 I'm going to tell you about next week's program, and next week we have something on climate change, the Vermont Prospector. Speaker is a professor and scientist named Jillian Gelford, and she is the lead author of the Vermont Climate Assessment. So she's going to review our future climate in Vermont, and the impacts on communities, natural resources, agriculture, and tourism. It will be a lot of fun. So today's speaker completes a dynasty of speakers. I do believe that the Graf family is the only family that has will have had four members speak. I think many of you know Chris Graf. We're not going to make a big deal about anybody because she's an important person. And her mother, Nancy, and her brother, Garrett. That is the end, except that Garrett does have a baby. So maybe 20 years from now I won't be standing here if you do see his baby. So the other members of the Graf family are writers and reporters and investigators, journalists, and that sort of thing. But Lindsay branched out. And although she grew up in Montpelier and then she always wanted to be a marine biologist, always. And she got her undergraduate and graduate degrees in marine biology and shark biology. And for the past 10 years has worked with sharks around the world. Her journeys have taken her to South Africa and the Bahamas. And quite often to Fiji it's been really hard on her. And this summer she has been working on the Cape. And I think a lot of you have read about how the great white sharks are coming back to the Cape. And Lindsay has been one of the prime researchers in that project. So she is here to tell us about that today, Lindsay. Okay, so I'm aware this is a little bit mis-labeled. Clearly we don't have any of these sharks I'm going to talk about in Lake Champlain, the North Branch River, anything like that, if that was possible. I would have made it happen a long time ago and it would have made my life a little bit easier to stay in my favorite state while studying my favorite animals. But what we are going to talk about today is a very new population or reemergence of great white sharks in New England, which is fascinating to begin with. But it also, we're going to talk about why it should be celebrated instead of essentially staring people off in New England or swimming in Lake Champlain. But I would say after this lecture you might learn a few tips on where you shouldn't swim around his cod or other parts of New England. And I don't think it's a bad thing, and what I'm going to learn from this talk is you have to see that it's a really wonderful thing and that we actually have a very healthy ocean right now. You can move closer to her mind please. Thank you. Is this better? Yeah. Okay, so clearly everyone here from Vermont, when I talk to other people around the world and I ask where I'm from, like most of those too, I'm going to say California or Florida. And a lot of people don't actually know where Vermont is, from San Diego or South Africa. I know that there is one other female shark biologist she's currently doing her undergrad right now. But that would make a total of two of us who focus on sharks who are born and raised from mofftars. Usually when we say New England, we think of the cows, pen and jerry's, lovely craft beers, foliage. Any kind of marine animal normally would bring up references to champs and whatever else might be lurking in Lake Champlain. That is a whole other world that we still need to keep discovering about. But in the last few years, a little bit more time has been spent looking at the sharks that are in New England. This is a disservice though because in New England we're actually blessed with over 33 species of sharks in our waters naturally. So these are sharks that have always been here but a lot of these species are pelagic which means they live offshore in deep waters. You wouldn't normally see these sharks unless you're fishing very far out there on the banks maybe doing a little scuba diving close to the Gulf Stream. But what we have in New England is we have the world's second largest shark, the basking shark which you can actually very regularly see in New England waters. Second largest shark but they eat plankton. And the problem with basking sharks and great white sharks is that a lot of people actually misidentify basking sharks as great white sharks. Basking sharks can go up to 30 feet in length. So if we ever have someone call us and say I just saw a great white shark that was double the size of my skiff they're actually probably seeing a basking shark. So we've had a lot of misidentifications happen which then it tends to blow up around the news very easily. Photos of sharks chasing kayakers when really they're just harmless basking sharks they're called basking because they simply bask at the surface and they swim around with their mouths wide open essentially eating non-stop the plankton that's located right in the top. We do also have beautiful pelagic sharks like the blue sharks. We have the short thin Mako, the world's fastest fish can swim up to 45 miles per hour and that's simply to help it catch its prey like swordfish and tuna and bluefish that can swim just as fast. We have sand taggers, we have thresher sharks and closer to shore we have spiny dogfish seen right here. And that's actually one of the only fish that you can commercially fish. While all of these other sharks are normally found pretty far off shore the spiny dogfish is found close to shore but it's a dimersal fish so that means it's found on the bottom of the ocean floor. If you are someone who travels to Europe a lot and eats fish and chips what you are most likely eating is actually the spiny dogfish. It's a very cheap white fish and most of it, which you can see at the time, fish here in Cape Cod or those areas are being sent to Europe to be used for cheap fish and chips there. So a lot of people say, oh the great white shark we have in New England we are actually lentiful with sharks in New England you just don't see them that often. And we are going to talk about why the great white shark is more visible than these other species in just a minute. So this is a video taken from our research vessel. Just a little welcome to the great white shark part of the talk. It might be a little loud, it's just underwater sounds. And it's taken a GoPro. On a very long stick. A very happy shark. It's a great white shark that was taken in about 10 feet of water right off of Nassif Beach in Cape Cod in Orleans and that is what we are going to be focusing on even though we do have great species of sharks in New England we are going to be focusing on the great white shark today. The thing about the great white shark population is people are saying it's a brand new population and it's actually misnomer because this is a re-emerging population. We know for a fact that great white sharks have always been around Northwest Atlantic and we know just because of fishing records and actually the first shark attack it wasn't fatal but was in 1771 so although there were scientists taking a lot of data there were records of any shark bites or shark attacks and the famous shark attacks of 1916 was actually what inspired Peter Benchley to write JAWS so we know even back in 1916 there were a lot of great white sharks in the New England area. However, we just didn't have the science available to us or essentially any way to collect data on these beautiful animals so there's nothing known about these sharks until recently. We do have a few old kind of news clips and the person up in the left hand corner that is Frank Mundes and he is the famous shark fisherman or shark killer of Montau and you're going to see a video clip of him watching the world's largest great white shark which he caught in the dates somewhere, August 6th and he had to go 80 miles offshore just to even find them. What he did was he went 80 miles offshore and he found a dead whale and around that whale he stuck there for a few days there were about six great white sharks and he reeled one in using a handheld reel and then came back and displayed it and it was Frank Mundes that Peter Benchley used to kind of create quint and jaws. The really interesting thing about Frank Mundes though is because all of his popularity for killing great white sharks caused an increase of people to go out and kill great white sharks themselves and just like Peter Benchley later in life he became a shark conservation advocate and essentially through education outreach he learned that because he was killing all of these beautiful old sharks they weren't able to reproduce and repopulate just like humans sharks are actually case selected so it means they grow very slowly they only have a few young and it takes them a very long time to reach maturity so essentially if you're catching the largest sharks out there you're catching these female sharks who can no longer repopulate and if you continually catch these large sharks the population is going to lose its size and it's going to lose its numbers. So here's a clip of Frank Mundes catching the world's largest great white shark veteran shark killer Captain Frank Mundes and his friend Don Braddock have done it again this time reeling into what is being called a world record at around midnight the two Long Island fishermen brought in a great white shark weighing more than 3,000 pounds Ms. 55 Matt says he has the story after nearly two days at sea Montauk shark fishing king Frank Mundes returned early this morning with a world record catch a 17 for 3500 pound great white shark it's believed to be the largest great white ever caught with the rod and reel literally shattering a 27 year record set in Australia by almost a thousand pounds veteran Monzoff fisherman Don Braddock brought the shark in with Mundes in about two hours both though had staked out the shark for two days I would say I don't even see one in this lodge again but I'm happy with just sitting on top of the world it's good, it's good, I like it I needed this one, it's full of years to do it the top of the line and no, it's no hiding, I can't go any higher just as amazed as Mundes and the other fishermen though were the onlookers who had to see the jaws like creature to believe it we made it, we made it will you become a fisherman up there? yeah so when we had our wild ones what I had as big as my boat my boat was seven foot wide he had his out there, seriously he took off like all my senses let's catch him, let's get that right here now according to Captain Mundes this great white was spotted some 30 miles south of the lodge two days before it was landed feeding on the dead whale so the amazing part is according to Mundes this was not the only shark out there at the time according to him they more or less had their choice of some six to eight great whites dead whales only dead for 24 hours before we found it so I mean when you really think about it that's amazing that we do have that many white sharks in this area in Mundes arc, Matt says in the news, 55 so with what we know today being able to age sharks we know that that shark was a female between 50 and 80 years old so essentially he was removing a very mature female from a dwindling population to begin with and it was those kinds of actions that really caused him to do a turnaround later in life and become a shark conservationist it's not like other species of fish so cartilaginous fish like goldfish and that kind of stuff repopulate a lot and they have a lot of babies because they have a very low survival rate sharks have only a few pups and they have a very high survival rate until you kind of add in commercial fishing, biopage or any kind of human interactions so why did the great white sharks leave we know that they used to be around the wiggling and then it kind of disappeared and if you talk to older generations in Cape Cod they'll say I never saw any great white sharks in Cape Cod they'll also say I never saw any seals in Cape Cod and that is why the great white sharks left if you take away an apex predator's prey you take away the predator too essentially in the 18th and 19th century the number here the 19th and 20th century 135,000 great seals were systematically killed from Massachusetts up to Maine and if you cut off the snout of one of the great seals and brought it in you would get $5 for it so they were being targeted for their pelts for their fur but also because fishermen believed that they were causing competition with the fish that they were going after so for a lot of people in Cape Cod they grew up without any seals in the area but what they grew up in was a completely unbalanced marine ecosystem they took away all of the seals and in 1965 there were only 30 great seals remaining in Maine so if you take away all of the prey the great white sharks are going to leave and right when our marine biology resources were growing when we were suddenly having the scientific abilities to be studying these animals they didn't exist in New England so even though populations in California and South Africa have really been studied for over 80 years and they know so much about them we've only started studying this population in the last 10 years essentially what happened though when all those great seals were killed the Marine Mammal Protection Act was passed in 1972 and so that was kind of a broad protection to all marine mammals from whales to great seals to harp seals in the area and that allowed enough protection and also protection of the habitats where these seals were reproducing for those populations to bounce back and what we've learned in the last 20, 30 years since this has happened is just how interconnected predator and prey and marine ecosystems are if you want to protect an animal you have to figure out what that animal eats it will only thrive if it has a food source so with these great seals returning to New England and now most of them are found actually between Monomoi and New Brunswick in 2017 there was an aerial survey that was done that spotted about 20,000 seals in Cape Cod so they bounced back and in some people in the area mostly the fishermen will say that their populations are out of control the way to control that population is to celebrate the great white sharks coming back and with the resurgence of their favorite food coming back you have the great white sharks coming back to New England so the first sighting of the great white shark officially in New England and in Massachusetts was September 23, 2004 when a great white shark used a full moon and a high tide to get into a salt marsh pond it was stuck there for 13 days and the person that worked for the great storm was the first person to see the great white shark in the science community essentially in the last decade he also was the first person to tag a great white shark ever in the Atlantic Ocean however after the shark was able to was essentially escorted out of the salt pond back into the ocean the tag fell off 45 minutes later so it wasn't until 2009 that a great white shark was successfully tagged but with this sighting in Buzzer's Bay in 2004 it was the first moment that Greg Skolmol, who now is the great white shark expert of all New England and the East Coast realized that great white sharks might be back in the area the only ones he had seen up until then were dead specimens that were brought to him by fishermen so here's a video of the fisherman who was very surprised when he was fishing in that salt pond and saw a 13 foot great white shark and then the resulting footage of it essentially going viral around the world and people flocking to the salt pond for 13 days while the researchers were trying to study it too Great white shark territory and things too that thing is huge I'm scared That was broad man I had to get down that scared me right there Oh wow I think it's only a matter of time unfortunately before somebody else finds out about this I'd like to tag this shark He's a great smoker A great white shark is 15 feet long 17 feet long 2,000 pounds Fisherman Takayashi showed no fear when he says he tried to catch the great white actually hooking his dorsal fin That's a good picture Oh he touched it I'm very interested in watching the poll 15 minutes are basically that and a lot of fishermen swearing into the camera getting footage of that of that shark but the real reason you've noticed that Greg was saying and that he wanted to keep a low profile is that sharks have various levels that they are susceptible when it comes to stress hammerheads are incredibly susceptible to stress so even if you catch a hammerhead species on a fishing line and release it 99% of those sharks will die within the next 24 hours Tiger sharks and great white sharks are a little bit more hearty so they can deal with a little bit more stress than that but you can see why the dangers of catching release come into play when talking about sharks and a lot of people will say well it's swimway just fine but 10 hours after that 24 hours back what they're finding at the University of Miami is that these sharks are dying at about a rate of 90% release rate so what you want to do the shark was clearly already stressed it was chasing after prey and it found itself in an aquarium almost so that's why they were hoping to get it out they finally got it out of the bay by actually using same nets to corral it towards the opening and the reason it got in there essentially in a full moon and a high tide which mean the tide was much higher than it normally is so it needed that kind of extra push to be able to leave this all pond but that was when they found out 45 minutes later that the tag detached that was the first moment in 2004 though that researchers realized that great white sharks might actually be back in the area just being a fisherman's tail a little blurry and a little bloody this is the return of the great white shark to England and this was taken by Wayne Davis who is professional aerial spotter he used to work for tuna fisherman and he would fly out there with the harpoon boats and he would find the largest tuna possible and he would help them I'm sorry I have to interrupt I wasn't pretending to be a big white shark so this was a photo that Wayne Davis our spotter pilot took a predation on a gray seal by a great white shark right off of shore I don't remember what year this happened I believe it was 2017 but he would usually catch about an average of four predations on film every year you kind of have to think of the odds of being that precise moment where the shark gets the seal or incredibly low so it's amazing to have photos like this okay so this is another photo taken by him and before we got into the research that's being done on these sharks this is just I want to use this aerial photo to show you where these sharks are swimming we said earlier that there are all these different species of sharks in New England but most of them are pelagic so they're off shore the reason the great white shark is so much more visible than any of these other shark species is because it's swimming close to shore in about 5 to 10 feet of water Cape Cod is essentially just a large sand bank that goes on for miles and at low tide it can get in pretty close to shore at high tide it can get in even closer and the way the seals the gray seals travel from haul out to haul out they travel right in the breakers because there's a little deep drop off right there and they pop their heads up above the water after every time they dive and they look for great white sharks and if they see a shark or a boat or anything in the area they can very quickly remove themselves and go on to the beach as a result though because the seals are here the sharks are here so the sharks are going to patrol where the seals are swimming and you can see that is right next to shore and essentially on the outer Cape it's one long beach and it's one long very populated beach and from Montemoy down at the bottom all the way up to province town you have large haul outs of seals that are constantly traveling back and forth right within the breakers so who else is traveling back and forth right by the breakers people also and it's amazing because a lot of people think that it's very cute and fun to swim with those seals those seals especially the males are incredibly aggressive and have huge very sharp teeth that they use to tear apart fish so it actually is more dangerous to be swimming with those seals than it is to be swimming in the water with those great white sharks so just remember how close this photo shows you this is basically we would be tagging these great white sharks and you can see why so when you have a brand new population reemerging that you don't know anything about there are two basic questions that you want to focus on you want to focus on how many of these sharks are out there and where are these sharks going and these are just the most basic questions you can ask but we don't have any answers for them and there's actually no known population estimate for great white sharks or most sharks in the world and that's simply because it's so hard to find them it's so hard to count them to find them in the middle of the ocean and so it's quite likely that almost 90% of all shark species are endangered or critically endangered but we can't legally label something as critically endangered and give it protection because we don't have the numbers to back up that information so by the time we find out how many great white sharks are in our area it's probably about the same time we'll figure out that they are critically endangered too so with those two questions that you want to ask you try to figure out where they are going and how many so all of these great white sharks are getting tagged with acoustic tags you can see in the upper left hand corner and those tags get darted in right by the dorsal fin with a very long pull and then any time a great white shark swims within 300 meters of the buoy seen here and these buoys are all between Block Island up to New Brunswick but mostly populated around Cape Cod it will get logged in for what shark was there and what time and when you upload all the data essentially you get a full scale data download of where these sharks were and where they were traveling and from that information you can figure out where these great white sharks like to hang out and of course you find out that these sharks like to hang out where the seals are hanging out makes a little bit of sense and then also there's an app called Shark TV which is run by the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy that tries to do a real as close to real time updates as they can that sharks were either spotted by surfers swimmers, fishermen or researchers and this is just showing you all of the shark sightings that happened I think this was just like a one week and you can see that almost all of the shark sightings were happening on the outer Cape so essentially between Montemoy up to P-town and then to the left that almost all of the shark detections were happening between Chatham and Orleans and this is important information to remember where we talk about some of the first shark attacks that happened in the next coming slides but very quickly if you were to simply glance at these what could you deduce about where you might not want to swim perhaps around Chatham or Orleans that part of the outer Cape maybe even anywhere waist deep and deeper on the outer Cape you can see that they go in the bay and they even go all the way up to Canada so Dr. Grace Fomal actually partnered with Canadian Division of Fisheries and they're tagging and calling them all the way up to Canada too and the thing about this is that these sharks are traveling where the seals are so if you're anywhere in New England or anywhere in that southern part of Canada and you can see some seals in the water there's probably a shark close by so a lot of people will say oh I've never seen a shark I've never been swimming with one if you've been swimming anywhere in New England you have been swimming with a great white shark I've never seen you but through 450 million years of evolution they can very easily tell the difference between a human and an incredibly fat large fill grey seal so they rarely make mistakes what are the sharks eating? the seals eat fish but usually sand lances so a lot of fish that live in the sand and right on the bottom of the ocean essentially there they don't normally go for the same fish that are being fished by the fishermen but the thing is if there's a fish that's already caught or tangled in a net kind of an easy lunch they're going to go after it back when they allowed seal mounties those fishermen would stand on the back of the boats for the shaka and they would just blow away the seals to try to keep them away from the fish if they really want to make sure they don't make a competition for the fish though then they'll protect the great white sharks because the great white sharks naturally keep the population of the seals down so this is a picture that was taken by Brian Scary who does photographs for and this is what the tagging process of the great white shark looks like so we have Wayne Davis our aerial spotter flying up and down the coast of Cape Cod looking for sharks the reason we have to use an aerial spotter is because there's no chumming allowed with the Massachusetts state water so that's 0 to 3 miles offshore that is a very wonderful thing because then if we were chumming to attract these sharks and changing their behavior but when the first shark attack happened we would also be blamed for bringing the sharks in not the seals so because we don't use any chumming and we're finding these sharks essentially in their natural swimming behavior we cannot be blamed for bringing these sharks here when in real life everyone knows the sharks are here because of the seals but Wayne Davis our aerial spotter when he comes down he has a window in his airplane that he leans over and he looks for sharks and that's as simple as it is and then he gives radio coordinates to us in the boat that is Dr. Rick Skomal right in the pulpit of where the shark is and what's really interesting is that this is a very clear picture of where the shark is the water is very calm there's no wind there's a lot of cloud cover we have been on the boat and within a 20 foot radius of us were four different great white sharks we have no clue until Wayne would call down on the radio and tell us and that is because the water is not clear in Cape Cod if there's any kind of wind rippling the surface you can't see it and unlike what Jaws might have told you sharks do not swim around with their dorsal fin out of the water if it were it would be incredibly easy for the seals to spot them and stay away so they always want to swim below the surface and there's also a reason why there's no real cage diving operations in Cape Cod is because there's only about five feet of visibility underwater so you really cannot see these animals until someone up high points them out or until they swim right past your boat so this is a long painting pole GoPro attached to it and what great student here is going to swipe that GoPro down the left side and down the right side of the shark that footage then goes back to the lab and is used to help identify the shark so you're looking at defining characteristics like scars, coloration you need to see if it's male or a female because a pregnant shark will go on a different migration route than a male shark there's different length estimates all that kind of stuff and once he for sure has both sides of the shark identified he then switches out that GoPro for that acoustic tag that you saw a picture of and he simply harpoons it right in next to the dorsal fin and then puts the GoPro camera back on to just get an idea of the placement and how deep it went sharks don't have scales they have skin and their skin is incredibly rough and thick so it's kind of just like getting an ear pierced or something like that and clearly we don't have a great idea of what kind of pain they're in, if any but for a lot of sharks it actually doesn't even bother them at all when they get that little tag put in you have to make sure the tag is going deep enough though to actually stay there so it doesn't fall off 45 minutes later can I ask a question? so to do that with a shark I mean they're not really afraid of the boat or afraid of the... so some are so what we found is that smaller sharks go probably in the juvenile age of about 7 feet to 10 feet are very skittish around the world and then you get from 11 feet up to 17 feet and they're incredibly aware that they are the apex predators in the ocean and they just one slowly nothing bothers them and they're wonderful to work with but it also changes shark to shark each great white shark is a very different personality which I think is the most interesting thing from studying these animals but that's even assuming that the weather is nice so it's not taking into account 5 foot waves or wind or the sharks suddenly turn around there have been so many times that Greg has been about to tag a shark and a wave takes the boat away so there's also a lot of weather that plays into the field research and also human error too so the population study they are utilizing something called a mark recapture and that actually wrapped up at the end of the field season last year at the end of October and the way it works is that every shark that you mark or tag in this case you then next time you go out you want to see if you encounter a tag shark or a brand new shark that hasn't been tagged if you get to gear 5 and 100% of the sharks that you are encountering have been tagged then you have an exact estimate of what the population is if you are encountering 50% tag sharks, 50% un-tag sharks, you know the population is biologized and so from those estimates they can get a rough idea of what the population is like off of Newfoundland of course what makes it a little bit harder this is just in Cape Cod and you know that these great white sharks do go all the way up to Canada it's possible there's populations that stay up in Canada and don't really come down to Cape Cod so it's not a perfect practice but that's about the best estimate you can get this is what the footage looks like from the GoPro camera on the lower left the nature of the great white shark that had just taken a bite out of the seal that we were able to get on camera this one right here has them seaweed stuck in its teeth and essentially what you are using this GoPro footage for is to help you find those identification factors that I mentioned earlier so you are looking for coloration normally around the gill slits the reason you don't really look for cuts is because the heal the coloration so the pattern of where the black and the white meets on the great white shark will never change scars and cuts and that kind of stuff can actually change and heal very quickly within sharks so essentially you are looking for either the white and black colorations or large disfigurements so maybe like a fin that is flipped or something like that to identify these sharks so as 2017 last year's data has not been analyzed yet over 170 great white sharks have been identified off of Cape Cod so remember these hot spots that you very clearly learned not to go swimming at just within that one minute so the next video I am going to show you is one of the most popular swimming beaches in Cape Cod it's called Nasset Beach or leans right where the circles are around and it is located on a beach where we probably spent 90% of our tidying time so if that tells you anything it clearly does to me and everyone else on the boats but this is a footage that happened I think it was in 2017 of a shark that was supposed to shore that a seal that had three surfers right next to it and it was all caught on camera because there were about 3,000 people on the beach new video is just incredible there was an egg on a popular Cape Cod beach today after a shark went on the attack just yards from the shore you see this here the shark takes a bite out of a seal and kills it just off Nasset Beach or leans the water they are filling with blood a couple of surfers near by scrambled as that was happening beach goers rushed to the water's edge they were actually afraid with all that blood that the shark might have attacked a swimmer but nobody was hurt there Nasset Beach was closed down after this understandably, shark sightings are closed a number of beaches on the outer Cape over the past week perhaps that speaks to the water and just how close the seals are to shore we are going to learn pretty soon whether or not that was a great way I assume it is based on the way it took apart a surfer right up to the right as he went back in as fast as he can it was a good day to be at the beach going in above here very long as we just passed was a beach located right in the middle of those red circles of the highest detection rate for all the great white sharks there is actually a haul out of great seals above that beach and below so that means there is constant movement of great seals right next to shore between those two areas as a result we consistently saw between four and five great white sharks right on shore there almost every single day that we were in the area tagging there are some shark detection programs and if they spot a shark or if they spot us in the boat they close the beach for an hour the problem with that is that if we leave the area to go tag a different shark it does not mean those sharks have left the area what I was saying about how hard it is to see these sharks in the water you really cannot see these sharks out there but they can see you you saw how close that seal was to three surfers through 450 million years of evolution sharks can very easily detect a difference between humans and prey the one problem is that some of their senses like their ability to sense that allows them to feel essentially the electrical currents a beating heart so a living animal underwater that only works between two and three feet away from that animal so if you're in murky water and it knows that there is a living being there it can smell it it can see a blurry image but the water is murky the only way to see what it is because they don't have hands is to take a bite with an animal with a large mouth that one bite is usually down in an area where there is a large artery or something like that and a lot of these bites occur in places that do not have actually great access to medical care when you're bleeding that steadily and very quickly almost 100% of all shark bites that do occur are simply one bite because that's one bite where the shark sees what you are and it sees what you're not and it sees that you are not the seal so it leaves however you are still bleeding the last time great white sharks were in this area in New England in 1912, 1920s those times not a lot of people swam and there was not a lot of marine or water activities that people did there wasn't as much surfing there wasn't as much paddle boarding, boogie boarding swimming all that kind of stuff so in essentially the 70 years that the great white sharks were gone from Kepcot in New England humans learned that they loved the ocean they loved swimming, everyone learned how to swim, they loved paddle boarding they loved surfing, they loved dressing up as seals in dark wetsuits and by the time those great white sharks came back they did not get more dangerous there was suddenly more humans in the water so statistically those interactions are more numerous when I say to people who have never seen a shark before if you've ever been swimming in the ocean you've been swimming with a shark before just sound it but the thing is, is that because so many people swim or recreate in our ocean sound off of the coast, statistically there's more overlap with these animals so especially for us researchers all we can do is give out the information you saw those maps of all the detections, there's flags on Kepcot and around New England that will be raised up if there's been a shark sighted in the waters we can share our data we can give you the information hey don't go swimming offshore deeper than your waist and people still surf and then paddle board only a matter of time that there was going to be a negative shark and human interaction and unfortunately that happened last September so there's actually a lab in Florida that only focuses on shark attacks and George Bergus travels the world and he does research on where shark attacks have occurred what kind of shark did them like salinity, temperature sunlight cloud cover all of that kind of stuff and he was quoted in 2017 as saying about Kepcot there's only a matter of time until there is a human and shark interaction statistically because as more research is being done in the area we know for a fact that there are four to five great white sharks off of Nassau Beach every year that has not changed the amount of people that show up and swim at Nassau Beach especially in September and October when due to climate change we are having warmer falls more people are swimming and the lifeguards in Kepcot stop working on Labor Day so there is no one to really be raising those flags if there's any sharks in the area there is a lot of signage around Kepcot now recent shark sightings swim at your own risk so to the left where the shark attack happened it was right after Labor Day weekend I believe and it was in Wellfleet on the outer coast of Kepcot those are people on the beach looking down at where the shark attack happened what is the sign that is directly above them there so there is a sign directly above them warning them about sharks warning them not to go into water deeper than waist deep unfortunately the person who was fit for a great white shark was boogie boarding pretty far out and there were a lot of other servers and boogie boarders in the water there this is also in that same red circled area that I showed you before of detections and where the sharks were normally found he was bit while boogie boarding and due to blood loss unfortunately passed away before you can make it to the Kepcot hospital this did not deter people from a few days later all 100 plus people going out into that same spot where he was a bit and having a memorial for him on their support and this was strongly encouraged by just formal by everyone in Kepcot and the thing is is that you can give people the information that they need to essentially act intelligently to prepare themselves and to understand risk people are going to do what they're going to want to do to begin with and unfortunately after this happened there was a nation wide discussion of whether we should just go out and kill all the great white sharks and that discussion was actually first brought up in that 2017 video of the great white shark eating the seal that we saw a minute earlier so there was a barnster bowl commissioner who said that we should call all the sharks which means to kill it and that was simply after seeing a video of a shark naturally going after its prey and not just going after its prey but so selectively going after its prey that there were three servers right next to it that it wasn't attacking and the blame for this although incredibly sad that it did happen statistically I'm amazed it didn't happen earlier and that hasn't happened more often but it is something to remember that even if you are in the Cape Cod area you want the actual statistic where they're here so your odds of dying in a shark attack are one in 3.7 million that's very low but if you go boogie boarding or surfing or swimming in an area where these apex predators are known to frequent and you do so against the advice of all researchers in the area that raises it much, much higher another statistic which is a little bit more applicable to Vermont is that cows are responsible for 20 times more deaths than sharks so that's something to keep in mind when it comes to that so why should this surgeons of great way sharks in New England why should we celebrate it and why should we not join the crowds of people saying I want my ocean in Cape Cod to be like a swimming pool and I want all the predators taken out and the reason that is so this is another photo by Wayne Davis and this is a photo that he actually took of a friend of his who was on the paddle board this great way shark came nowhere close to this paddle board 99.9% of all interactions of great way sharks and humans are like in New England these are in the water they are not interested in humans but if we continue to bring our paddle boards and our surfboards out there you're going to have the overlap that you can see in this picture here so what I think is amazing about sharks is that they have been around for 450 million years they have survived five mass extinctions so what drove away the dinosaurs what drove away the mammoths these sharks survived and the way that a lot of the shark species survived is actually by diving deeper into the ocean so unlike on land where you have different apex predators you have lions you have bears you have wolves you have I mean in some places you have anacondas you have kind of a wide variety of terrestrial animals that could be apex predators but in the ocean no matter what ecosystem you're in from hydrothermal vents in the deepest part of the ocean to the coldest water around the Arctic you have a shark species that is the apex predator there and what's really amazing about that is that they have had so long to adapt perfectly to every single part of the ocean that they are found in and the thing about apex predators there's something called a trophic cascade so an apex predator is something that's going to be at the top of a food chain and if you take away the top predator so if you kill them off what is below them so in this case seals with the gray white sharks are going to overpopulate what the seals eat so fish or some kind of sand lances will then almost go extinct and then what they eat as a return will overpopulate so that's called a trophic cascade so in every single level of the eating or food chain there's going to be disruption whether it's overpopulation or almost extinction and with great way sharks at the top of a food chain they are the anchor for everything and all these other shark species like the seven gill shark the greenland shark which was just recently found to be over 250 years old one of the oldest living animals in the world they found that out by actually carbon dating the corneas of the greenland sharks that's estimated they can live up to 500 years in age and they think some of that though is because they live in such cold waters they age just slowly so recommendation to swimming cold waters but these apex predators are exactly why they should be celebrated that we for the first time since people start killing off the seals in early 19th century this is the first time that we have seen a healthy marine ecosystem in new england waters in more than 100 years you have the apex predator that will in turn keep in check the grey seals people who are specifically fishermen who are complaining about too many grey seals well the way you help that is you help protect the grey wedge sharks which will naturally keep that population in check as a result by keeping that population in check they won't overeat any of the fish that the fishermen are targeting so for very long time we did not have a healthy marine ecosystem and the reason fishermen are actually complaining about why it's harder and harder to fish is not because of seals it's because the way we fish has gotten more and more and more advanced through fish finders through commercial fishing they are the ones who are removing the fish from the sea not the grey seals so this matters to us in new england and specifically in vermont simply because a healthy marine ecosystem benefits everyone we get 50% of our air supply from the ocean and we have in vermont did not come from here so we need to be celebrating the fact that there is actually a healthy marine ecosystems that we can hopefully utilize in a sustainable manner one in nine jobs in the United States is actually connected to the ocean so if we have a healthy ocean then hopefully we can have a healthy economy when it comes to that so even being in vermont it does matter that these grey wedge sharks are here in new england that could ultimately and is already ultimately benefiting us if you want to swim in an ocean that is devoid of predators that's what pools are for and you can also go in swimming places where these sharks are not found there's a lot of information now due to advances in research where we know these sharks aren't we know they are in some places a lot of them undertake the same migration route as other people in this room and this summer is a Cape Cod and they winter down in south caroline in florida so right now is a great time to go swimming in Cape Cod not a great time to go swimming on a tilted head not sure all of these grey wedge sharks are right now but just because they essentially are a threat to us does not mean that we have the right to take them out of the ocean what I think is the most amazing thing when I spend that time diving with grey wedge sharks or any sharks in general is that it puts me back into the food chain because it's something that humans have gotten very good about removing ourselves from and we are just as interconnected as any of the other animals here and we are not at the top naturally so it gives you a level of respect for these animals and it connects you back to the earth in a way that I think we have kind of disconnected ourselves in the last century one other thing we can celebrate is that there's actually only 5 hotspots in the world where these grey wedge sharks are I spend most of their time very very far out to sea and I think it's incredibly cool that Cape Cod in the northwest Atlantic is now a grey wedge shark hotspot these beautiful animals are rarely seen because they try to stay as far away as possible from humans but they do come to shore to feed on certain animals like seals and sea lions so Stewart Island New Zealand South Africa California and Guadalupe and now Cape Cod in northwest Atlantic we are home to one of the most beautiful predators ever made in 450 million years and I think that's something to be celebrated instead of shying away from the fact or using it kind of as a fear topic and this is the last slide and to leave you with two quotes the one closest to me is by Peter Benchley the creator and writer of JAWS who is one of the largest shark conservation advocates in the world and his wife when that few years ago went eventually to the bottom of his work and now offers a lot of grants to shark researchers around the world but what he said is without sharks you take away the apex predator of the ocean and you destroy the entire food chain so this is the trophic cascade that we were just talking about and then Sylvia Earle who was one of the first female marine biologists and then also shark biologists in the world you should be afraid if you are in the ocean and you don't see sharks there are a lot of places where 20, 30 years ago there used to be a lot more shark species down in Caribbean off of Florida in the Keys they're no longer there anymore and it's because of all this destruction to coral there's been an interference with dredging cutting down mangroves pollution and you should be more concerned where you are swimming in an area where there should be sharks and you aren't seeing them because it's not a positive thing it's a negative sign of what we are doing to the oceans that will continue to essentially steamroll where I spend a lot of my time in Fiji doing work it's because it is a third world country so it has such healthy coral reefs there we essentially haven't destroyed them yet and where I work in Fiji I swim on a daily basis with eight different shark species and there's almost nowhere else in the world that you can do that and so it's amazing that you have to go that far away from the United States to get such a healthy brain ecosystem so just another reason why we should be celebrating the return of these great white sharks and the thing is is that along with the return of these great white sharks just like the return of the salmon to certain rivers we might start seeing positive effects that we didn't even know could be a positive effect so the returning of these great white sharks could start causing seabirds that we haven't seen in a very long time return to the area to feed on healthy populations of fish you know if certain seagrasses grow in areas it's just it's all so interconnected that it's possible we don't even know the extent of how positive this ecosystem will flourish with the great white sharks back in this area so I would love to answer any questions it doesn't have to be about great white sharks that you might have yes I was just wondering in the example of you being on the boat and having four great white sharks around you could you use like fish finder or radar or something like that so you can't simply because we're all usually in like 60 to water and the fish finder that they use is mostly to go offshore to the banks where they find those like large tuna and the large schools but really you just feel like a complete idiot because there's 5 15 foot sharks when we were on your boat and you have no clue and that's when you realize just kind of how attuned sharks are with their six senses and their ability to sense stuff like that and how not attuned we are yes does the fact that we're putting more and more plastics into the ocean that affects the white shark it affects everything especially when you hear stories about these whales and seals and birds dying coming up on shore and there's so much foam in the plastic that's what sharks are feeding on so besides the fact that to a certain degree it's just really not environmentally stable to be eating almost any fish right now you are ingesting more and more plastic the higher you go because those things that are at the top of the food chain like sharks and swordfish they're eating all those little fish that are already filled with plastic so the time you eat swordfish it's called bio accumulation there's a larger amount of plastic but also mercury and any other pollution like that related you keep using the word healthy ecosystem it doesn't sound like that's possible so with humans we make it very hard for things like that to happen because it is incredibly hard for us to not interject ourselves the reason this population and this ecosystem became unbalanced to begin with is because we systematically killed up the gray seals and that was for the fur or for the fish it is hard and now because of that because we throw this ecosystem out of whack there are now so many seals because they are protected so that's why there are a lot of fish human who are saying we need to kill off all these seals you don't, you just need to protect their predator that's here because the thing is that the our ecosystems whether it's on land or in the water have a natural way of keeping themselves in balance without any human interaction and they will find a sustainable number that what that ecosystem can handle so if we just keep our hands off of New England in the waters there the shark population will continue to flourish and will take down the seal population naturally and eventually we will get to the number where the population has peaked in New England for gray white sharks and for seals and then all the other animals believe them and from there everything will be kept naturally in balance as humans from hunting from commercial fishing we take too much and we throw everything out of whack very easily I was happy to see your map of the world showing where the white sharks were and where they weren't because I've been placed since where sharks are safe to swim with in the Galapagos with white-gipped sharks and other species and we only think of sharks as killers of people and that's not true they're part of all of the ocean so there are over 500 different species of sharks the only sharks that are ever responsible for any kind of human interactions or bites there's about 6 species so that leaves 493 sharks that want nothing to do with us and a lot of those instances like for oceanic white-tips it's actually come in the last century from large ships with Navy sailors crashing and them eating the injured dead people so that kind of instance it's I mean the last time a person was bit by a great white shark in Cape Cod was 1936 so it was almost 80 years since the last time there was a human white shark interaction who knows if those numbers will go up I believe that number will go up just simply because we have this wealth of information that people are not actually changing your behavior too so we know more about where these sharks are and where they're going and yet people are not really taking that into account when they're planning how far out they're swimming I think it's incredibly important that with the wealth of information that we can get now that you integrate that information into your behavior I understand that one of the big histories with great whites has been not knowing where their nurseries are not knowing where they have their babies and is there progress on that maybe you should keep that secret unfortunately it was discovered about 30 years ago and it's off of Montau so there's a great white shark baby birthing ground and then they're about this big but they're born and on the west coast it's a long beach and it's very deep and far out it's pretty shallow unfortunately because they don't want those baby sharks even though when sharks are born they come out fully formed because there's no parental care so essentially from the moment they're born they have to take care of themselves and be able to look for food and that's why mangroves are very important because they act as nurseries for a lot of sharks these sharks in Montau area they can very easily get hooked by fishermen and that kind of stuff and the reason they birth them around Montau is because they don't want to give birth to them deep out in the middle of the ocean where there's other large sharks so it's trying to keep them as safe as possible there but unfortunately we do know where their birthing grounds are and so it's one of those things and that's also a problem that has come up sometimes with these live trackers that we have on some of our more expensive tags where you in real time can see where these sharks are it does cause some people, not the best people in the world to go out and try to find these sharks that hook them so you know there's the problem with research and science is that there's someone who will take advantage of it in a negative way but you can't focus your research on those idiots out there you have with it for the majority of the people it's a benefit to know where these birthing grounds are and where these sharks are Is there a fine for that? So in California it is illegal I think it's a $10,000 fine to catch a great white shark off the beach that does not stop people from doing it because the thing about fishing is that it is completely indiscriminate so it's not like on their hook out there there's a sign that says any animal but a great white shark bite this so a lot of people can go out and fish off California and say they're trying to not catch great white sharks but they are actually purposely trying to catch great white sharks it's just kind of a he said she said kind of scenario there are no federal laws against catching great white sharks yet but for state waters Florida has protected some shark species like hammerheads but that still doesn't we know that 90% of them die after being handled so that doesn't stop people from still catching them and possibly killing them from just dragging them on a beach and taking a photo and also fish and wildlife does not always have the funds or the manner to really be policing or enforcing some of these rules and regulations and the thing is is that you can make all the protection and conservation laws that you want but unless there's someone who can actually enforce them it's not going to make a difference is that done in Massachusetts where they're Massachusetts not yet well so you can't besides spiny dog fish you can't commercially fish for any shark and it is frowned upon to catch any other sharks that doesn't stop people from catching like throshers and makos and blue sharks but you do have to go you know like 20-30 miles offshore before you even find those sharks so a lot of these sharks the great white sharks are also in the deep ocean you said pelagic is a definition of deep water so it just happens that because of the seals they are close to shore but they're normally the big manipulation is just the hard part is trying to protect any kind of marine animal is that clearly you cannot just protect the whole ocean so what you have to find out are these critical hot spots so where do these animals feed where do they breed where do they give birth and may all of that kind of stuff and so these white sharks do tend to stay pretty far offshore but they come in from June through now almost October November because of warming waters to feed on the seals and that's not not every shark you know and they're essentially from Montemoy all the way up to Canada so it's a pretty big distance but then in when the water starts to cool down they go further offshore and they go south so they do spend a lot of time but they are not completely pelagic like those blue sharks and makos that never come close to shore and that's simply because their prey is seals sea lions, whales what's the relationship between the people of Fiji and the sharks so it's really interesting Fijian folklore has a shark god and that has actually been a great benefit when it comes to protecting these sharks the one thing is that in the last 20 years ecotourism has really started to provide them with more money than it would provide if they were calling the sharks and selling the fins to Hong Kong so ecotourism or specifically diving and diving with sharks in Fiji brings about 20 million dollars now so if they protect one shark it can bring in $100 just for that one shark almost every day for 23 years if they kill that one shark the fins will bring in $500 once so you can only protect something if you have incentive to protect it so by protecting these sharks in Fiji their economy will actually flourish which is why Fiji has turned into such a wonderful hotspot when it comes to protecting the sharks, diving with the sharks it's the same with the Bahamas and Galapagos Kokos Islands Philippines, some areas they're finally learning that it is actually better off and they will make more money if they protect these animals instead of killing them but the people who are responsible for killing these sharks they're poor fishermen who have no other way to make money they're not these awful people they're simply trying to provide for their family and Fiji where I work when you pay to dive on this reef with these sharks a levy of that money goes to the village who's protecting that so essentially every single person in that village benefits by protecting those sharks yes I can see that if you can't enforce a law it's kind of a mood point but are there any sanctuaries of the east coast like say the Farallons or Monterey Bay off the west coast on the west coast but are there any marine sanctuaries on the east coast so I believe it was last year that they declared a marine sanctuary very far off in St. George's Banks area it's not a shark specific sanctuary but it is protected so the United States has 0 to 200 miles offshore that it can protect natural resource wise and I do believe that was declared a national monument I don't know exactly how that is different than a sanctuary but that area was declared a monument the thing is in US waters besides the spiny dogfish you cannot commercially fish any sharks but there are a lot of other countries in the world that have shark sanctuaries and marine protected parks and national parks just like in Fiji where they are federally protected yes so we do have nine marine sanctuaries in the US and one of them is right off of this area still walking banks yes thank you yes and also for the right whales and everything how many are we going to just mention is because of noise pollution part of it so the ships have moved away does that affect the shark too like it does the whales so it doesn't and that's simply because for whales the noise pollution affects directly their echolocation and their ability to communicate together sharks do not communicate visually they communicate with body language and they have 50 times better hearing than humans do and but they don't make any noises underwater so they really don't have any need to evoke or anything like that and that hearing is usually used to hear if there's any kind of splashing at the surface they can feel vibration wise along the sides of their bodies too I know you had a question I was just wondering if the media performance Shark Week has that helped or hindered the reputation of sharks I would say it is both it has drastically improved over the years with a more of a focus being given to actual science and actual research but it also is up to the scientists and the researchers who are asked to be involved to make sure that their shows are kept on track and are not just stunts or anything like that it there's two different ways that you can make change you can actually be in the show and make sure that it's focusing on research and science or you can turn down shows that are being offered to you that are simply stunts the thing is that Shark Week is mostly for people who really want to see extreme footage of sharks feeding or aerial breaching like great white sharks people doing stupid things to sharks it's not necessarily an education standpoint but every year there are more and more shows that are focusing on research and science and not just stunts and air jaws and that kind of stuff and another question I think the best way for conservation is what you're doing I'm sure you're going to be in the water but so big part of being a shark biologist which is not something you have to do if you are studying whales, dolphins turtles, people love those animals big part of being a shark biologist is not just the research that you're doing but also helping people understand why they should care also and also breaking apart any myths or misconceptions that are put out there from Shark Week, from Jaws, from Sharknado anything like that and it's a very rare occurrence there really aren't any other animals maybe large snakes or crocodiles that you have to do something like that too I think when people ask me why sharks for me the answer is why is not everyone out there studying sharks because I think they're amazing beautiful, they're amazing and if you had an option to go out and study these beautiful animals why isn't everyone doing it let's do one more question and then we'll all go to the cape to swim one last question did I scare you? no Lindsay did well thank you so much