, but you've never seen it.

21:23 We have spent hundreds of hours underwater. And no one I absolutely could believe that. I totally believe that, Chris. Yeah, I totally believe that. You just never see. I mean, I've never seen one, thank good God, up here in Monterey in all my 50 years of diving up here. I just never saw one diving, but boy if you go up in the helicopter with a drone off certain beaches up here. I mean I tell the story frequently. I'll count 40 sharks along like a mile, two mile stretch of beach up there at the cement boat there. You just get tired of counting. I'm like okay, there's a lot of sharks here. There's people playing in the water, playing in the beach, kayaking. And you talk to them, and like, nope, they have no idea there's any So there's, like, we know there's sharks around. Like, we know, like, if someone's in the water, there are sharks there. Like, there's a white shark, like you said, you've gone in 100 hours of diving, and there've been sharks around, they've just never come up to you while you know, I've never seen it. What's the reason for I think, and this is kind of a cool study that my last grad student's working on, I think they're used to people now.

22:40 I think they can identify people because these are nurseries. So these sharks show up as young of the year and they will hang out at those beaches for weeks to months at a time. They may migrate off, but they'll come back. They'll return to those aggregation sites until they're about six years old. They're about nine to 10 feet by that size. And they behave the same way they did when they were babies. I think they are used to people. And the other thing about people at a beach is we're flotsam. We're just floating stuff on the surface. And quite often you can't see the sharks. So you're just, whether you're in the lineup, you're waiting to catch a wave, you're paddling for a wave, you're swimming outside the wave break, doing a nice long beach swim, you can't see them. And I think the sharks don't want to be seen. I think they largely ignore people.

23:31 So my current grad student, what she's doing is, what we can see from the drone is that a shark will orient to a person, whether it's a surfer or swimmer, from about 60 feet away. And there's no way, both being at the surface, that the shark can see the person. So our hypothesis is that they're using hearing or they're using lateral line vibration to detect that person. So what Whitney has done is, we got a hydrophone with an accelerometer in it, and then we have students swim back and forth between buoys, and she records the sounds and the vibrations that they make. So then we put them on a surfboard and we have them paddle back and forth, and then we put them in a kayak and paddle back and forth. And kayaks are interesting because, Dave, you probably heard about this, in the last 10 years, we've seen a big uptick in adult white sharks biting kayaks. So our hypothesis is that kayaks act like a drum. They really accentuate that sound. So what Whitney has found is that each signature is different. So a person swimming looks and sounds differently from a person paddling a surfboard from a person paddling a kayak. And because these sharks are around these objects, these floating flotsam all the time, we think that they're actually able to identify us as non-threatening, non-food. And now we've become what I call freeway noise. I live near a 405 freeway. People come to visit and they're like, what

25:04 They've kind of habituated, I think, to us. And that's really kind of a cool concept, right? Because remember in the early days, if you saw a shark, you pulled people out of the water. You prevented sharks from basically learning that that's not food and that's not a threat. But now, because we're sharing these habitats with lots of these animals, I think they're actually learning how to identify us. And that may actually lower the incidence of bites in the future, assuming that some of those bites are a And that goes to the kayak theory too. It's like maybe there are more kayaks in the water now because more people are using the water. And they're just not used to kayaks. So they're coming in, they're just kind of taking some little, I say little But that's exactly what they're doing. People aren't getting hammered. They're not getting launched. Literally, the sharks come over and clamp down on the kayak. Now, a lot of those kayakers are doing like what Dave was saying. They're fishing. and they have fish in their kayaks, and they have holes, drain holes, so they are emanating a little extra Q, right? But, you know, a shark is curious of those things, and the fact that they come up and just kind of bite on them, you know, people sometimes get knocked out of the kayaks, you know, they kind of panic, they see the shark there, and one of the guys I was talking to, the shark clamped down on the kayak and held it while he used that

26:42 Do you think the shark was helping him? He was I'll stabilize this kayak for you. So, you know, these things happen and you're right. It could be that there's just more kayakers out there now and that's increased the frequency or that it's odd. It's something unusual. Something new. We don't see the juveniles act the same way around kayaks. They tend to ignore them. So, you know, that's, this is kind of a next step into getting into white sharks heads to figure out, well, what do you see and what do you hear and what do you feel and how do you make decisions? This is kind of where we want our program to go because the more people think of sharks as being cognitive animals, the less they fear them. So we actually did a psychology study that showed that. If people view sharks as being cognitive animals, decision-making animals, not mindless eating machines, they actually fear them less and they want to protect them.

27:44 So that's another one of our goals in doing this research, is relating it back to people. You know, they're not that different from you, and That is so interesting. I think a thing too, Chris, is that because sharks obviously don't have hands like people do to manipulate things, their base way to manipulate things is with their jaws. And a lot of these sort of what they call the bite and spit things, that's how they're testing something out. Because you know, as I know, if a white shark goes full on into whether it's a surfer, I mean, it could do a ton of damage. You won't survive that. If it really went full on, you're not gonna survive that. But these sort of grabbing bites, spitting, you know, it's a different behavior. I don't know if you've probably noticed this, you spend a lot more time than I have, but you notice and you think you just kind of touched on this, there's different behaviors, depending if it's a surfboard or swimmer, a kayak, Um, you know, that gets into things that I used to look at in terms of foraging strategies, like depending on they'll approach something, I do a lot with seven gills, as you know, but they approach something, each thing they'll approach a little differently. And like, okay, that's, I'm Is that kind of what you're kind of, that's where drones have really helped Dave, you know, it gives us that bird's eye view. And even when we're tagging, you know, uh, you know, I always, when you get really close to him and you startle him, the first thing they'll do is try to get behind you. And that's that classic predator thing, right?

29:11 So we always tell people, look, if you're out in the water and you actually see a white shark, you know, always keep your eyes on it, let the shark know you see it. If you lose track of it, the first place you should look is behind you. And people think, well, it's stalking me. And it's like, no, actually that's the safest place for that shark to investigate you. It's not intent on feeding you or stalking you, but it's thinking of its own safety at that point. So people always put that sinister thought in their head like they're out to get me. But when we start looking at these animals a little differently, like they feel threatened too. What would you do if you're in that situation? Then some of these behaviors become explainable, So I think those are the cool things. That's where drone footage is so amazing.

30:01 You know, people can see that and you can say, this is what we think is happening. And they'll go, well, okay, that kind of makes sense. That's kind of what it looks like. Um, and that, that's not us saying, This is incredible. This is like mind-blowing to me right now that you're able to conduct this research, be able to have the video, to have the proof, and also like doing the psychology studies and interacting with lifeguards and people to show them that, look, although we've all been taught that these animals are dangerous, it's actually not as dangerous as we think. And there's a lot of intelligence Have you had the chance, I know you have a lot of connections around the world and a lot of colleagues around the world, to like, you know, when you compare the work that you're doing in Southern California and the way they manage sharks in Australia with the shark nets, Have you had a chance to have discussions with expanding the program? Obviously, you know, funding is going to be something there, but expanding it to other places where they take a very different

31:31 approach to people and sharks, you Yeah, so we just had White Shark Global Conference which was in South Australia last November. Great conference. So basically all the White Shark researchers from around the world were there and it was awesome because we got to hear what everybody was doing. So you generally only get that when somebody publishes, right? Yeah. But getting everybody together to swap notes and things like that was great. You know, Australia does a lot of really amazing shark research. They have some really good researchers and they've got some incredible data. But that is funded nationally. So they get a whole national pot of money to do that work on both coasts, right? Or even on the south coast. But their approach to then shark mitigation is then divvied up into different divisions. And I think what makes our program different is everything is in one house. It's all run through the university. And we have no mitigation.

32:36 What's really cool is, you know, all those other places, South Africa, Australia have been using shark mitigation for decades, like 60 years in places like South Australia and in South Africa, right? The only place in the US where they've ever used shark mitigation was Hawaii. And they only used it twice and they don't use it anymore. So, despite the fact that there are more shark bites anywhere in the world, in the U.S., and there's never been shark mitigation, really I think speaks to a couple things. You know, at least our, I always say Americans are horrible risk assessors, but in this particular case, they either don't want to spend any money or don't think it's worth the time to do that. Right. Despite the fact that the sentiment is the same, right? So we have, you know, we have coastal communities that are heavily dependent on tourism. You know, those are the triggers. And we just don't see that.

33:31 Now, what we do know is that fatalities really change the barometer on that, right? So when there are fatalities, that's a big deal. One of the things we learned, which is really interesting, is that California has the lowest white shark bite mortality rate. So when we were talking with our Australian colleagues and our South African colleagues about why that is, we were finishing up a case study looking at bites in California. And what we found is there should have been fatal bites in Southern California that turned out not to be fatal. And the reasons were, number one, Coincidentally, they were in the water with somebody who knew emergency first aid, somebody who knew what to do, right? Number two, EMS was notified within minutes of them and they were reported as shark bites. So that was really critical because what that meant was they spun up a helicopter, a medevac helicopter to come to the site. Number three, the most crucial, they were in a major trauma center within 30 minutes of being bitten. There's nowhere else in the world where you can find that. So in Australia, they were telling me like their average time to a hospital can be two hours. So for a major bite, if you don't have the right equipment, you don't have the right trauma set up, someone's in shock in 20 minutes. They're not going to make it. And again, when we're talking about big sharks and little bites from a tiger or a white, that can do a lot of damage. So this is why we

35:03 do every year we do a lifeguard workshop where we update them on all the cool new data that we're finding. But I also I bring in an ER doc and a trauma surgeon to talk to the lifeguards about what are the key things you need to do to save someone's life. So, they go through everything. Like, you know, tourniquets, they all have tourniquets now. But now they're like, you need to have combat gauze. You need to have quick clot in your kits. You need to have a full-out trauma kit. And then these are the things you need to do. You've got to make sure that sand does not get in the wound. So this is a huge deal. Yeah. You're on a beach. Debriding these wounds can take hours. Yeah. They can't close those wounds until they get all the sand out. So you imagine they're dragging somebody up on the beach who's been bitten and they're dragging them through the sand. Or a helicopter's coming to land and it's swirling all the sand. So now they have drapes to cover people to make sure that they're minimizing all those things. All of these things have mattered.

36:09 I was going to say too, Chris, I know up here in Northern California where pretty much everybody wears a wetsuit in the water. It's just too cold or you're going to be nuts to go in with just a bathing suit. And I know people have been bitten up here and they'll comment that the wetsuit probably helped save them because even though the wetsuit was damaged, it was still help provide some, keep things together, keep sand and stuff from getting over, you know, getting too much into the wound and stuff. So I know that's, I think down in Southern California, we have more people just in bathing suits without wearing wetsuits and stuff. But up here, if you're surfing, you're doing any kind of dive, and you're wearing a We still wear wetsuits. Well, I was thinking about that, but I'm a NorCal guy, so I didn't want to have our guests on from SoCal. No, But Chris, when you went to the White Shark Conference last year, I assume this was a big topic for you to discuss. What was the reaction when you started to talk about bringing in trauma doctors and surgeons and talking to lifeguards and having these types of programs? Was that something that they're considering, or is this something that could be, I know every place is unique in terms of distance to hospitals and things like that, but it sounds like the more prepared you are and the people are, the better,

37:40 Yes, and I think that was what was the consensus, right? So it's done in certain locations, it's not done in others. And in some of those locations, some of those those provinces. Some of them are more remote, so therefore you might need to have better trained people. They might need to have specific trauma kits with them. to make sure that if you have a two-hour transit time, you have all the things you need to keep somebody alive, right? And personnel trained to do that. Those are things that they can do, right? Those are modifications they can make. And those are not, you know, we're going to go out and kill a bunch of sharks. Those are, what do we do to keep people alive? Because again, the fatalities are really the triggers. Those are the ones that get communities upset.

38:29 They get people worried about economic loss, tourism loss, things like that. So if you can reduce those, that's huge, right? And that's aside from what churches are doing. So there's a lot of great research being done there, and it was cool to see how much similarity there is. Now, unfortunately, South Africa doesn't have the same funding that Australia and US has. So quite often their research isn't up to the same level, technology-wise. It's not that they don't want to, it's that they can't afford to quite often. So I think those are some of the limitations, but at least we're sharing all those ideas and going, oh, that would be great for where we are. We need to adopt something like that. So I think that's the cool thing about getting everybody together to do that, not just from a research standpoint, but also from how do white sharks interact with people? How do we deal with that? Because that's quite often where the Oh for sure Yeah, it's a Christian, you know, obviously I can speak to South Africa. I know you've been down there too But it's a lot of the areas you go. It's it's remote. They're just it's just you know, you're you're a couple hours away potentially from anything and then that's I mean It's it's just remote you get away from any of the city centers, which is where most people go It's remote and so Yeah, and I can remember a number of shark attacks when I used to live down there. And, you know, people just expired just because they couldn't get them to any kind of a trauma center. And anytime

40:02 soon, they'd be there and they just would bleed out, essentially. They just had no stuff to go on. It was it was just really hard to do. I can really understand that. Yeah, that is. That is. So let's go. That sounds really good. We had just people out there listening. We had Charlie Huveniers and Lauren Myers on the podcast last year around the white shark. I think we had Charlie on just before and Lauren on afterwards to talk about. So if anyone out there wants to find out more about the White Shark Conference from last year, go check out those episodes there. So Chris, so as far as your future, your program, how Yeah. So our funding is expiring. So we were kind of set up to get refunded, but the state budget is poor. So California has made some tax code changes. We had some natural disasters that put us kind of in a bad spot. So our funding disappeared. So legislators that were champions of us, which we have plenty, wanted to see us funded. They just couldn't. And I totally get it, right? But unfortunately, it came at a bad time. So I was notified in December, last December, that the state couldn't fund me. We were going to try to find some agency money to see if they had some money that would keep us alive. And then that got clawed back. So right now I'm looking for private money. So I have enough money to make me through, to get me to January. Unfortunately,

41:32 I've already had to lay off half my staff. So we're in a slow period right now. This is our off season, right? Which is good. But the bad thing is I have to prepare for summer and I'm going to have to rebuild my program. and I need money to do that. So right now I'm trying to find private money because that's the fastest source of money that could get us operational again or working with big foundations. The tricky part is this program is not cheap, right? It costs about $900,000 a year, but we operate from Monterey all the way to the Mexican border. So that's a lot of territory to cover.

42:14 Yeah, sorry you have to go through that. That's never fun, you know, when you're laying off staff and going through tough times. You know, it seems as though the program, from a funding standpoint, It's crucial. I think a lot of people have trouble figuring out how to fund projects where you're looking at genuine academic research where there's no application. I feel as though this program, there's a lot of application. There's obviously a lot of technology that's involved in this, but you need it to be able to, I mean, you've talked about a lot of stuff already today that requires a lot of technology. Drones, those are not cheap. You're looking at sort of instrumentation that vibrates and things like that. This is not cheap. Boat operations is not cheap. And so I think, though, because this is so applicable to The beaches along that stretch you're talking about, that huge stretch, and you talked a lot about how it affects the economy. I feel like there's definitely a crucial need for this program. And so I feel as though this is a part where people need to pony up and say, hey, look, we need to keep these beaches safe. And it sounds like what you're learning is mind-blowing to me, you know, like in terms of what we're learning and

43:47 what we're discovering about these sharks and what we can do more of I do. And you know, I've always said is, you know, when Dave and I were grad students, it was hard to study sharks because there weren't many sharks to study. Right. And then the problem was, if they started to find them in numbers, we didn't have the technology, right? We just didn't have the tools. So now we have the sharks and we have the tools, amazing technology, but it's expensive, right? And then the problem was, then we didn't have the money. And if you tag one or two animals, that doesn't really get you where you need to go data-wise. So you really need quite a bit of money. And I think that's the thing that this program has taught me, was that if you're properly funded, because of all the tools that we have available to us now, we can answer questions that I thought were impossible 10 years ago. So I think this is exciting. My students that get to participate in this, in a way, kind of get spoiled, right? Because they think, you know, every master's student should have $400,000 to answer But they do get to see, when you have the right resources, the sorts of things you can do. And I think that is kind of the way we need to think about this, right? And more importantly, The science is fun and we find it really exciting because this is what we love, right? But if mom and pop can't

45:19 understand why it's valuable, then why would they fund it? And I think what's satisfying for me is that we've found ways of making everybody appreciate why we do what we do and how it's valuable to everyone. And I think that's the key to sellable science these days, number one. And number two, it would be easy for us to just ignore all those things and just focus on doing the science and say, look, Dave, Dave, you're my colleague. Look at all these cool things we found at Davigo. Chris, that's awesome. I love it. But if other people don't see the value in it, then how will I keep getting funding to keep doing more? So I think that's been the key. You know, I've had to spend a lot of time thinking about those things and marketing those things and showing people, here's how we evaluate that this is working. This is how we know this This is making a difference. You know, Chris, you know, you talk last time you're, you know, you grew up right there in Martha's Vineyard when they felt we're filming Jaws when you're a kid and you, you know, the, obviously the big part of the movie was like, they couldn't shut the beaches because of the money. And now here you are, let's say about 50 years later, uh, watching the, uh, almost going through the same thing, a real life situation where you do, you know, you're looking at a financial impact in these communities, but you actually have the technology now to do something about it. And really, $900,000 to cover half the California coast In

46:53 California, I don't want to say it's chump change, but it's not really a lot of money when you look at the economic impact. So if any of the city council people are out there listening or county supervisors, give Chris a call, throw a few bucks into his tip jar there, and maybe you can help him out there because it's really not a lot of money when you think about it to basically be monitoring half the California coast. for white sharks, and you're learning stuff about the sharks too. And so you're educating the public. So you're hitting on all the marks as far as I can see. So Can I ask you something too? I know Surfrider has a big presence in Southern California. Obviously that's where they were formed and their headquarters are. Have you collaborated with other organizations such as Surfrider to extend some of these projects or create new ones. Obviously, surfers are a big user of the ocean. They would be very interested in this type of work. Has there So we are, we're always trying to find partners, right.

48:06 To help share some of the costs and, and actually do a lot of the outreach. So we, we do give a lot of talks to Surf Rider. We, we, you know, financially they're, they're not as wealthy as some of the other groups, but, um, they do, they do promote our stuff and, you know, we, they become, uh, kind of like They're terrific. Yeah, you know, we've had discussions with surf line and things like that. There are a lot of. Technology that surfers use, whether it's digital technology or information, we're always looking for ways they want information about sharks. Of course. Our new buoy system, that's our next phase, is to make those data publicly available. Right now, only lifeguards get those data. Okay. And our fear is we don't want the public to think this is an early warning system, because it is not.

48:58 Right, right. But with proper education, the public is interested in this, and they can start to learn about the patterns of these sharks. We priced out, you know, to make an app, it cost about $300,000 and then to maintain it, you know, probably $20,000 a year. But the system's set up so that it's automated. You know, data gets pushed and people can see it every day. They can see when detections come in. I think something like that would be popular. Yes. And people would feel like, you know, they're learning something at the same time. So these are the sorts of things we want to do. We just need money. And that's not just like fishers and surfers and stuff. You can roll this out to your K to 12 programs and have people learn about, you know, even data gathering and so forth. I think it's a fantastic idea, again, that has multiple applications and getting more and more people connected to the ocean without sometimes not even being able to go to the ocean. I really like I would play with that app for sure and I'm in Canada, so you know So yeah, I think that's I think that would be that would be very handy But again it caught things cost money, and then you have to get those those funded now. I gotta ask Chris like You put this program together, you help run this program, you have some fantastic staff members and students that have helped you out through the years, but you're now balancing academic

50:28 research, studies, outreach programs, education programs. How do you do this all? I know your students, it's a small staff and small Good question. I don't sleep very often and if you ask Well, you're out on the ocean all the time. It's kind of like a vacation, right? Yeah, sure. I was spending way too much time on the computer making phone calls Yeah. So, I think the good thing and Dave knows this very well. There's a really good group of people out there, well-trained people who are dying for jobs, right? And they would kill for a job to work in the Shark Lab on something like this. And they're very skilled. I just need the money to hire them, right? So, that's the thing.

51:27 Whether it's my own students that I cultivate or whether they're from other labs, they're out there and they need work, right? And they're looking specifically for projects like this that give them the same satisfaction that I get, that you're working on a project that makes a difference. It's not just cool science. It's something that makes a difference for the public, right? And there's lots of those people out there, and they're really good at what they do, Yeah. You just need money to do that. You have the work and you have the passion and they have the skills. It's just a matter of getting that funding, which is always the And I think the other fun thing about my job is that I get to collaborate with engineers, computer scientists, artists, journalists, filmmakers, psychologists, environmental economists, that's the good part. I'm just this dumb shark biologist and I get to learn about all these cool other fields that sometimes I used to make fun of and now I'm eating my words, right? So psychology, I was like, psychology, what is that? Now I've learned so much about that and I'm like, this is so And these guys are hardcore scientists. They are hardcore. For sure. Yeah.

52:47 I was just going to say, you know, I used to think about my dream was like being able to get in the shark's head and understand how they make decisions. And I'm thinking, how hard is this compared to, we can talk to people and we still have a hard time understanding what people are thinking. So, you know, I'm thinking, wow, I love it. I was, you know, Chris, I was going to, I was going to say, Chris, I, uh, and I'm sure you had the same experience to be like, when you start, we started out to, You know, at the same time, it's like you think like, well, I'm just going to go study sharks and all this other stuff you're exposed to now, people you meet. I'm just going like, I never, this was never on the drawing board at all. I just, how do I, how do I wind up in these places and meeting these people and talking to these guys? And it's just, it's just, it's been, I don't, I look at it like it's just been a fantastic journey. And I'm sure you feel the same way of the places you've been able to go, people you meet, things you've learned, uh, It's it's great. I I think you're absolutely right, Dave. And the thing is, is that it was a matter of my opening myself up to it. Right. You know, it's a little scary sometimes when you start working with somebody who's not in your field and you feel like I have no idea what these people are talking about. So there's this trust that has to be there. But but it also comes from the shared enthusiasm. Right. So I have this great engineer, roboticist colleague that I've worked with for 10 years. And this guy is like one of the best roboticists in the country. He

54:18 just loves being in the ocean. He loves surfing. He loves diving. He loves snorkeling. He loves rain animals. That's the thing that brought us together. And we've made this awesome team. We've made shark tracking robots funded through National Science Foundation, things that I never thought were possible. But we did that because we had that shared interest, right? And all the people that I've been able to get to collaborate with me, I suck in because they're like, you know, I think sharks are so cool and I love going on the ocean. I don't get to do that but now I get to do that. You know, that's the common thread, right? That has brought all these people together. And for me, it opens up these lines of communication and gets me to open and think, okay, maybe I can learn something about this thing that I know nothing about. These people have spent their entire lives doing it.

55:11 But it leaves you in awe, but then you walk away going, wow, I've learned Yeah. That's great, Chris. That's really terrific. Well, if anybody's listening to the show out there, any city council people, any wealthy donors, please contact Chris. They need some money to keep the shark program going. It's a phenomenal program. I can tell you it's, it's, it's really, it's, it's an amazing state of the art type of program. Yeah. And so I hope, uh, hopefully somebody out there will catch it, catch the podcast here and maybe, and give you a shout. Uh, if you have any trouble getting hold of Chris, you get hold of Andrew and I, we can direct you where to go. And, uh, let's see if we can get some funds in there for Chris to keep his program going.

55:54 And Chris, uh, Just want to thank you for coming on the show again today. It's been a long time, a couple of years since you're on. We'll have to not let so much time go between having you on the next time. And That would be great. And yeah, we'll just keep hunting for money. And remember, our ultimate goal Absolutely. Absolutely. Great words to leave Thank you. Thank you, Chris, for joining us today on the Beyond Jaws podcast. It was great to be able to, I mean, not only great, it was mind-blowing. The type of research that you do, the all-encompassing research that his lab has been doing from science communication, outreach, education, shark science and distribution and ecology, and then looking at the application of keeping beachgoers safe, working with lifeguards, It's changing the perception of sharks from people, taking us away from that programming of the movie of Jaws. And like you said at the beginning of this episode, Dave, when he starts and he sees people filming the movie Jaws when he was a kid, now taking them out of that sort of thought process and bringing it back to a, hey, white sharks are pretty cool, and they're not as dangerous as we thought to humans. They're around us all the time. We need to embrace that.

57:16 And here's a little education on that. I just think that's the way we do science in today's day in the modernized day. What Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, he's really he's kind of really brought that marriage of science and science communication and also some business skills to the to the field. And that's something that really in this day and age, you need to be able to do. It wasn't like, you know, probably when Chris and I started out, it wasn't such a big issue. Of course, you didn't have that. You didn't have the technology to do today. And I think that was a that was another point Chris really hit on was just the technology today versus when him and I started out in the eighties, you know, you just kind of have these really cool ideas, but you couldn't really do anything as drones and GPS and these, uh, advanced, uh, tags. Now you put out used to, that wasn't even, you know, you didn't even have that type of stuff. And Chris started working with Don Nelson, who is a legend in the field for doing early, early telemetry work. But I mean, even Don would be blown away today. Um, at the technology that that's, uh, that's out there now just to just be mind-blowing To think that the amount of information you can get just from tagging and setting up a buoy system where you can find out where these sharks are, where they've been in close range, is phenomenal compared to 35 plus years ago, 40, 50 years ago. and the amount of information that we've been able to get in terms of distribution, how far these animals can actually travel, where they're going, how they're feeding, all that kind of stuff, not only just from tags, but other technology, drones. Just

58:48 talking about how Chris was discussing how sharks orient when they see or when they detect somebody in the water or something in the water, and they orient themselves to there, probably using their lateral line to feel the vibrations in the water. and just what he's talking about in terms of the vibration you've seen people, a person in a kayak and a person swimming. It's a very interesting time for shark science and just science in general, but especially ocean science and understanding what we thought was this mindless killer, understanding how intelligent and how in tune with the water and its surroundings sharks really are, especially the white sharks. It's just an impressive time that we're at when we're when we're looking at shark science these days. It's got to be so much different.

59:39 Yeah, no, I think, you know, I've kind of touched on this in other episodes, but the sharks, they all have a different personality, especially some of these larger species like white sharks. And I worked a lot on seven gill sharks, but they all have personalities. And there's actually a, we talked about, I think talked about this in another episode recently, there was a classic paper by Sonny Gruber, another shark legend, back in the mid 1970s, I want to say about 1975 or 76, where he looked at a group of bonnet head sharks in Florida, And he kept the population of them in a tank. And he documented how each one of them had a different personality. And these are sharks that get about a meter, three feet, or three to five feet in length. And he talked about that. And I remember when I was a grad student in the 80s, I thought that was just a fascinating paper. And Chris is actually, we didn't even bring up that. I know Chris would be well aware of that paper. But it was just, they started talking about how these sharks have personalities. With the white sharks, you're seeing that, where they have this sort of interesting personality, the behavior towards different things. And I think his comments on how these sharks have become kind of habituated towards, you know, whether it's a kayak, a surfer, a swimmer, they kind of get that because these sharks have been here since they were young, and they've just sort of grown up here. And they understand what those different signals are. And I think that's fascinating work, and that's going to It's Agreed. It's going to be very

1:01:12 interesting to see how this, not only this lab progresses, but also just the field of shark science is going to progress. So, you know, again, Chris, thank you so much for joining us on today's episode. We're going to put all the links that people can go check out the shark lab and the work that they do. Check out their YouTube channel. They've got some pretty cool mini documentaries that Ava Dominicelli, who's been on this program as well, has produced and shot herself and edited. They're fantastic. I highly recommend that you check those out. And of It's Lawsharkguy on social media, on Instagram, Lawsharks on Facebook, and yeah, LinkedIn and all the Awesome. And then I'll put the links into the show notes where you can find our YouTube channel, as well as our Instagram, beyondjawspod. And feel free to connect with us. We'd love to hear from you. If you are interested and you have the means to be able to fund or partly fund the Shark Lab, feel free to connect with us. We'll put you in touch with Chris. So thank you so much, Dave, for joining us again. And thank you so much for Chris for giving us all those great updates on the lab. And thank you, everybody, for listening. We really appreciate you coming in each and every time we put out an episode. It's a lot of fun. We've been getting some great feedback. Keep it coming. We'd love to hear from you. And thank you so much for joining us on today's episode of the Beyond