Good morning everybody.
My name is Ryan Fischer.
I'm a member of the Darwin Festival Committee.
Welcome to the 47th Darwin Festival here at Salem State University.
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Good morning, everyone.
My name is Ryan Fischer and it gives me a great pleasure to make a formal
introduction for our guest speaker today, Doctor David Shipman.
Doctor David Shiffman completed his bachelor's in biology with a
concentration in Marine Science at Duke University.
Following this, he studied the feeding ecology of sandbox
sharks for his master's degree at the University of Charleston.
He continued his graduate work looking into the ecology and conservation of
sharks at the University of Miami.
He was a postdoctoral fellow at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia
where he used an interdisciplinary approach to study the sustainability of
Canadian shark fisheries.
He is now based in Washington DC where his consultancy using interdisciplinary
approaches aims to answer policy relevant questions about about marine species.
His talk today is entitled Why Everything you know about Shark conservation is
Wrong, an interdisciplinary look at public
misunderstanding of conservation science.
Welcome Doctor Chift, thanks for having me.
Are we successfully sharing screen writing?
You're the only camera I see.
Can you give me a thumbs up if you can see the slide?
Wonderful.
So thanks for having me today, everybody.
I'm excited to rant with you today about the last decade or so of my work.
Trying to understand why so many people who care about this subject get it wrong
all the time.
As Ryan mentioned, I live and work in the Washington DC area
where I am an interdisciplinary ocean conservation scientist and communications
and policy specialist.
I also do a lot of both public facing education and university level education.
I currently teach at 4 universities in four different states.
I also train scientists how to talk to people who are not scientists.
So if any anyone watching this, I know there are some folks who followed
me on social media and signed up for it.
If anyone's interested in having me speak at your institution or collaborating with
me on a research project or having you having me train your team and how to talk
to the public.
Or if you're interested in joining me for a shark research expedition down in
Florida where I do wear that awesome sea turtle hat you see there,
let's chat after.
I'll share my e-mail at the end.
So before I get into what people get wrong about shark conservation,
let's talk about some real facts about shark conservation.
Sharks and their relatives, which have been on the earth for over 450
million years.
They're not.
That's not only before dinosaurs, that's before trees.
They are some of the most threatened animals in the world.
Frogs are in worse shape because of a fungal disease in rainforests.
That's about it.
The the problem is so bad, and has gotten worse so fast that this
infographic that I helped the IUCN Red List make in grad school is already wrong.
It's already worse than this.
It is.
This says about 1/4 of all known species of sharks and their relatives are
threatened with extinction.
It's now closer to 1/3 and the threat that everyone's heard of is shark finning
and shark fin soup.
But I hope to convince you today that it's bad that that's the only threat that
you've heard of because that's not the biggest or only threat.
But I do include this line because it's an opportunity for me to include this
photo that I got from the the Soup Soup Nazi from Seinfeld.
He signed it.
No shark fin soup for you.
That hangs in my kitchen.
So over the last 20 years or so, the global trade in shark fins,
which again is the primary threat that most people who care about shark
conservation have heard of, has declined dramatically.
That is due to a combination of factors including increased environmental
advocacy and public concern, changing international trade laws,
and also to no small degree anti corruption of issues in within the
Chinese government of that cut down on luxury spending in general without much
of A focus on environmental impacts.
But just this is expensive.
You can't have it, you're a public servant.
However, over the past, over the same time period,
the number of sharks that are killed for that,
not their fins but for their meat has exploded in in global trade.
This is a problem because it generally involves different species of sharks,
it involves different fishing nations and it involves different end user market,
which means just focusing your policy on the shark finning and shark fin trade
does not help solve this problem.
I will also note that I have heard had some environmentalists tell me that that
photo in the lower left, a bowl of shark fin soup, that's evil,
that's repulsive, that's vile.
But that photo in the upper right, that's a grilled Mako shark steak.
That's fine because that's how normal people eat fish.
Other than the fact that that makes no sense from a conservation perspective.
Either way, you've got a dead shark.
It's also super racist.
The term shark finning, incidentally, does not mean what most people think it
means it is.
It is incorrectly used as a synonym for killing any shark for any reason.
However, the term it refers to a specific fishing
practice in which the fins of sharks are removed at sea and the carcass of the
shark is discarded at sea.
This was the most shared picture about ocean conservation on Instagram in 2016,
the last year of my PhD, and it went viral with the hashtag stop
shark thinning and a description about why shark thinning was bad.
These sharks are dead.
They were killed by fishermen.
They're endangered species in this photo.
But their carcasses made it to land, which means this is not shark thinning.
And stopping shark thinning would not stop this.
Knowing terms matters, so the shark conservation world is at a
bit of a crossroads at the moment.
More people care about sharks and want help than ever before, which is great.
But there is intense debate about what to do.
There's a lot of focus on just shark fin soup.
There's a lot of focus on particularly charismatic species like great white
sharks, which are absolutely not the most
endangered species of sharks.
There's a lot of focus on flashy dramatic activism,
like this Sea Shepherd activist who spray painted her body silver and put a big
fish hook through her back and hung herself outside of a fish market in Hong
Kong in the lower right here.
That's something that one of my sarcastic friends made for me when I said I don't
trust any solution to a complex global problem that's concise enough to fit on a
bumper sticker.
So as an interdisciplinary conservation scientist,
I spend a lot of my time thinking about this diagram,
the science policy interface, and we'll come back to this a lot during
the talk here.
This is a way of visualizing how science influences environmental policy change
and what steps it goes through along the way.
In the simplified case here, there's some sort of environmental
problem which is documented and described by scientists who propose,
possible propose or evaluate possible solutions that leads to public concern
and advocacy for change and eventually policy change.
It's almost never that simple, as anyone who's ever worked in this space
knows, but some some things really work almost
exactly like this.
And either way, this is worth considering as almost like
a null hypothesis of policy change.
If it looks different than this, it means something has gone wrong and you
can usually pinpoint what.
So when we're talking about policy change within the world of shark conservation,
there's two main families of shark conservation policy tools.
The number one threat facing sharks is unsustainable overfishing.
And the main dividing point between these policy families is what do we do about
that?
Should we allow any fisheries there?
The target based policy tools say unsustainable overfishing is bad,
but sharks can be fished sustainably, so let's do that.
These are policy tools like size limits.
If it's too small, you throw it back quotas.
You can only catch this many.
If you if you've ever gone fishing at all in it for anything,
you'd recognize these policy tools.
But in recent years there's been a push to say, no,
the problem is not unsustainable fishing.
The problem is fishing.
Let's ban all fishing entirely.
These are things like shark sanctuaries and shark fin trade bans.
It's important to note here, as an interdisciplinary scholar,
science is one of the best tools ever made for answering questions like,
is it possible to do this or what will happen if we do this?
But science absolutely cannot answer questions that start with should Should
we do this?
Is this the right thing to do?
That is not what science is for.
I will note that people who are interested in these target based policies
for sustainable shark fisheries, and I'll note in the interest of
transparency, I am on team sustainable shark fisheries.
This is tied to the beliefs that sustainable shark fisheries can and do
exist.
Obviously you wouldn't support a policy if you think it's impossible to work.
And the belief that sustainable fisheries for sharks offer some benefits that are
not found with total bans.
So is it possible to have a sustainable fishery for sharks?
Can this exist?
Does it exist?
When I talk to people who are sort of amateur ocean conservation activists,
they overwhelmingly believe obviously not.
Of course not.
I've never heard of this.
No group that I, I follow ever talks about this.
But the answer is absolutely, unequivocally yes.
And we've known that for 30 years.
Unsustainable overfishing is a big problem for sharks,
but sustainable fisheries absolutely can and do exist.
This diagram from or comes from a paper Co written by one of my one of my postdoc
advisors, Nick Dolvey.
It's called Bright Spots of Sustainable Shark Fishing.
The fisheries modeling math here is very confusing,
but what I want you to note here is that a sustainable shark fishery confirmed by
science is indicated in green on this map, and you note there are green dots on the
map.
Sustainable shark fisheries can and do exist.
This paper also went further and said that bans are not the answer and that
some fisheries that are currently not sustainable could become sustainable with
relatively minor changes to management.
Sustainable seafood Guides such as Seafood Wash and the Marine Stewardship
Council have identified a variety of shark fisheries that are sustainable,
including the spiny dogfish fishery in Massachusetts,
which is the largest shark fishery in the United States.
This is the result of a survey I did of my entire field during Graduate School.
For those of you who are not familiar with interdisciplinary conservation
science, let me brief you or let me briefly Orient
you here.
This is called a bar chart, and a bigger bar means that more people
agree with that statement.
90% of the scientific experts in my field, 9 out of 10,
believe that sustainable fisheries management, not bans,
should be how we move forward to save sharks.
Good luck.
Good luck getting 90% of your scientific field to agree on literally anything.
And we were able to agree on this, something so fundamental to the future of
our field.
NOAA, the US government agency that manages
fisheries, is actively promoting US caught sharks as
sustainable seafood.
And as an amateur home cook, I did not think this was going to this
was going to be how I ended up getting quoted in Food and Wine magazine.
But it totally counts.
I've been quoted in Food and Wine magazine,
so hopefully I've convinced you that sustainable shark fisheries can and do
exist.
That doesn't mean that's what we should do, but it does.
It should be.
You should be convinced now that it is absolutely,
unequivocally possible and does happen.
So what about people who support these limit based policy tools?
Support for these policy tools are are often tied to personal values,
which might be cultural in nature.
Some cultures values Revere sharks as the reincarnated spirits of ancestors who
drowned at sea.
And sometimes people just like sharks.
These are people who they just don't the the idea that sustainable shark fisheries
can and do exist just doesn't matter to them.
It's independent of how they value sharks.
And Johnson ET al 2004 reminds us as scientists that sometimes it's important
to know you roll and shut your mouth.
I would never say your values are wrong or your values are bad.
That is not my job.
It is inappropriate as a scientist to say that.
But there are also people who wrongly state that science.
Science says that sustainable shark fisheries are impossible.
There's no such thing.
We shouldn't do it, and that is factually wrong.
It is appropriate for scientists to stand up for things that are,
to protest things that are factually wrong about our field of expertise.
So the science is clear that sustainable shark fisheries can and do exist.
But so many people who care about this issue wrongly believe that they can't and
don't exist.
And I'm going back to our science policy interface diagram.
I spent two years of my life during my post doc,
living right here trying to understand what people learn about science and where
it comes from.
What we found in general that I'll outline over the rest of the talk is that
some scientific research, the idea that sharks are in trouble is
reaching the public, but other scientific research,
sustainable shark fisheries can and do exist and are the preferred solution of
experts, is not reaching the public and troubling
Lee the the public is learning about that stuff from sources other than science.
Now, science is not the only form of expertise
and it's not the only way of learning about the world.
But in this case, people are learning about this stuff from
sources other than reality, which is a problem.
And this can lead to what's called an effort goal mismatch.
Remember how nice and clean the science policy interface diagram I originally
showed you was?
The more complicated it gets, the more things are going wrong.
And this is basically a worst case scenario.
And this is groups that are supposed to be working together are actually working
towards mutually exclusive goals.
You can't have a sustainable fishery and a ban on all fisheries,
at least not in the same place in time.
And in some cases the groups are actively in conflict with each other.
So this is where interdisciplinary research comes into play.
Are sustainable shark fisheries possible?
That's a natural science question, and it's been answered.
Yes, they are possible, but why don't people know about that?
Or why do people why have people heard this but disagree with the experts?
That is something that requires social science or interdisciplinary methods to
answer.
There have long been calls for the for including social science and
interdisciplinary work in the world of shark conservation,
but this is a research priority that is not being prioritized.
We did an analysis of all of the shark, of all of the scientific talks that have
ever been published or ever been given at the American Elasabank Society conference
and found that in about 2000 scientific talks,
fewer than 30 involved social science, and nine of those were mine.
So you have to look really hard to find this stuff.
So given that sustainable shark fisheries can and do exist,
the overall focus of my research was trying to understand why people believe
that they can't and don't exist.
Or put a little more technically, where do non scientists learn about these
issues and what information is shared through those information pathways?
And I'm going to present to you today the result of three interrelated projects
once you're not a grad student anymore.
We don't call them chapters, but they're basically chapters.
One is through, one is people learning about this stuff
through popular press coverage newspaper, one is through infotainment documentaries
with a specific focus on Shark Week, and one is through public information
shared from environmental nonprofits.
Let's first talk about popular press coverage.
So media content and discourse analysis is a really complex and nuanced field
within interdisciplinary studies, but I what I want you to know here as
background is that citizens understanding of what the environmental threat is and
what the possible solutions are affect what solutions they support.
And also media coverage effects what people know about threats in the
solutions.
Sharks are often the subject of popular press coverage.
There are thousands of articles about sharks written every year,
but an analysis by colleagues of mine in Australia found that less than 8% of
those news articles even mentioned that sharks are some of the most threatened
species in the world.
Most of them are about sharks either biting people or sharks swimming near a
beach in a way that made people think they were going to bite people.
Media framing matters.
This is a, this is a topic that some of you might be
more familiar with than others.
But even if all the facts in an issue are presented accurately,
an article can be framed in a certain way to make you feel a certain way.
So in this humorous example, the shark is not biting the cage to eat
the human, but they're, Oh my God, someone's trapped in the cage.
Let me get it out.
So this is a, this is a real thing that that happens.
That the same sort of story can be framed wildly differently.
So my research questions for this project are, would some overall,
would someone learning about shark conservation just by reading newspaper
articles be well informed about this issue?
And specifically, are threats to sharks and policy
solutions to those threats framed in a factual,
factually accurate manner with appropriate context?
And all of these words have very technical social science definitions.
But I'll, I'll give you a, a bird's eye view here.
Importantly, in media content and discourse studies,
it's not just fact checking.
Things can be wrong in a bunch of different ways.
One of those ways that I think is really interesting is what's called aggregate
coverage bias.
Aggregate coverage bias occurs when there are, let's say, 10 threats,
but one of those threats gets much, much, much, much,
much more media coverage than all the others,
even if every individual fact is correct in all those stories.
You would wrong readers would wrongly believe that that one issue is much, much,
much more important than the others just by virtue of the relative volume of
coverage.
And a classic example of this is coverage of Hillary Clinton's emails during the
2016 presidential election.
There's also just straight up wrong information,
which can be sometimes from the quoted expert or sometimes the journalist,
and also things that are misleading due to inappropriate context.
A fact is correct, but it's not introduced or put or
contextualized correctly.
So we found about 2000 popular press articles from the last 10 years in the
English speaking world about Shark Khan's broadly defined shark conservation.
And I had a team of 10 volunteer readers, including some undergraduates under my
supervision, and they answered 76 questions for each
one of these articles.
Some of these were presence absence questions.
Does this article mention climate change, yes or no?
But also things that were a little more specific is the IUCN Red List quoted?
Is the expert who is quoted from a nonprofit or a government agency or a
scientific institution, etcetera.
Here are some of the highlights of what we found.
One is the art, the species that were featured,
and I apologize here if anyone is red green colorblind,
but this is the official IUCN Red List color scheme.
We found that out of of thousands of articles,
fewer than 20 of those articles mentioned a critically endangered species of shark.
So the species of sharks that are the most threatened and could most benefit
from a little publicity, and also those that have perhaps a more
interesting story than just don't eat unsustainable seafood were barely
mentioned at all.
People would be well informed about what's going on with great white sharks,
but they would not know what's going on with many of the critically endangered
species that most need our help.
So now let's look about threats to sharks.
Remember that shark fin soup is not the biggest or only threat to sharks anymore.
It hasn't been in the lifetime of any of the undergraduates who are watching this
talk today.
And the shark meat trade is growing in as a threat and is now the biggest threat to
sharks by far.
And you would not know that from looking at popular press coverage which included
6 1/2 times as many mentions of shark finning and and the shark fin trade as
the shark meat trade, which is a clear case of aggregate
coverage bias.
What about are?
So are the threats to sharks described in a factually accurate manner with
appropriate context?
No, they're not.
What about policy solutions?
Remember we have the target based policy tools which focus on sustainable
fisheries management and we have the limit based policy tools which say no
shark fishing, no trade in shark products.
So there is a great deal more coverage of shark fin trade ban, the limit based tool,
than there is of sustainable shark fisheries management.
This is a suite of 10 policy tools together in the blue bar,
because otherwise most of them wouldn't show up against the axis at all.
They were mentioned so few times despite being supported by experts.
So let's look specifically at shark fin trade bans.
Shark fin trade bans were mentioned 2 1/2 times as often as all sustainable
fisheries management tools combined, despite the fact that these are a policy
solution that are are widely not supported by experts.
Even if you think that this is the best way to protect sharks,
which again most experts do not, we wrote a whole paper about this in
Marine Policy.
The fact that they are covered 2 1/2 times as much as all sustainable
fisheries management tools combined is a clear case of aggregate coverage bias.
And what about these consumer boycotts, which I I have charitably characterized
as other here?
You could also call them nonsense.
This is one small nonprofit.
They have two employees and a few volunteers and they find these well known,
often beloved brands and that have a very, very tenuous connection to shark
conservation and they make a lot of publicity about this.
These get meant these get more media coverage than all sustainable fisheries
management tools combined, despite being literally nothing.
You may be wondering, hey David, what the heck does Starbucks have to do
with global shark conservation?
This is the answer to that.
And this is not an exaggeration of how ridiculous these campaigns are.
When Starbucks sells their coffee in Southeast Asia,
they go through a food importer exporter distributor,
as everyone does when they sell anything internationally.
That food importer exporter distributor is owned by a holding company,
which is owned by another holding company.
One of the thousands of businesses owned by that other holding company is a
restaurant that serves shark fin soup.
For that, this this campaign got dozens of articles
about how Starbucks is killing sharks.
It's just nonsense.
But I will note that a consumer boycott of an Atlantic City hotel chain that you
may have heard of that was serving shark fin soup was responsible for these.
I swear to God, real tweets sharks are last on my list
other than the losers and haters of the world.
So does popular press coverage cover policy solutions in a factually accurate
manner with appropriate context?
It does not.
Would someone learning about shark conservation by reading newspapers be
well informed?
They would not be.
They would wrongly believe that shark finning is the only major threat to
sharks, that banning the shark fin trade is the
only solution to save sharks, and that these consumer corporate
boycotts have some role to play in helping.
None of these things are true.
I also briefly note that if any of the faculty or graduate students or other
scholars watching this are interested in doing a media content and discourse
analysis of your issue, I would love to collaborate with you.
Shoot me an e-mail after this talk and let's chat.
So now let's talk about infotainment documentary, specifically Shark Week,
which some of you may be familiar with.
So what is Shark Week?
Shark Week is the longest running cable event in history,
attracting millions of viewers each year.
Theoretically, it's a week long series of sarcastic air
quotes documentaries that airs on the Discovery Channel.
And it is, as you'll see, a dumpster fire of lies,
pseudoscience and nonsense.
To give you a sense of this, I think we're in webinar mode so it'll be
hard to hard to pull people.
But shout, shout the answer out loud wherever you
are and let your office mates get confused.
One of the following Shark Week episode titles is a real episode title,
and the others I made-up this morning to make fun of Shark Week.
Which of these do you think is real?
Great white serial killer.
Fatal Christmas ******* does shark Week 2.
Naked and Afraid of Sharks 2 The Haunting of Shark Tower,
Real Monsters of the Bermuda Triangle and Mecca Shark Lover down Under.
Which of those do you anyone think is real?
I'll give you a few few seconds here to think you're right, they're all real.
So we we have no time to talk about science on the Discovery Channel because
we are too busy with Naked and Afraid of Sharks too.
I happened to watch that episode with my mother who said, wait a minute,
these people are allowed to have a mask, fins and snorkel,
but they're not allowed to have pants.
You know, science.
So how do we know that Shark Week is bad?
We checked.
We did a media content discourse analysis of 202 episodes of Shark Week over 32
years.
We had two poor undergraduate volunteers who watched all of Shark Week ever and
wrote down what was in it.
And it was in fact worse than we thought.
This contains egregious lies.
Perhaps the the worst example of this was the megalodon shows which claimed that
that megalodon, which is if you've ever been to an
aquarium, they there, there was giant shark jaws that you can
stand in and take your picture.
Sharkweed claimed that not only is this extinct animal alive,
but it claimed this extinct animal is alive and is a threat to your family and
scientists and the government are lying to you about it.
Don't trust them.
Colleagues of mine got death threats about this.
This is completely fictional.
It used actors pretending to be the families of shark bite victims and
pretending to be government officials.
It used CGI video if photoshopped images.
Completely fictional.
I give public talks about sharks all the time.
I get questions about this.
Is this real all the time, 10 years later?
And then the most horrifying thing I've ever experienced was the next year Shark
Week aired a show called Megalodon, The New Evidence,
which used real criticism that the first show had received as evidence of Look how
deep the conspiracy goes.
Shark Week also lies to scientists to get them to appear in shows.
It makes them seem like they were responding to questions that they were
never actually asked due to deceptive editing.
One of my colleagues who is a hammerhead shark scientist was shocked to learn that
she was showing up not in a special about hammerhead shark science as she was told,
but in a special about Hitler the magic evil hammerhead,
and this resulted in her losing her job.
This show presents fringe lunatics as credible experts.
Of the most featured expert on Shark Week is Andy Casa Grande,
who you can see here on his Instagram page encouraging people to take LSD and
then go swimming with sharks because that's the only way you can really
experience nature.
Please don't do that.
There was also this reality show Shark Academy with Doctor Riley Elliott,
in which people did a series of ridiculous survivor style competitions to
gain a graduate student spot in the lab of Doctor Riley Elliott.
This show was cancelled when it was revealed that Riley Elliott is not a PhD
and does not have a lab or spot for graduate students.
It's also a disaster for representation.
My field is about 2/3 women.
You would not know that from watching Shark Week,
which not only features more men than women,
but features more guys named Mike than women.
Most of the shows take place in Mexico, South Africa or the Bahamas,
three very sharky areas, but local experts are hardly ever
featured.
They fly white guys from halfway around the world rather than interview a local
expert from that community.
The few women who are shown on the show are never called doctor or shown their
credentials, but they give Riley Elliott a fake PhD.
The claim that Shark Week is good for public awareness and how conservation is
laughably false.
It is extremely common for an hour long episode of fear mongering nonsense to
note oh as narration over the end credits.
Actually, sharks aren't a big threat to you and
they're in trouble.
Save them.
That's it.
And that's not conservation.
In 202 episodes, we identified only 6, not 66,
actionable things that Shark Week ask their audience of millions to do to help
save shark.
And four of those things were don't eat shark fin soup,
which most Americans are already not doing.
So the most widely viewed, supposedly educational content about
shark science and conservation uses blatant,
egregious lies and does not talk about the actual problems.
In addition to promoting fringe lunatics.
This is bad news.
And finally, people learn about this stuff from
environmental nonprofit advocates.
So my questions for this part of the research were,
how does science influence environmental advocacy?
I wanted to know if advocates believe that science matters for environmental
advocacy.
Where do advocates get their science?
Does all relevant science reach them and do advocates work towards the stated
policy preferences of scientific experts?
So we did a voluntary online survey of and we reached out to every environmental
nonprofit employee who's brought, whose portfolio broadly and includes
broadly defined shark conservation advocacy.
Not these are not the scientists who work for these nonprofits.
These are the advocates and educators.
We have 84 responses who are 84 respondents who did this voluntary online
survey, and these included ocean nonprofits that
do sharks, but other ocean stuff.
All we do is sharks and groups that work on both land and sea issues,
including sharks.
We had respondents from all over the world.
They were heavily biased towards North America and Europe,
but that is not sampling bias.
That's the population.
They're just, they're just are more nonprofits working
on these issues in North America and Europe.
But we had at least at least three responses from every major region of the
world.
So first, I wanted to know if these advocates
believe that science matters for environmental policy making.
And we got a range of responses here from Science is Essential.
We can't do appropriate management without Science.
We got some intermediate responses, such as, sure,
science in general is really important for conservation advocacy,
but that doesn't mean every individual piece of science matters.
And then also we had a lot of concerns about people who pretended or claimed
that their science mattered for conservation when it did not.
Next, I wanted to know where do these advocates
get their scientific information from?
And is this happening?
A majority of respondents.
And again, these are not the scientists who work for
these nonprofits.
These are the advocates and educators, they said.
I read several scientific articles from peer reviewed scientific journals every
month as part of my job and more than half of them said that they've been a
co-author on an article.
Again, not the scientists, the advocates.
A minority said I have never read a peer reviewed scientific journal article in my
life.
I also asked are there scientists who work for your nonprofit if you have a
technical question.
More than half said yes, we have scientists who work for my
nonprofit whose job it is to teach me, the advocate,
the educator about the science.
Whereas other groups said I there are, there are external scientific volunteers
who are available to help me with this or I have some other access to scientists
there.
About 10% of respondents said no, I haven't, I do not.
Scientists are not involved in my group in any capacity.
I never speak to scientists.
Those are the same people, 100% overlap who said they never read
scientific papers.
Does all relevant science reach these advocates?
I want and this was compared by a series of questions about the the literature.
You have seen the green bars here.
This is how scientists feel about sustainable shark fisheries,
whether or not they can and do exist and if they should be the gold.
The blue bars are new.
Those are the environmental respondents, the the environmental advocate
respondents to this survey.
A majority of of environmental advocates correctly identified that sustainable
fisheries are possible a but a majority felt that there are none in the world
today.
They are theoretically possible, but they I have not seen evidence of 1
and 78% of these respondents said that shark conservation advocacy should focus
on sustainable fisheries, not banned.
So still a huge majority, though not quite 90%.
This was an interesting analysis of the what's called the primary partitioning
variable, which is the survey response that
explains the greatest variation in other survey responses of people who were asked,
do you prefer?
Do you think the goal of shark conservation advocacy should be making
those fisheries more sustainable, or a ban on all fishing and trade?
Among respondents who regularly read the peer reviewed scientific journal
literature on the right, 90% of them prefer sustainable fisheries.
The exact same percentage as with scientists, though.
Among respondents who rarely or never read the peer reviewed scientific journal
literature, it's about 5050.
So the people who are met are better informed about the facts.
Not even getting into values, you're more aware of the facts.
They overwhelmingly agree with scientists about the way forward.
I explicitly ask these people about what do you think the state of science is
about Sustainable shark fisheries of a a plurality of people said the science
concerning the sustainable the sustainability of shark fisheries is
still uncertain.
That's not correct.
The next largest group, about 35% said the science is clear,
sustainable shark fisheries can and do exist.
That is the factually correct answer.
And then about 12% of respondents said the science is clear,
sustainable shark fisheries are impossible and they've never been done.
Those are the very is the very same people who said,
I've never talked to a scientist, I've never read a scientific paper.
They are, they feel very comfortable opining on
opining on the state of the science and they say things that are wrong.
One of those people said, I've never seen any evidence that it's
possible to have a sustainable shark fishery,
which is an interesting thing to say when they are not looking for evidence
anywhere.
That evidence exists, some intermediate responses.
It's clear that sustainable shark fisheries can and do exist,
but that doesn't mean that all shark fisheries could be made sustainable.
Fair enough.
And then there was a lot of support for the idea of sustainable shark fisheries.
I also wanted to know if advocates were working towards the stated policy
preferences of scientific experts, in this case sustainable shark fisheries,
or if we had one of these effort goal mismatches on our hands.
So a majority of respondents said that in the last five years,
my nonprofit has worked primarily on sustainable fisheries management tools.
Great.
But there were a lot of groups that were working on these limit based tools,
especially shark fin trade bans.
This is a stacked bar chart.
Green showing, I agree with the I support this policy.
Red showing I oppose this policy even among environmental advocates.
Shark sanctuaries and shark fin trade bans received less support,
less green and more opposition.
More red than sustainable fisheries management.
But there was still more support among this community than there was for these
tools among scientists.
So this is my favorite graph that I've ever made.
It doesn't claim that everyone who disagrees with me is wrong,
and I'd never claimed that.
But again, the primary partitioning variable here is
a factually answerable question.
Do you believe that sustainable shark fisheries exist?
Among respondents who believe that sustainable shark fisheries do exist,
about 20% of them support shark fin trade bands.
But among respondents who believe that sustainable shark fisheries do not exist,
100% of them support shark fin trade bans.
And remember, sustainable shark fisheries do exist.
That doesn't mean that's what we should do.
That's a values question.
But they absolutely, unequivocally do exist.
So I would never say that everyone who disagrees with me is wrong,
but everyone who is wrong disagrees with me.
And that is almost as satisfying to say.
So why do people support bans?
There are people who said people should not eat.
People just should not eat sharks.
Sharks are nature.
Sharks are not food animals.
People believing sustainable shark fisheries are not possible and then
people saying that no one should kill or eat any animal ever.
Notably, that respondent came from a wealthy
country in Europe and not from a country that perhaps relies a little bit more on
wild animals for food.
Among people who supported sustainability, there was opposition to the idea of bans.
There was opposition to the idea of blanket bans.
These policies say, don't say we look at the individuals of
conservation status of each shark species.
They say we were no shark fishing or no fishing for any species of shark at all.
But some shark species are doing great.
And there are also concerns about bans.
Just make things go underground where it's harder to measure.
So in conclusion for this section.
Do advocates believe that science matters for policy making in general?
Yes, but not every individual piece of science.
Where do advocates learn about science?
Most of them read the literature or work with a nonprofit that employs scientists,
which is the same way scientists learn about this stuff.
But there are some who are very loud in their opposition to sustainable shark
fisheries who do not ever read the science or talk to scientists.
Does all relevant information reach them?
I know people were were very aware that sharks are in trouble,
but not that aware of sustainable sustainable fisheries as a solution.
And do advocates work towards the stated policy preferences of scientific experts?
Many of them do, but a lot of them do not.
That we had found strong evidence of this effort.
Goal mismatch, this worst case scenario.
Another interlude for you here.
A thing that I I do a lot is assessing what the entire state of a field opinion
is on something.
What do people, especially for environmental issues,
what do people think is the biggest threat?
What do people think is the most effective solution?
You want to do that for your field?
I'd love to chat with you about how we can collaborate.
I also work on a related issue of expert solicitation research priority setting.
In this case, we got together everyone in my field and
asked them what are the biggest unanswered questions in shark ecology and
conservation and frame them as research priorities that future graduate students
can use to help inform their research.
So in conclusion, overall the popular press overwhelmingly
covers one threat, shark finning and the shark fin trade,
and one set of policy solutions banning shark finning.
And that is not the biggest threat or the most effective solution.
The most widely viewed documentaries about sharks do not accurately portray
these issues.
People are aware that sharks are in trouble,
but do not are less aware about the solutions.
And at least some of these environmental nonprofit groups work against the stated
policy preference is of scientists.
So back to my original question, why do so many people believe that
sustainable shark fisheries cannot and do not exist when the science is clear that
they can and do?
And it's because there's a lot of confusing information out there shared
from a lot of different sources that people should trust.
If you are learning about sustainable shark fisheries and shark conservation
from sources other than credentialed experts and the peer reviewed scientific
journal, journal literature, you are learning information that is not
supported by science.
And that is true of a lot of different fields and a lot of different issues.
But I have colleagues who study misinformation and disinformation for
much more controversial things like GMO foods or climate change or plastic
pollution, and they're shocked at how much nonsense
is shared by people supposedly helping with sharks.
So is it bad that so many people are wrong?
Yes, it is.
When people in a democracy like ours, public support is needed to pass
regulations and pass laws.
And when people do not understand the problem and do not understand what the
solutions are, they do not support the policies that the
evidence and the experts say we need.
I'll also note that while we're arguing about how to save sharks,
sharks still very much need to be saved.
This is a this, this is actually, it's way less than this,
the number of humans that are killed by sharks each year.
But compare that to the number of sharks that have been killed by humans in the
hour we've been speaking.
I should note that that is significantly zoomed in.
So while we're arguing about how to help, sharks very much still need our help.
What can scientists do about this?
It'd be really great with more scientific and technical experts.
Join me doing public science engagement and talking to policy makers and talking
to the press.
And it would be great in academia world if doing that stuff counted as leadership
and service in hiring and tenure decisions.
Often it does not.
It is something that people have to do because they believe it's important,
in addition to all the other work that you're that professors have to do.
So before I wrap up here, I would like to thank my many project
collaborators, including people who read all those
articles and watched all those Shark Week specials for me, my finding sources,
especially from the Liebert Euro Postdoctoral Fellowship in Conservation
Leadership, which I did in Vancouver.
I'd like to thank my new friends at Salem State for inviting me to speak with you
here today.
I have written up this talk as an invited editorial in Integrative and Comparative
Biology.
I have PDF copies of it if people are interested.
You can shoot me an e-mail.
All of this is covered under Human Subjects Research Ethics Permits.
You can find me on social media at Why Sharks Matter.
I am everywhere.
I'm one of the most followed scientists in the world.
So if you have a question that we don't get to here today,
or if you're interested in talking with me more about collaboration or about some
of this other research, or if you want to join me on a shark
research expedition, shoot me an e-mail at Why Sharks Matter
at Gmail or find me on social media at Why Sharks Matter.
Why Sharks Matter is also the title of my shark conservation book.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm going to stop sharing and bring us all back together here.
Great, awesome.
Thank you, David.
Just a reminder to folks in attendance, if you have a question,
please type it into the Q& A and Ethel and I who are moderating will
ask the questions.
Ethel, I think I'll start off with a couple and
then I'll pass it over to you if that works.
OK, I'm going to go a little bit out of order,
but Brendan asked when you mentioned sustainable fisheries, what do you mean?
That's a great question, Brendan.
And sustainability of seafood is a very complicated issue.
That's actually the subject of my second book,
which I just turned in the draft for earlier this year.
So that'll be out.
If you follow me on social media, you'll get alerts about that.
But the short answer is we're generally talking about a fishery that we know how
many individuals are in the population approximately.
We know how many babies they have and how often,
and therefore we know how many can be removed from the population without
causing overfishing.
And also there are rules in place to make sure that that's followed.
the US generally does a very good job with that.
Canada does a medium job with that.
Australia is pretty solid.
The UK is intermediate.
Much of the rest of the world is significantly behind us.
If you so unsustainable fishing practices are the number one threat to sharks by
far, so much that there's not really a #2
threat.
And if you want to help save sharks, which will also is also how you help save
coral reefs and sea turtles and whales and all that,
don't support unsustainable seafood practices.
Notice I didn't say you have to give up all seafood,
but use a guide such as a seafood watch run by the Monterey Bay Aquarium,
which is an excellent science based resource that's really,
really easy to use if you tell it where you live.
It gives you some common seafood areas in your seafood products available in your
area organized into green, which is you can eat this guilt free.
It's a caught environmentally responsibly yellow every once in a while you can have
it, but there's some issues and red which is
maybe order the chicken.
Awesome thank you.
Another question from William is why are bands not considered effective forms of
conservation?
That's a good question, and bans are an appropriate form of
conservation for some species.
For species that are so threatened or so vulnerable or so fragile that there's no
way to sustainably exploit them, a ban is the only way possible.
The problem comes when people from primarily wealthy Western nations tell
people who are in developing nations where they are starving,
often as a result of exploitation by Western nations in the past.
Hey, you're bad for trying to feed your family.
We we love sharks.
Leave sharks alone.
That is not that does not work for some.
That is ethically deeply problematic.
I have a lot of examples I could rant about if we have time later,
but also it doesn't work because people won't do it.
There are species that are particularly threatened should be protected.
Species that can be sustainably exploited generally should be because that is how
humans eat and humans provide money for their families.
This is sort of related, but Jen asks what type of research has
been done on how to convince fishermen that sustainable fishing is a good
direction to go in.
Oh, there's a lot.
And I talked to fishermen a lot about this stuff.
And there's generally speaking, fishermen are on board with this.
They understand.
They have friends in other fishing communities elsewhere that when a fishery
is collapsed due to over harvesting, they understand that it's bad for them.
They understand it's bad for the whole community.
There's some skepticism about specific research papers or sometimes even labs,
but the idea that fisheries are vulnerable and that we need to manage
them well is something that most fishermen,
at least in the at least in the US, are very much on board with.
Sometimes we have to get into specific techniques of, hey,
this thing you're doing is bad.
Do this instead.
That gets tricky because a lot of times the what they say is,
but this is the way my father did it and the way his father did it, etcetera,
etcetera.
Like, OK, that the fact that it's been done wrong
for 200 years doesn't make it any less wrong.
So there's a, there's a lot of discussion with this.
It has to do a lot with relationships.
But usually what happens is there are, there are regulations that are passed.
We don't try to persuade them to voluntarily do this because even if there
are lots of fishermen that are doing a lot of great, great stuff,
if some say I'm still going to do it the easier, cheaper way,
then that's a problem for whales or for sharks.
So usually the goal here is absolutely make sure that these communities who
depend on the resource have a seat at the table.
But the goal here is not persuading individual fishermen to voluntarily
change, but making a regulation so everyone has
to.
Great.
Ethel, Thank you.
Yeah, sure.
So I'll ask a couple of questions from the audience.
How was Shark Week legally allowed to get away with what they're doing?
There are no rules against lying on TV.
Have you guys seen the state of our state of the world?
There's, I mean, there's no rules against it.
If they had the So one of the reasons why they used fake people in some of these
specials is because one thing there is a rule about is defaming individuals who
are real.
So by having a fake person that they completely made-up for the purpose of the
show, they get around that and the rest of it
they say like, Oh well, we're just simplifying it.
No, you're not simplifying it.
You're lying.
That's not the same thing.
It's a it's a good time.
Thank you.
Another question would be, do you do any research on deep sea sharks?
Great question.
I don't personally work on deep sea sharks,
though I do have some colleagues that do.
I have most of those species that I work on are what we call small and large
coastal sharks under US fisheries management rules.
And that's species that you've probably heard of.
We, I work on black tip sharks, I work on hammerhead sharks,
I work on nurse sharks and also some common species that you might not have
heard of, like I work on bonnet heads, I work on black nose sharks,
things like that.
So most of my work to work on deep sea species,
you need a big boat that goes really far.
And most of the research that I do, it's a,
it's a medium sized boat and we are back at the dock everyday.
So we don't go far enough to work on those.
Oh that's the next next one.
What is your input on cage diving or swimming with shocks?
Do you think it's unethical or do you think it helps people have more open mind
on shocks and decrease negative association with shocks?
Great question and the short answer, which is every scientist favorite answer
to everything and every non scientist least favorite answer is it depends.
There are some wildlife tourism scuba operations that do a really great job.
They're responsible, they're safe for the sharks and the
humans.
They teach people about sharks and you get to have an amazing experience with
wildlife that lots of people don't get to see.
That's great.
But there is also a group of what a term I'm trying to get into the peer reviewed
journal literature of quote, macho cowboy idiot scuba divers who are
trying to who they ride sharks, they hug sharks.
They they cause serious physiological disruption to the sharks and humans have
died participating in that these activities.
That's bad.
That should not be allowed.
You should not support that.
There are some people who say, well, I'm raising awareness.
No, you're not.
You're just trying to get an amazing shot of yourself doing something scary for
Instagram.
There's no awareness of any kind happening there.
So it depends.
The good news is the responsible operations are usually not hard to tell
apart from the macho cowboy idiots.
I will note that macho cowboy idiot is a gender neutral term and many of the worst
offenders are women.
But there's the people who do this.
It's real obvious on their website that they're pushing boundaries and it's
extreme and stuff like that.
No, that's not good, Lindsay.
OK, a question from Chanel.
I live in Gloucester, which is a huge fishing town.
I honestly haven't seen any mention of overfishing or anything to help managing
harmful fishing practices.
Is there anything a smaller town could do to help get regulations passed?
So it's a great question.
Most of our regulations in the US are passed at the federal level or at the
state level rather than local.
If you want to do something at the local level,
that is if just most regulations don't work that way.
Though some things do happen at the Marina level that if you are fishing
using this gear, you're not welcome to dock or unload here.
A big issue happening in seafood sustainability in your neck of the woods
right now.
Do you know that?
What the answer to the question what is the most valuable fishery in the United
States?
And also what is a fishery that is newly on the Seafood Watch Red List?
Maine lobster, that is because that fishery,
the way that the the lobster are caught with the traps,
with lines and floats attached to them, kills critically endangered North
Atlantic right whales.
They get tangled in the line and drown and that is bad.
And there's groups that are are usually quite supportive of seafood
sustainability and saving endangered species push back hard when lobster
fishing is criticized because it's so valuable.
But there are solutions in the form of different gear,
gear that does not tangle the does not tangle the whales,
or if they do get tangled, it snaps the line and then they're fine.
And thus far, fishermen have been extremely resistant
to this.
There.
I see another question in here about the New England Aquarium.
It's great facility in in Boston.
They have done some work on trying to develop alternative gear types.
Demarius asks what are the benefits you mentioned earlier that aren't found by
doing a full ban on shark fisheries?
It's a great question.
So the if you allow fishing at a sustainable level versus banning it,
a few things happen.
One, people can eat and people can feed their
families.
Two, we get more data on what's going on with
the fish that are out there because scientists depend on fishermen for a lot
of the data that we use to make these rules.
There are a lot more fishermen than there are marine biologists.
They're out on the water every day and they are required to take very, very,
very detailed data in their logs.
And if we just ban a fishery entirely, then that's gone then we have no idea
what's happening.
So those that's a very, very general level,
but the IT is good for the animals if we know what's going on and it is good for
people if they have jobs and food.
Gracie asks, what other people do you suggest we
follow to learn more about important topics such as this?
Great question.
So I actually have my students, both graduate students and undergraduates,
do a follow ocean experts on social media assignment for the semester.
And I have a curated list of experts that in a variety of topics that I say follow
these people on Instagram, check your feed for a few minutes every
day and you'll learn something.
And then we talk about it in class.
There are, if you want to learn about seafood
sustainability issues, you can follow Seafood Watch at the
Monterey Bay Aquarium.
If you want to learn about ocean conservation in general,
the Ocean Conservancy and Oceana are great groups.
I share stuff in my stories of anything I come across from sort of less followed
accounts.
So if if, if I am again at why sharks matter on
everything.
And if you follow me there, you will get a lot of stuff about shark
science and marine biology and ocean conservation in your feet.
Ethel, I'm going to pop.
Thank you.
Sure.
Here's here's another question.
What is the most ethical way to interact with sharks in the wild?
And how do people worst impact shark habitats?
Sure.
So again, there are there are absolutely these
responsible wildlife scuba tour operations that you can use,
that you can use and they'll take you out scuba diving and you'll see sharks.
There are places that that put chum in the water or put bait in the water to
attract sharks to them.
I don't I don't support businesses that do that.
It can be done responsibly, but I personally don't like it.
That to me is the difference between going to the zoo and going on safari.
I'd rather go scuba diving and be lucky and see a shark than do a targeted shark
dive operation.
If you're interested in joining a shark research expedition,
our team does offer fundraiser charters that help support the labs efforts to
bring inner City Schools out on the boat with us.
So you can reach out to me to talk about that.
Going to responsible aquariums is a great way to see sharks really up close.
And most aquariums, the New England Aquarium is actually a
world leader in this fund.
A lot of science and conservation efforts around the world.
In Massachusetts, I know the the Atlantic White Shark
Conservancy out on Cape Cod, they do trips where you can join Doctor
Greg Skomal and his team out tagging great white sharks,
or you can fly in fly in a plane and and see the sharks close to Cape Cod.
So there are lots of ways to do it.
Thank you.
Another question would be which species of shark is most critically endangered
and why?
Is it because of the lack of scientific knowledge and media coverage?
Yeah.
So there are different categories of endangerment with within the IUCN Red
List and this gets very technical and mathy very quickly,
but critically endangered is a status and there's not a most critically endangered.
Anything that's critically endangered is equally bad.
And that means that generally we are in serious danger of this animal going
extinct within the next 10 years.
If nothing is done and there are 30 or 40 species that are critically endangered,
there are a lot more that are endangered and then a lot more than that that are
vulnerable.
But the IUCN Red List database, which is iucnredlist.org,
is a free online resource and you can learn all about this.
Thank you.
Lindsey, did you have another question?
Sure, I can ask a few more.
We have a few more minutes for questions.
This is an easy one.
Where did you get your cool shark shirt?
So among the many, among the many ridiculous hats that I
wear sometimes literally as you saw on that picture of me on the shark boat,
is I'm an Instagram fashion influencer.
I get AW9 from Meta.
So I these, these outfits literally just show up on
my doorstep and the company sends me clothes with sharks on them.
And I post a picture on Instagram and tag the company and I get free clothes.
So this one, I don't even know where it came from.
It showed up in the mail.
This sort, this stuff just sort of happens to me.
What inspired you to do research on sharks or just be interested in that
topic?
Great question.
I feel like most kids go through a shark thing or a dinosaur thing at some point
in their lives, and I never really grew out of mine.
There are pictures of me with three years old wearing shark shirts and playing with
shark toys.
When I was five years old, I told my parents I want to be a marine
biologist and my dad said I have no idea what that is, but I'll find out.
And now he's retired and he takes his golf buddies on shark research shirts
with me.
So I've, I've just sort of always wanted to do
this.
But a thing I tell my students is it's OK if your path is less linear than that.
Most professional paths are not especially linear.
I'm one of the the lucky few who has sort of always known what I want to do and was
able to make it happen.
But if you have a few twists and turns and you change what you want to do,
that does not mean you're a bad scientist or a bad person.
Besides fishing, what is the biggest environmental human
caused threat to sharks?
Habitat loss.
So this is the again, the IUCN Red List stats among threatened
species of sharks.
The species that we have said these are face serious conservation challenges.
100% of those list overfishing among their top threats.
Habitat loss is listed in about 15%.
And that's number two.
So habitat loss is bad.
We should stop that.
That's usually actively destroying habitat,
sometimes to make coastal property or development, sometimes to make.
In Southeast Asia, we bulldoze mangroves to make shrimp
farms.
So things like that are really bad.
There are some fishing gears that destroy the sea floor, things like that.
Awesome.
I'm going to pop it back to you, Ethel, to maybe wrap it up.
OK, So I found this question of sustainable
fisheries occurred for other endangered species and have they helped?
So I want to be clear here that if a species is endangered,
we should not fish for it.
The issue is that there are lots of shark species that are not endangered that we
can fish for.
And people say because great hammerhead sharks are are endangered,
we should not allow fishing for black tip sharks.
And that makes no sense.
That is not something we do for other species.
We don't say because we're really worried about southern bluefin tuna.
You shouldn't fish for albacore tuna anymore.
But the issue is people don't realize that sharks are different species.
There's over 530 different species of sharks.
There's a new species of shark or shark relative discovered somewhere in the
world every two weeks.
So the this is an incredibly diverse group of animals.
They are united by what threatens them.
But some of them can support a sustainable fishery while others cannot.
Thank.
Thank you.
Thanks very much, David, for a wonderful talk.
And I guess I have a quick question because I could share privilege.
I couldn't work out how to do AQ and a because I don't think we have access to
that.
So if you were to tell the 150 undergrad students that are listening to you now,
what would you recommend?
The one thing that is most effective for them to do to help sharks.
The single most effective thing that anyone can do to help save the ocean in
general, sharks, whales, coral reefs, whatever is don't support unsustainable
fishing practices and use something like the Seafood Watch guide to help you if
you still want to eat seafood to find something sustainable.
Other things you can do that will help in general reduce your carbon footprint.
That's always good.
Climate change is not that big a deal for sharks,
but it's really bad for other things.
Using less single use plastic crash always good.
Not a big deal for sharks, but a big deal for other things.
Pollution is a big problem for a lot of ocean animals,
but the number one threat by far is unsustainable fishing practices.