From Cape Cod to the Keys: Dr. Grace Casselberry and the Eugenie Clark Award

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Another episode of the Beyond Jaws podcast and another year that the American

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Alasdair Brank Society has put up another Eugenie

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Clark recipient. The sixth winner of the Eugenie Clark recipient

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is on the podcast today. Dr. Grace Castleberry is joining

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us on the podcast today to talk about sort of like her

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rise in what she's been able to do and accomplish already

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as a postdoctoral student with University of

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Massachusetts at Amherst. We're going to talk about her career.

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We're going to talk about what she wants to do later on. But she's

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already had done so much in her career. We've got lots to talk

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about. So let's get started with the show. Here we go. Welcome back

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to another exciting episode of the Beyond Jaws podcast. I'm your host,

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Andrew Luen, with your co-host, Dr. David Ebert. Dave,

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this is the sixth recipient of the Eugenie Clark Award. This

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award is not given out lightly. This is going to be an exciting

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We're looking forward to hearing about Grace's journey, what she

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did, what she's done on her journey to receiving this

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award this year. As it says, it's probably one of the most prestigious awards that

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the American Alasdair Brink Society gives. She's only the sixth recipient of

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it. And it's given to a person who

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shows a lot of the stuff that Eugenie Clark did as a

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person, which was uncommon perseverance, dedication, and

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innovation in of Biological Research and Public Outreach on

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the Laszlobranchs, Sharks and Rays. And I'm

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really looking forward to it. I don't know Grace well, but I'm really looking forward to

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hearing her story about her journey. She's worked with a lot of amazing

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people in her short career, really. She'd be

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an early career person. And we'll get into that with people like Greg Skolmol,

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among others, and some of the different species she's worked

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Yeah, it's going to be a blast. I'm looking forward to it as well. So let's get into the interview with

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Dr. Grace Castleberry. Enjoy the interview and we'll talk to you after.

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Hey, Grace, welcome to the Beyond Jaws podcast. Are you ready to

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You bet. We want to welcome everybody to another episode of the Beyond Jaws

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podcast where we have another rising star in the shark research world.

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the fabulous Dr. Grace Castleberry. Grace is the sixth

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recipient of the American Allosylbranch Society's Eugenie Clark Award

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that is given to the early career female scientist who demonstrates uncommon

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perseverance, dedication, and innovation in biological research

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and public outreach on allosylbranch fishes. The Eugenie Clark Award

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is also supported by the Save Our Seas Foundation, which has

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been an early supporter of the podcast. Grace is a fisheries biologist

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and an American Associate of Underwater Women Postdoctoral Research

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Fellow at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she studies

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the spatial ecology of multiple shark species, shark-predator-prey dynamics,

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and the effect of catch-and-release angling on striped bass, interestingly. Grace

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has research interests at the intersection of marine

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animal movement, particularly migratory fishes, with a fisheries management

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angle. Prior to receiving the Clark Award, Grace

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was a recipient of numerous other awards, including the American

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Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellowship, the Samuel

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Gruber Award for Best Student Oral Presentation for the American Lousenbrink Society,

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the Emily Klein Award for Exemplary Service and Scholar from

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the Noah Sanctuaries, and the Dr. Nancy Foster Scholarship, also

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from the NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. Her

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schooling background, she did a Bachelor's of Science degree at the University of Connecticut

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in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, a Master's of

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Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and she did

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her PhD there as well. Just finished receiving her PhD in

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2023. She did her Master's and her PhD under the guidance of Andy

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Danilchuk. Hopefully I pronounced that right. And Greg Skomal

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is a good friend of the podcast, and Greg's been on the podcast a couple of times.

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As I mentioned, Grace is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of

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Environmental Conservation from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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Hi, Dave. Thanks for having me. That was, I feel very special to

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You are very special, very accomplished, very, very accomplished. And

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so Grace, we'll start off with all our guests. How'd

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you get interested in sharks and in the marine environment and

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Yeah, that's a great question. I feel like I have a little

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bit of a different trajectory towards getting

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into sharks. I'm not one of those kids that was obsessed with

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sharks when they were really little or saw Jaws and

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had it change their life the way my advisor Greg did. So

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I grew up coming to Cape Cod, Massachusetts every

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summer to spend time with my grandparents. And my grandpa would always take

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me and my mom fishing. And so I really developed

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a love for the ocean by fishing with my grandpa and

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going to the beach with my family at Cape Cod. But I didn't know

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that you could have a job studying fish until

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a lot later on. So when I was doing my undergraduate at

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UConn, I took a fish biology class from a professor named

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Eric Schultz. And I just thought it was so

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cool that you could go fishing for fun,

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and also then make that your job studying fish. And

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through his class, I started learning about tagging

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and tracking technologies for a paper that was assigned. And I just thought

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that was amazing. I got really interested in movement ecology,

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and wanted to do that for graduate school.

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but I had no experience with it. And so I

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applied for a bunch of internships from tagging

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turtles and marine mammals to doing stuff with sharks. And

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the shark one is the one that I got. I ended up going to be

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an intern at the Panama City Nymphs Lab with John

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Carlson and Dana Bethea. And that's,

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I knew nothing about sharks when I went there other than they

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were a thing that was big enough that you could put a tag on. And I thought tags were

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really cool. And so that was

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the beginning of me falling in love with sharks and

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getting to do field work with them. I just, I fell in love with being in the

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field and I haven't looked back and I've managed to

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That's, that's, that's, that's super interesting. So when you were doing

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it, so you're doing your undergrad and you kind of got interested in marine science, what kind

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of led you to UMass? Why

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did, of all the places you've thought about. You obviously went

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to Panama City, got some experience there, and

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sort of what kind of led you to decide to

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Yeah, so I had been looking around for

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kind of the right combination of a

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project that I was excited about, which

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was I really wanted to do movement ecology, particularly acoustic

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telemetry. My master's was all acoustic telemetry, My

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dissertation also had several acoustic telemetry

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chapters. And I

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also, I loved the work that I was doing in Florida. I

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didn't totally love living in Florida. My family is from the Northeast. I

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wanted to get back closer to family if I could. And

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though I didn't grow up in Massachusetts, like I said, Cape Cod, Massachusetts

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is kind of my marine scientist origin story. And

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so all of those things kind of came together through connections

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that I made with Andy through the professor that I worked with at UConn.

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And then I also did an internship for Greg Skomal shortly

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after I graduated from UConn. And so Andy

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and Greg had worked together in the past on some projects. Andy

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has done a lot of different big

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marine fish work. He largely focuses on recreational fisheries,

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but he also used to be at the Cape Eleuthera Institute, which did a lot of

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shark research. And so Andy and Greg were kind of the

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perfect combination of there was a project that

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I was really excited about, which was acoustic telemetry in

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Buck Island Reef National Monument in St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

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and there was funding and it was in a place where I thought I could be

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really happy living and so that's what brought me to UMass Amherst and

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I've obviously very much liked it because I've been

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there for a while now. Stayed for two degrees and now

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Well let me ask you this because you know I'm just looking at You

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know, you send us your CV before before we did this episode and I'm

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looking at the time where you graduated From

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your your be it with your BSC, you know 2013 and then going

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back to do your master's in 2020 So a good seven years

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in between that was that done on purpose? You

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just hadn't found like were you planning on doing? Graduate work

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or were you just sort of working? You were able to get jobs and you were enjoying those

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jobs as it was like what made you go back and do a

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Yeah, so that timeline is a little bit deceiving.

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I only spent two years out

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in the working world before I went back to graduate school.

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So I started my master's in

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2015. So I was at the Panama City lab working on

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the Gulf Span survey, which is a fishery independent shark,

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pupping and nursery survey. as well as the smalltooth sawfish

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survey that they do in the Everglades for about two years

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before I found that sort of right combination of advisors

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and projects and funding in place. And

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then I always knew that I wanted to do

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a PhD. But I was finding

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with a lot of people that I was talking to about graduate school that a

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lot of professors seem to really prefer you to at least start as a

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master's student and then transition into the PhD program.

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And so that was sort of how I started out there. In

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2018, I got the Dr. Nancy Foster scholarship from the

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NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries to fund PhD

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work for me, which was an entirely different project in

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a different study site than where I was doing my master's. But

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the way that the funding package made

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most sense was for me to roll that master's degree into

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my dissertation. And so my master's was awarded when

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Okay, I see. Gotcha. That makes a

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lot of sense. I like that. Now, you mentioned too that you always

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wanted to do your PhD, and I find that happens

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with a lot of students when they start to do graduate work. They're like, oh, I'm going to

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do my MSc, then I'm going to do my PhD. Was

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that just something of a personal goal of yours or did you think

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like this was going to help you stay in like you want to stay in the research

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side so you were going to get a PhD or

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you just like is this something like a personal thing or you knew for

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I would say probably a

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mixture of both. So I I

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worked in a lab as an undergraduate and worked very closely

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with two PhD students, and I just thought that their

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life in grad school looked really fun, which I

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feel like most people don't say. But I loved the

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fact that they were able to, you know, be conducting their

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own research projects. I was really excited about being involved in research,

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and I wanted to be able to have those skills

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where I could conceive a project, chase

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the funding, go out and do the project, and then analyze

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the data, write it up. I wanted to be able to have all those skills where I could go

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from step one to the end of research.

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And I knew that at the very least, I would need a master's to

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be able to do that. And that PhD

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would probably be the step that I needed to be

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able to really pursue that as a career path. As

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a graduate student, I've also come to find that I really

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enjoy the teaching and the mentorship aspects of being in academia.

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And so as I was pursuing my

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master's, I just became more sure that the PhD

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was probably the next step that I wanted to go to and hopefully

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ultimately having a professor position where I can have

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my own lab and have that mixture of the

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research and the mentoring and the teaching all combined. Gotcha.

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How did you get on to, you know, we've had John Carlson on

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recently and Megan Winton and Ivy Barrymore who

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all were involved with the NOAA Panama City

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Oh, that's a great question. I think

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maybe I just found them on Google. I

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can't, I can't, I don't think I knew because I really didn't know

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anyone in the shark realm. I,

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I had been talking to Dean Grubbs at

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one point about graduate school. So there's a possibility that he had mentioned

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them to me. I can't, I can't remember. I

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think I just was Googling internships and they have, they

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Yeah. Yeah. I know we talked about in some of our recent episodes we

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had on, um, it's a really good program. And I know I

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had several students from, that came through my lab, their masters,

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came from the program there. And we talked a little bit about how, if

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you get, when you have an opportunity to get into a program like that, it

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could really be a big benefit to you, because it's, you know, it can help you,

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you know, because the program's well-known. Students that come out of there are

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very good. I had several come through. Megan Witten was one of them,

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but had a few others. And they, it was just, it's just a good program. That

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was, and I didn't know, like I said, how you happened to come across it.

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Because I'll be honest, I hadn't really heard about it until I had one of the first

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students I had came through Lewis Barnett about 20 years ago.

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That was the first time I was, and I knew John for years before

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that. I just wasn't familiar with it. So, but it's a good, it

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was definitely a good program. It helped get you

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Yeah, absolutely. I loved my time there. Dana

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really, by the time I was an intern, had been taking interns for

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a number of years, she ran a really tight

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ship. It was a well-oiled machine. I learned so much,

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pretty much everything that I know about how to do fieldwork, I learned from

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Dana Bethea, who was running the field programs by the time I was there. And

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I learned a ton from John, too. And it really It's

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what got me into sharks and it's what springboarded my career. And,

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um, most of, most of the connections that I have made

235
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in the field since then can kind of be traced back to, to

236
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So, so, so you went on from there and you've gone on to do your, do

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your PhD, uh, uh, you know, and obviously you must like

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it quite a bit. Cause you've been there for a while now and you're still there

239
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actually, uh, base there. Um, what

240
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I can. You know, we have students come on here and some like, like

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to move around from go where they do a master's, go somewhere different

242
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for a PhD and go somewhere different for a postdoc. Besides being

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just loving the area and enjoying the university setting there, was there any,

244
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did you have any grand plans when you started your master's there

245
00:15:55,103 --> 00:15:58,404
that you were going to like stick it out there as long as you have or?

246
00:16:00,944 --> 00:16:04,499
Yeah. I mean, I, I certainly didn't. know

247
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that this is how it was going to unfold. There

248
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are some personal life reasons that have

249
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kept me here too now. My husband has a

250
00:16:15,088 --> 00:16:18,571
good job and so that when you're trying

251
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to piece together kind of the short-term contract

252
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life that is graduate school and

253
00:16:25,577 --> 00:16:28,840
then postdocs, it's easy to And

254
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if you can make it work to stay in one place, it definitely makes other

255
00:16:32,683 --> 00:16:37,786
aspects of life a lot easier. But I also, you know,

256
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I have two really great advisors now,

257
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I guess, more PIs. But Andy

258
00:16:45,071 --> 00:16:48,334
and Greg are incredible to work with. And it, you

259
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know, it's tough to want to leave when you have such

260
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a good team around you. There

261
00:16:55,765 --> 00:16:59,528
was one other postdoc in my lab who's done kind of a similar trajectory

262
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of sticking around postgraduate degrees. And

263
00:17:03,812 --> 00:17:07,556
so that it was never the grand plan to begin with,

264
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but I'm not the only one following that model in my lab. So

265
00:17:12,540 --> 00:17:15,904
Yeah. Yeah. We'll get on some of the more shark

266
00:17:15,944 --> 00:17:19,467
stuff in a second, but how'd you happen to get into striped bass?

267
00:17:21,738 --> 00:17:25,041
Yeah, striped bass are part of what's paying the bills right

268
00:17:25,061 --> 00:17:29,045
now, which I appreciate. It's

269
00:17:29,085 --> 00:17:33,289
been a really fun project to work on, though, because the

270
00:17:33,329 --> 00:17:37,033
first fish that I ever caught as a kid was a striped bass. Oh,

271
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cool. And I'm working on striped bass now

272
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in the same places where I grew up

273
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catching them with my with my grandpa and my mom. And

274
00:17:48,455 --> 00:17:52,216
so that has been a really fun sort of full circle moment

275
00:17:52,296 --> 00:17:55,956
in my career that I wasn't actively chasing

276
00:17:55,996 --> 00:17:59,257
necessarily. But we, our lab got some

277
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funding to look at post release behavior and mortality, since

278
00:18:03,018 --> 00:18:06,727
that fishery is largely catch and release. And

279
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so it's where things have taken me for now, and

280
00:18:11,720 --> 00:18:15,201
And what, when you look at the projects

281
00:18:15,261 --> 00:18:18,384
you do or the projects you want to do. Obviously, you're staying at

282
00:18:18,745 --> 00:18:21,928
UMass for a reason, you're doing some pretty cool projects, whether

283
00:18:21,948 --> 00:18:25,632
they're coming up to pay the bills or they're coming up to interest you. What

284
00:18:25,712 --> 00:18:28,995
drives you to pick up a new project or to kind

285
00:18:29,035 --> 00:18:32,939
of just be like, oh, this would be kind of cool to see? Like, what in,

286
00:18:33,019 --> 00:18:36,543
like, is there like a basic sort of, you know,

287
00:18:37,223 --> 00:18:40,345
Ecological question or some sort of question that kind of drives you

288
00:18:40,385 --> 00:18:43,747
to pick up a new project whether they be sharks or striped bass or

289
00:18:43,807 --> 00:18:47,009
anything else Yeah, I think

290
00:18:47,049 --> 00:18:50,271
there are a couple things that really excite me

291
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Obviously the the bio logging or telemetry aspects are

292
00:18:55,274 --> 00:18:58,356
are really interesting to me. So the striped bass project is

293
00:18:59,340 --> 00:19:02,481
which we also have a master's student in our lab that really is

294
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leading that, Olivia Dinklacker, uses accelerometers

295
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to look at behavior post-release. And

296
00:19:10,964 --> 00:19:14,506
then my dissertation and master's work used acoustic

297
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telemetry and some satellite telemetry. I think

298
00:19:17,827 --> 00:19:21,028
in terms of questions, I've always been

299
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really interested in kind of applied conservation

300
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and management needs. And so I've done

301
00:19:29,632 --> 00:19:32,895
some work looking at residency and habitat use in marine

302
00:19:32,935 --> 00:19:36,558
protected areas. My dissertation focused

303
00:19:36,799 --> 00:19:40,322
on shark depredation, so shark interactions in recreational

304
00:19:40,382 --> 00:19:44,085
fisheries, which is something that is kind

305
00:19:44,125 --> 00:19:47,557
of gaining increasing traction and

306
00:19:47,898 --> 00:19:51,118
noise, especially on the East Coast and particularly in

307
00:19:51,179 --> 00:19:54,640
Florida. So I worked with Great Hammerhead Sharks and Atlantic

308
00:19:54,680 --> 00:19:58,901
Tarpon for that in the fishery in the Florida Keys. So

309
00:19:58,921 --> 00:20:03,182
I think I always want to be able to have a real

310
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conservation application to my work. And a lot of the work that I

311
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do is also in collaboration either with anglers

312
00:20:10,084 --> 00:20:13,305
that are involved in the fishery or managers so that

313
00:20:14,190 --> 00:20:18,152
what we're learning is kind of like directly transmitted

314
00:20:22,875 --> 00:20:25,997
Yeah. You've, you've worked on, uh, besides the stuff you're

315
00:20:26,017 --> 00:20:29,199
doing there, you, you worked on sawfishes, um, in Florida. Um,

316
00:20:29,779 --> 00:20:34,382
can you talk a little bit about that? Cause they're obviously a very critically endangered species

317
00:20:34,622 --> 00:20:37,744
and there's a lot of, obviously a lot of interest globally on that. Could you talk a little

318
00:20:39,637 --> 00:20:42,759
Absolutely, yeah. The sawfish project is really near and

319
00:20:42,779 --> 00:20:46,221
dear to my heart, and whenever anyone asks me what my favorite shark is,

320
00:20:46,281 --> 00:20:49,583
I always take a deviation and say a sawfish, and

321
00:20:49,604 --> 00:20:52,946
they're not really a shark, they're more of a ray, but they're super

322
00:21:01,517 --> 00:21:05,121
Exactly, yeah. So the sawfish project

323
00:21:05,201 --> 00:21:08,906
that I was working on was sort of juvenile nursery

324
00:21:08,966 --> 00:21:12,447
area habitat. assessment. And so

325
00:21:12,687 --> 00:21:16,309
once a month we would go down to Everglades National

326
00:21:16,369 --> 00:21:19,711
Park and we had certain areas within the park and then just

327
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adjacent to the park where we would do a

328
00:21:23,332 --> 00:21:26,874
standardized fishery independent survey. And the goal was really to

329
00:21:28,455 --> 00:21:31,816
catch as many little baby pups and

330
00:21:32,157 --> 00:21:35,338
juveniles as we could to give them

331
00:21:35,378 --> 00:21:41,151
a dart tag and a pit tag and be able to identify them and understand how

332
00:21:41,231 --> 00:21:45,655
many are around and the habitats that they're using. And

333
00:21:45,836 --> 00:21:49,099
at the time, we couldn't do acoustic transmitters on

334
00:21:49,139 --> 00:21:52,523
them. They are able to do that now with the renewed ESA

335
00:21:52,563 --> 00:21:55,786
permit, which is super exciting. So they're getting a better idea of

336
00:21:55,886 --> 00:21:59,229
movements, but our understanding of movements was really just

337
00:21:59,269 --> 00:22:02,693
from Mark and recapturing those those sawfish with

338
00:22:02,793 --> 00:22:05,915
external tags. And I got to be a

339
00:22:05,955 --> 00:22:09,677
part of that project for three field seasons, which was really, really

340
00:22:09,737 --> 00:22:13,099
great and special. There aren't very many people that have gotten

341
00:22:13,299 --> 00:22:16,581
to handle sawfish in that way. So

342
00:22:16,781 --> 00:22:19,983
yeah, I loved being on that project. If I could get back to

343
00:22:29,094 --> 00:22:32,436
It might be worth it though to work on the sawfish. That would be, that would be pretty cool.

344
00:22:32,936 --> 00:22:36,397
Uh, so, so you've done that, you did, you worked on that, you worked on sawfish down

345
00:22:36,437 --> 00:22:39,939
there. So you've worked on, when you went back, what, what were some of the primary

346
00:22:44,441 --> 00:22:48,363
Yeah. So my, my master's was with four different species, um,

347
00:22:48,563 --> 00:22:51,985
tiger sharks, lemon sharks, nurse sharks, and Caribbean reef sharks.

348
00:22:53,167 --> 00:22:56,851
And we were trying to understand what

349
00:22:56,911 --> 00:23:00,755
habitats and the residence time that they were spending in

350
00:23:01,115 --> 00:23:05,019
a marine protected area called Buck Island Reef National Monument in

351
00:23:05,079 --> 00:23:08,443
St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, which is actually one of the oldest

352
00:23:08,463 --> 00:23:11,786
marine protected areas in the United States, but it wasn't

353
00:23:11,826 --> 00:23:14,974
established for sharks. It was established to

354
00:23:15,034 --> 00:23:18,861
protect the coral reefs there and then also there's

355
00:23:18,881 --> 00:23:22,246
sea turtle nesting beaches on the little island that's in the center

356
00:23:22,266 --> 00:23:25,621
of the MPA. So we wanted,

357
00:23:25,962 --> 00:23:29,244
it wasn't made for sharks, but we wanted to know if that MPA was

358
00:23:29,304 --> 00:23:32,427
providing any level of protection for sharks. And we were able to

359
00:23:32,467 --> 00:23:36,770
find that they spend, all of the species spend more than 50% of their

360
00:23:36,810 --> 00:23:41,434
tagged days at liberty within the MPA. So that was pretty exciting for

361
00:23:41,474 --> 00:23:45,257
a place that was not designed with sharks in mind at all. And

362
00:23:45,698 --> 00:23:49,240
then for my PhD research, I worked with great hammerhead sharks

363
00:23:49,300 --> 00:23:53,335
in the Florida Keys, looking at their broader

364
00:23:53,375 --> 00:23:57,217
movement patterns and migrations back and forth between

365
00:23:57,237 --> 00:24:01,179
the Keys and points farther north in the US, but also looking

366
00:24:01,239 --> 00:24:04,420
at fine scale movements and interactions in a

367
00:24:04,540 --> 00:24:07,981
channel called Bahia Honda, which is a site for

368
00:24:08,001 --> 00:24:11,263
a pre-spawning aggregation of Atlantic tarpon. And

369
00:24:11,323 --> 00:24:14,984
it's really quite heavily fished. So there are a lot of interactions

370
00:24:17,738 --> 00:24:21,220
Now, with this research you're doing, is this all part of your PhD,

371
00:24:21,240 --> 00:24:24,781
but is it strictly through the university, or are you working with NOAA

372
00:24:24,861 --> 00:24:28,142
fisheries or the sanctuaries? Who is this

373
00:24:31,764 --> 00:24:35,105
Yeah, so for my PhD, all of the field

374
00:24:35,145 --> 00:24:38,466
work was done by us, but in

375
00:24:38,546 --> 00:24:41,968
collaboration, closely collaborating with Bonefish and Tarpon

376
00:24:41,988 --> 00:24:47,603
Trust. which was funding a large

377
00:24:48,043 --> 00:24:52,065
Atlantic tarpon migratory pattern study through

378
00:24:52,125 --> 00:24:55,387
our lab. And then I was

379
00:24:55,467 --> 00:24:59,129
funded personally by the Dr. Nancy Foster scholarship. So

380
00:24:59,529 --> 00:25:02,951
a lot of my results were communicated directly to the National Marine

381
00:25:02,971 --> 00:25:06,052
Sanctuary System, but I wasn't actually out in the

382
00:25:08,433 --> 00:25:11,795
Okay, okay. And this was all done pretty much down in St. Croix, the Virgin

383
00:25:13,054 --> 00:25:16,456
So that work was in the Florida Keys. The

384
00:25:16,516 --> 00:25:20,197
work in St. Croix is directly

385
00:25:20,217 --> 00:25:23,619
with the National Park Service. So the Park Service manages that

386
00:25:23,699 --> 00:25:27,821
MPA, since it's a national monument. And

387
00:25:28,121 --> 00:25:31,582
we go out on their boats directly to

388
00:25:31,623 --> 00:25:34,824
fish, which has been really great. They put in

389
00:25:35,024 --> 00:25:38,366
tons of effort to help maintain the acoustic array

390
00:25:38,426 --> 00:25:41,805
that's out there. And we have some ongoing projects happening with

391
00:25:41,825 --> 00:25:45,207
them as well, which has been really fun. I've kind of taken that

392
00:25:45,227 --> 00:25:48,330
acoustic tagging of the tiger sharks and

393
00:25:48,430 --> 00:25:52,073
brought it into what's part of my postdoc now,

394
00:25:52,093 --> 00:25:55,195
adding a satellite telemetry component to look at

395
00:25:55,475 --> 00:25:58,738
connectivity between the protected areas that are in the

396
00:25:59,658 --> 00:26:03,101
So what was it like when

397
00:26:03,121 --> 00:26:06,265
you start working with these large sharks? sort of

398
00:26:06,285 --> 00:26:09,586
just jump in or do you have, were you working with anyone else that kind

399
00:26:09,626 --> 00:26:13,288
of shows you what to do so you keep all your fingers and arms

400
00:26:15,788 --> 00:26:19,430
Yeah. Um, I'm, I'm lucky that I started out

401
00:26:19,590 --> 00:26:22,911
working with juvenile sharks, um, because I was,

402
00:26:22,931 --> 00:26:26,432
uh, the first shark I ever touched was a lemon shark

403
00:26:26,652 --> 00:26:29,913
that was, you know, probably like two weeks old.

404
00:26:30,093 --> 00:26:33,326
It was small. And

405
00:26:33,346 --> 00:26:36,768
I was so afraid that it was going to bite my finger off. I was

406
00:26:37,009 --> 00:26:40,191
kind of terrified of it, to be honest. But I got

407
00:26:40,231 --> 00:26:43,453
to learn how to handle sharks when they're much smaller, and you can kind

408
00:26:43,513 --> 00:26:46,856
of bend them to your will. And from people that had

409
00:26:46,896 --> 00:26:50,693
been handling sharks for decades, And

410
00:26:50,913 --> 00:26:54,315
so then when I started graduating up to these bigger

411
00:26:54,355 --> 00:26:58,138
sharks for my master's and my PhD, I

412
00:26:58,178 --> 00:27:02,000
got to do a lot of my fieldwork with Greg Skomal, who

413
00:27:02,440 --> 00:27:05,902
obviously, he's been on the podcast. People probably

414
00:27:05,922 --> 00:27:10,225
know Greg. Greg really does a lot of white shark work, but

415
00:27:10,285 --> 00:27:14,207
has worked with all kinds of different species throughout his career. And

416
00:27:14,467 --> 00:27:17,729
so he really started out

417
00:27:17,809 --> 00:27:20,891
as the the chief shark wrangler and has has taught me a

418
00:27:24,313 --> 00:27:27,695
Yeah, I had to ask this kind of thing. I know I'm pretty

419
00:27:27,715 --> 00:27:30,797
sure Greg had a similar experience when I was started out in the 80s

420
00:27:30,857 --> 00:27:33,959
is that it was just like, well, there you go. Good luck. And it

421
00:27:34,019 --> 00:27:37,241
was like there wasn't really anybody to show you any give

422
00:27:37,261 --> 00:27:40,363
you any kind of guidance. Actually, I know

423
00:27:40,383 --> 00:27:43,556
for myself, fishermen were really helpful because they knew They knew

424
00:27:43,596 --> 00:27:47,380
how to handle the big sharks to get rid of them and stuff, or get them

425
00:27:47,400 --> 00:27:50,523
and stuff. So I just had to, and I realized things have changed a lot, but I just

426
00:27:50,543 --> 00:27:54,167
was curious how. Because some of those species you're working with,

427
00:27:54,207 --> 00:27:58,391
particularly the tigers and the hammerheads, they get quite large. And

428
00:27:58,451 --> 00:28:02,695
just that experience when you first start handling them, it's like, that's

429
00:28:02,775 --> 00:28:06,299
big, that's a big shark, and they're really, really strong and powerful.

430
00:28:07,707 --> 00:28:11,749
to handle with them. So you got some good experience. Have

431
00:28:15,050 --> 00:28:18,352
Not really directly. I've been out and helped out

432
00:28:18,392 --> 00:28:21,733
on the boat a few times when they've needed an extra set of hands and

433
00:28:21,753 --> 00:28:25,015
things like that. So I've gotten to see them, which has been really fun. But

434
00:28:25,095 --> 00:28:28,377
I've not led any white shark research or anything like that.

435
00:28:30,518 --> 00:28:33,999
I'm the one that gets to remind Greg that there are other shark

436
00:28:43,133 --> 00:28:46,915
Do you have much association, do you match with the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy much?

437
00:28:49,877 --> 00:28:53,219
Yeah, they are. One of my best friends

438
00:28:53,619 --> 00:28:56,861
works for them, but I'm not directly affiliated with them.

439
00:28:56,961 --> 00:29:01,043
So I'm friendly with a lot of the biologists there, but yeah.

440
00:29:01,720 --> 00:29:05,163
I'm sure it's a small world when you get into that area with sharks

441
00:29:08,646 --> 00:29:11,949
Yeah, for sure. I have to ask, did you work much

442
00:29:16,893 --> 00:29:20,890
No, I know Michelle because she actually She

443
00:29:21,090 --> 00:29:24,893
left the Panama City Lab shortly before I started

444
00:29:24,973 --> 00:29:28,155
there. So we have, Michelle Passerati and I have

445
00:29:28,255 --> 00:29:31,438
known of each other for a while, and then we're able to

446
00:29:31,558 --> 00:29:35,000
meet in person at an AES meeting a few years back.

447
00:29:35,561 --> 00:29:38,783
But I am yet to do stuff with the Narragansett Lab. I

448
00:29:38,803 --> 00:29:42,085
would love to hopefully have that in my future at some point.

449
00:29:44,727 --> 00:29:47,929
No, I'm just curious. Yeah, since you're, like Andrew just said, it's a very

450
00:29:47,969 --> 00:29:51,110
small community there. Everybody tends to know everybody and you kind

451
00:29:51,150 --> 00:29:54,293
of stumble into each other a lot of times. I didn't, you'd mentioned all

452
00:29:54,333 --> 00:29:57,935
the stuff you're doing in Florida and the keys and St. Croix,

453
00:29:57,955 --> 00:30:01,198
which are all like, well, I don't know about Florida so much, but the St. Croix

454
00:30:01,218 --> 00:30:05,901
sound like is a really nice, pretty tropical area to go do some work, which

455
00:30:05,962 --> 00:30:09,024
is always nice, nice goal to have to work somewhere nice. So

456
00:30:09,064 --> 00:30:12,426
I didn't know, but you hadn't mentioned anybody up in the, in the Northeast area that you

457
00:30:12,446 --> 00:30:16,309
had much to do with. So as you're going along with these

458
00:30:16,369 --> 00:30:19,489
different types of projects, what's kind of the

459
00:30:19,509 --> 00:30:23,490
different sort of things you're looking for, like when you go, you worked with like

460
00:30:23,530 --> 00:30:27,571
these hammerheads and the tiger sharks. Could you

461
00:30:31,532 --> 00:30:34,893
Yeah, so the hammerhead project was really

462
00:30:34,973 --> 00:30:38,254
exciting. It started because a

463
00:30:39,734 --> 00:30:44,640
postdoc in our lab was running a study study

464
00:30:44,860 --> 00:30:48,202
of Atlantic tarpon migratory patterns in the Florida Keys.

465
00:30:48,282 --> 00:30:52,164
And so their goal was to tag 200 tarpon with

466
00:30:52,184 --> 00:30:55,426
acoustic telemetry tags. They achieved that goal, so they were doing

467
00:30:55,486 --> 00:30:59,408
tons and tons of tarpon fishing. And through

468
00:30:59,448 --> 00:31:02,769
doing that, they were spending a lot of time with the charter fishing

469
00:31:02,809 --> 00:31:06,932
guides down in the Keys, and they were sort of increasingly hearing

470
00:31:06,952 --> 00:31:10,553
these grumblings and concern about how

471
00:31:10,874 --> 00:31:14,157
sharks more and more often were coming up and eating their

472
00:31:14,197 --> 00:31:18,181
hooked tarpon before they were able to get them to the side of the boat. And

473
00:31:19,062 --> 00:31:22,866
the tarpon fishery in Florida is, it's all recreational. It's

474
00:31:23,286 --> 00:31:27,070
almost entirely catch and release except for a small handful of

475
00:31:27,831 --> 00:31:31,435
trophy harvest tags that are sold every year. And they're

476
00:31:31,455 --> 00:31:34,687
almost they're rarely used. So they're bought by

477
00:31:34,727 --> 00:31:37,789
people that are trying to break a world record and need to

478
00:31:37,829 --> 00:31:42,993
keep a tarpon. So they're very infrequently harvested.

479
00:31:43,634 --> 00:31:46,816
And so if these sharks are eating these fish that are going to get

480
00:31:46,876 --> 00:31:50,231
released, that could be the like

481
00:31:50,311 --> 00:31:53,554
largest part of the largest piece of mortality that's

482
00:31:53,594 --> 00:31:56,977
happening in this fishery, and it's unquantified. And so these guides were

483
00:31:57,017 --> 00:32:00,340
getting really worried about that. And I really just

484
00:32:00,360 --> 00:32:03,562
happened to be sort of the right person in the right place at

485
00:32:03,582 --> 00:32:06,845
the right time, I knew I wanted to go down

486
00:32:06,885 --> 00:32:10,508
the path of a PhD. And this this project

487
00:32:10,608 --> 00:32:13,931
was presenting itself. And I was the

488
00:32:13,971 --> 00:32:18,458
person in my lab at the time that was doing the shark work. And so I

489
00:32:18,518 --> 00:32:22,060
could just sort of jump into pursuing funding for this project.

490
00:32:22,140 --> 00:32:25,942
And so we had those 200 tagged tarpon.

491
00:32:26,422 --> 00:32:29,843
I tagged 18 great hammerheads in this channel,

492
00:32:29,903 --> 00:32:33,585
Bahia Honda, where there's a big pre-spawning aggregation.

493
00:32:34,125 --> 00:32:37,707
Thousands of tarpon come to this area underneath of a bridge that

494
00:32:37,767 --> 00:32:41,018
connects two keys. It goes across the channel. in

495
00:32:41,139 --> 00:32:44,461
April and May of every year. And it's a

496
00:32:44,561 --> 00:32:48,324
place that people can go very reliably to

497
00:32:48,685 --> 00:32:52,007
try to catch a tarpon. And that's been

498
00:32:52,027 --> 00:32:55,390
a well-known thing for decades. So there's a lot of fishing pressure underneath of

499
00:32:55,450 --> 00:32:59,313
this bridge. And so part

500
00:32:59,353 --> 00:33:02,976
of what I did was I sat on the bridge and I watched

501
00:33:03,136 --> 00:33:07,118
tarpon fishing for over

502
00:33:07,198 --> 00:33:10,900
200 hours of my life. And I saw in

503
00:33:11,020 --> 00:33:14,442
April and May of one tarpon fishing season, and

504
00:33:14,462 --> 00:33:18,804
I saw over 400 fish get hooked. And

505
00:33:19,224 --> 00:33:22,946
of those, the ones that were fought for a substantial amount

506
00:33:22,986 --> 00:33:26,668
of time, about 15% were eaten

507
00:33:26,868 --> 00:33:30,050
by great hammerhead sharks. So landing a tarpon is

508
00:33:30,090 --> 00:33:33,492
really difficult. They jump up, they shake their heads, they try

509
00:33:33,532 --> 00:33:37,077
to spit the hook. They're also fishing under a bridge. So

510
00:33:37,157 --> 00:33:40,500
you can hook a tarpon and almost immediately have it wrap the line around

511
00:33:40,520 --> 00:33:43,923
the bridge pilings and just break off. Oh, wow. So that happens

512
00:33:43,963 --> 00:33:47,325
a lot in the first minute of the fight. Right. But when you get rid

513
00:33:47,345 --> 00:33:51,329
of those fish that get lost almost immediately, about 15% of

514
00:33:51,349 --> 00:33:54,852
the ones that are really fought in that channel get

515
00:33:54,932 --> 00:33:58,955
eaten by hammerheads. So that's not

516
00:33:59,215 --> 00:34:05,025
the worst percentage in the world. It's not 75% of these fish. Tarpon,

517
00:34:05,486 --> 00:34:08,527
similar to sharks, live for decades. It takes them a

518
00:34:08,567 --> 00:34:12,450
while to mature, and they grow slowly. So

519
00:34:12,710 --> 00:34:16,412
these are fish that are coming to aggregate to spawn, and

520
00:34:16,452 --> 00:34:19,594
a lot of them get eaten before they're able to reproduce. So you

521
00:34:19,754 --> 00:34:22,996
can think about how that might add up over time. So part of

522
00:34:23,136 --> 00:34:26,578
it was a tarpon

523
00:34:26,658 --> 00:34:30,468
conservation kind of question that I was interested in answering. But

524
00:34:30,508 --> 00:34:33,711
we also wanted to understand how these sharks might be changing their

525
00:34:33,731 --> 00:34:37,794
behavior in response to how the tarpon were moving in the channel. And

526
00:34:37,874 --> 00:34:41,676
so we were able to show that the tagged hammerheads shift

527
00:34:42,217 --> 00:34:45,659
where they spend their time in the channel based on the direction of the current, which

528
00:34:45,779 --> 00:34:49,262
corresponds to the direction that people drift

529
00:34:49,322 --> 00:34:52,944
their boats while they're fishing. So they're kind of moving

530
00:34:53,005 --> 00:34:56,467
to set themselves up to be in a place where they can take advantage

531
00:34:56,527 --> 00:35:00,225
of these hooked fish. And then I

532
00:35:00,265 --> 00:35:03,906
was able to sort of piggyback off of having these tagged hammerheads to

533
00:35:03,946 --> 00:35:07,367
look at, well, when they leave the channel, where are they going?

534
00:35:07,508 --> 00:35:10,729
So I could explore movement patterns within the Keys and then

535
00:35:10,769 --> 00:35:14,090
more broadly, seasonal patterns of movement as they

536
00:35:17,631 --> 00:35:20,913
Any estimates like how many, how many of the great hammerheads were hanging around

537
00:35:23,088 --> 00:35:26,470
Yeah, so I don't have a solid answer,

538
00:35:26,590 --> 00:35:30,032
but it's more than we expected. So something

539
00:35:30,052 --> 00:35:33,314
that we were that question was something that we were interested in, and we wanted

540
00:35:33,354 --> 00:35:36,621
to understand. if, you know, this

541
00:35:36,661 --> 00:35:39,783
was like one or two hammerheads that are coming into the area, and

542
00:35:39,823 --> 00:35:42,984
it figured out that this is a way to get an easy meal, or if it was

543
00:35:43,024 --> 00:35:46,446
a lot. So in my first year of tagging, actually, what

544
00:35:46,486 --> 00:35:50,328
I was doing was putting big, like four-inch

545
00:35:50,588 --> 00:35:54,290
cattle tags that were different colors on the tops of their dorsal fins,

546
00:35:54,830 --> 00:35:58,093
And I was working with the fishing guides that fish under that bridge every day.

547
00:35:58,113 --> 00:36:01,535
And I was up on the bridge watching the fishing, too, to see

548
00:36:01,715 --> 00:36:04,858
if we were seeing tagged individuals come back and

549
00:36:04,958 --> 00:36:08,200
eat tarpon again and again throughout the season. And we

550
00:36:08,260 --> 00:36:12,663
only saw one actually do that. And

551
00:36:12,803 --> 00:36:16,626
most of the sharks that we caught were untagged.

552
00:36:16,766 --> 00:36:20,869
Most of the sharks that I saw eat tarpon were untagged. And

553
00:36:21,150 --> 00:36:25,696
so it's The answer is more than 18, because that's

554
00:36:25,736 --> 00:36:28,879
how many I tagged. But it

555
00:36:28,919 --> 00:36:32,362
was a pretty low sort of recapture rate

556
00:36:32,442 --> 00:36:35,785
for our visual survey there. So it's

557
00:36:37,006 --> 00:36:40,229
And I'm betting if people went, I don't know if they could dive around there, but if they went to dive,

558
00:36:40,289 --> 00:36:44,032
no one ever probably sees a great hammerhead when they're actually in the water. It's

559
00:36:44,072 --> 00:36:47,135
only when the tarpon are around and somebody hooks one that they seem to show up.

560
00:36:47,972 --> 00:36:51,174
Yeah, exactly. So diving in there is a little bit

561
00:36:51,194 --> 00:36:54,375
of a precarious situation because the current is pretty high. You have to

562
00:36:54,435 --> 00:36:57,857
time it right around the slack. But we had an acoustic

563
00:36:57,897 --> 00:37:01,238
array in there, so we needed to to dive on the receivers and

564
00:37:01,418 --> 00:37:04,540
nobody ever saw a hammerhead in

565
00:37:08,462 --> 00:37:11,623
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the case with a lot of

566
00:37:11,663 --> 00:37:14,805
sharks that people don't realize because you have that

567
00:37:14,845 --> 00:37:17,976
interesting situation where they come in when they're they're hooked in

568
00:37:17,996 --> 00:37:21,116
the tarpon but I wouldn't be surprised I

569
00:37:21,136 --> 00:37:24,637
think a lot of times people never see the sharks until there's something

570
00:37:24,677 --> 00:37:28,118
attracts them in there and yet they're they're around they just you just don't see them until

571
00:37:28,698 --> 00:37:32,259
I guess they want you to see them or whatever um how

572
00:37:32,399 --> 00:37:35,760
so have you so you've been taking take are you still going down to Florida pretty regularly

573
00:37:37,763 --> 00:37:41,124
No, so so that ended this is actually the first spring in

574
00:37:41,184 --> 00:37:44,425
five years that I haven't been down there, which has been this past

575
00:37:44,445 --> 00:37:47,627
spring. So that was that was really kind of strange. But I

576
00:37:47,887 --> 00:37:51,008
defended my dissertation in July of

577
00:37:51,088 --> 00:37:54,329
last year. So that for the time being is kind

578
00:37:54,369 --> 00:37:57,877
of the end of the keys project there. I have some some

579
00:37:57,937 --> 00:38:01,179
ideas that I maybe would like to pursue in the future if I

580
00:38:01,219 --> 00:38:04,321
can find funding for it. But for now, I

581
00:38:08,084 --> 00:38:11,986
You've mentioned funding a few times now. And again,

582
00:38:12,006 --> 00:38:15,028
looking at your resume, you've had a

583
00:38:15,068 --> 00:38:18,290
lot of awards and nominations and things like that. How How

584
00:38:18,670 --> 00:38:22,293
hard is it for a graduate student

585
00:38:22,353 --> 00:38:25,456
to, like, are you applying for your own funding or is

586
00:38:25,516 --> 00:38:28,858
this, I mean, I know the awards are something different. Sometimes you apply for

587
00:38:28,898 --> 00:38:32,060
them, sometimes you're nominated for them. But is this something that

588
00:38:32,080 --> 00:38:35,883
you're actively seeking for each project and you're getting the experience in

589
00:38:39,606 --> 00:38:43,469
Yeah, that's a great question. So I think that my experience

590
00:38:43,489 --> 00:38:46,932
with pursuing funding has been a little bit different from other graduate students.

591
00:38:48,409 --> 00:38:52,075
For the most part, past my master's degree, I

592
00:38:52,175 --> 00:38:55,781
have brought in a substantial amount of the funding to fund my dissertation

593
00:38:55,821 --> 00:38:59,562
work. parts of my postdoc. And

594
00:38:59,942 --> 00:39:04,144
so yes, I started actively pursuing

595
00:39:04,285 --> 00:39:07,746
funding because my lab didn't have the ability to

596
00:39:07,786 --> 00:39:11,348
support me for the PhD work. They had the desire

597
00:39:11,388 --> 00:39:14,630
to keep me, but we needed to figure out how we

598
00:39:14,670 --> 00:39:18,372
could get that done. And so I started

599
00:39:18,472 --> 00:39:22,294
writing grant proposals when I was supposed

600
00:39:22,314 --> 00:39:26,142
to be finishing my master's thesis. With the

601
00:39:26,182 --> 00:39:29,424
permission of my advisors, unfortunately, that

602
00:39:29,484 --> 00:39:32,786
funding came through, and so I was able to pursue the

603
00:39:32,826 --> 00:39:36,248
PhD and build on

604
00:39:36,368 --> 00:39:40,190
some of the projects from my master's, like I mentioned, with the satellite

605
00:39:40,210 --> 00:39:43,632
tagging for the tiger sharks, and then start this new project in

606
00:39:43,652 --> 00:39:47,274
the Keys, which also built off of some existing funding

607
00:39:47,294 --> 00:39:50,436
that we had for that tarpon work. Um, but yeah, it's

608
00:39:53,877 --> 00:39:57,459
Um, I think it's, it's fine. That's going to be the promo

609
00:40:04,182 --> 00:40:07,484
I think it's fun to, um, to like dream

610
00:40:07,544 --> 00:40:11,666
up new ideas and think about what you can do within sort

611
00:40:11,706 --> 00:40:16,028
of the, the limits of what your funding is maybe

612
00:40:16,068 --> 00:40:19,996
going to be able to give you. And yeah,

613
00:40:20,157 --> 00:40:23,526
I find that part of science exciting to kind of think about

614
00:40:26,804 --> 00:40:30,467
I don't think I've ever heard anybody say, I find grant writing exciting.

615
00:40:31,148 --> 00:40:35,271
That's going to be the headline for your podcast. I

616
00:40:37,553 --> 00:40:42,898
Oh dear. Have you ever had, and

617
00:40:43,058 --> 00:40:46,320
you can answer this if you'd like, but have you ever gotten rejected for

618
00:40:46,360 --> 00:40:49,663
funding? Because that's part of the grant writing process, right?

619
00:40:50,003 --> 00:40:53,126
And seeking funds is, it's not easy. I mean, it's

620
00:40:53,166 --> 00:40:56,348
a very difficult thing. Can you tell us? you know, in terms of,

621
00:40:56,388 --> 00:40:59,750
like, how you persist to continue to find it even

622
00:40:59,830 --> 00:41:03,332
though, you know, sometimes you get rejected

623
00:41:05,153 --> 00:41:08,454
Yeah, for sure. I have absolutely applied for

624
00:41:08,554 --> 00:41:11,996
way more things that I haven't gotten than things that I've gotten.

625
00:41:13,397 --> 00:41:17,299
I think, you know, there's still rejections

626
00:41:17,339 --> 00:41:21,121
that happen that really knock me down, but it

627
00:41:21,221 --> 00:41:26,132
gets easier the more you do it. And

628
00:41:26,152 --> 00:41:29,375
you start to sort of realize that there's an aspect of it that

629
00:41:29,535 --> 00:41:33,918
isn't personal at all. Like at some point, you're

630
00:41:33,998 --> 00:41:37,440
competing with a bunch of other people that are also really, really good

631
00:41:37,460 --> 00:41:40,763
at coming up with cool ideas to do science. And so some

632
00:41:40,823 --> 00:41:44,145
of it is almost a little bit of luck

633
00:41:44,425 --> 00:41:47,647
at a certain point. And the more I kind of tell myself that,

634
00:41:47,687 --> 00:41:51,134
the easier But I think the important thing

635
00:41:51,814 --> 00:41:55,556
is to just apply. You're never going

636
00:41:55,616 --> 00:41:59,599
to get the money if you don't try to get the money. That's true.

637
00:42:00,459 --> 00:42:05,042
And you never know what might

638
00:42:05,142 --> 00:42:08,964
come to be if you give it a shot. And so

639
00:42:08,984 --> 00:42:12,246
I applied for the NSF GRFP, I

640
00:42:12,386 --> 00:42:16,243
think, three times and never got it. I

641
00:42:16,283 --> 00:42:20,584
applied for the Nancy Foster once, got

642
00:42:20,724 --> 00:42:23,985
feedback, which was great. They're

643
00:42:24,025 --> 00:42:27,466
a proposal that gives you feedback. And so I was able to kind of use

644
00:42:27,546 --> 00:42:31,406
that to understand what exactly they were looking for, make

645
00:42:31,446 --> 00:42:34,587
my proposal better, try again, and I got it

646
00:42:34,627 --> 00:42:37,768
that time. And that's what let me pursue my

647
00:42:37,808 --> 00:42:41,749
PhD. So I think You're never

648
00:42:41,769 --> 00:42:45,410
gonna feel like you deserve to get the money, so just try

649
00:42:48,932 --> 00:42:52,353
Is there something that you find that's different when you do get

650
00:42:52,393 --> 00:42:55,654
it as opposed to when you don't? Or does it just,

651
00:42:55,895 --> 00:42:59,496
basically it

652
00:42:59,576 --> 00:43:02,777
comes down to the different funding agency and the foundation and

653
00:43:05,799 --> 00:43:10,109
Yeah, I think sometimes I have, you

654
00:43:10,129 --> 00:43:14,232
just find that sort of perfect combination of your

655
00:43:14,372 --> 00:43:18,174
idea fits in really well with whatever the

656
00:43:18,214 --> 00:43:22,636
request for proposals is or whatever the nonprofit agency

657
00:43:22,897 --> 00:43:26,459
looks for in grants. So I definitely

658
00:43:26,519 --> 00:43:29,941
have gotten lucky,

659
00:43:30,001 --> 00:43:33,423
I guess is the right word there, where things have lined up really well.

660
00:43:35,034 --> 00:43:38,697
Certainly, I think that working on sharks has

661
00:43:38,757 --> 00:43:42,060
a bit of a wow factor to it as well, if

662
00:43:42,100 --> 00:43:45,883
you're applying for something that isn't just like a shark focused

663
00:43:45,943 --> 00:43:49,606
organization, right? On certain places, you

664
00:43:49,646 --> 00:43:53,088
have, you could have a little bit of a leg up just because you're

665
00:43:53,108 --> 00:43:56,231
working on something really charismatic, and

666
00:43:56,251 --> 00:44:01,132
that people are interested in. And sometimes that they

667
00:44:01,533 --> 00:44:05,174
lend you to be able to tell a good story. Just

668
00:44:05,194 --> 00:44:08,676
because sharks are really cool, right? So it's

669
00:44:08,816 --> 00:44:11,898
easier to be able to tell a good story about why you need to be

670
00:44:11,918 --> 00:44:16,540
doing this work when your organism is kind of inherently flashy.

671
00:44:17,881 --> 00:44:21,623
But storytelling does kind of help with grant writing, right?

672
00:44:24,724 --> 00:44:28,665
Yeah, it's all about thinking about how

673
00:44:28,845 --> 00:44:32,288
to convince people that have no idea about where

674
00:44:32,328 --> 00:44:35,910
you work or what you're doing or why it's important, why

675
00:44:35,970 --> 00:44:39,373
it's important. And that I think is the sort of important

676
00:44:39,453 --> 00:44:43,476
thought process and something that I've worked really hard to hone as

677
00:44:49,300 --> 00:44:52,603
So you still do with the, now you got involved with the, I'm

678
00:44:52,763 --> 00:44:56,472
a little interested in your involvement with the sanctuaries program. out

679
00:44:56,492 --> 00:44:59,815
here in California with the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. I'd been involved

680
00:44:59,835 --> 00:45:02,937
with them many years ago. But I just kind of

681
00:45:02,957 --> 00:45:06,220
curious, how are they as far as supportive of the type of stuff you

682
00:45:08,882 --> 00:45:12,205
They were great. The team that runs the Nancy

683
00:45:12,245 --> 00:45:16,188
Foster Scholarship is a really incredible group.

684
00:45:16,208 --> 00:45:19,351
They're largely in D.C. at

685
00:45:19,491 --> 00:45:23,108
the sanctuary headquarters. But they've always

686
00:45:23,148 --> 00:45:27,331
been incredibly supportive of my work, helped me with

687
00:45:27,632 --> 00:45:31,035
connections, both in Florida

688
00:45:31,055 --> 00:45:34,418
Keys National Marine Sanctuary and then other local people that

689
00:45:34,478 --> 00:45:38,161
are involved with working with Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. So

690
00:45:38,262 --> 00:45:42,007
I really enjoyed working with them. done

691
00:45:42,067 --> 00:45:45,451
with my time as a Foster Scholar, but I'm still in touch with a lot of people.

692
00:45:45,471 --> 00:45:49,175
I was able to have some other collaborative

693
00:45:49,235 --> 00:45:52,638
projects while I was doing my dissertation with the

694
00:45:52,698 --> 00:45:56,022
local aquarium in the Florida Keys, Florida Keys

695
00:45:56,062 --> 00:45:59,465
Aquarium Encounters, and that all came from my connection with

696
00:45:59,506 --> 00:46:02,807
the sanctuary. Ben Daughtry who is

697
00:46:02,907 --> 00:46:06,328
the president of that aquarium is also very involved with the sanctuary and

698
00:46:06,388 --> 00:46:09,689
saw me give a talk about my work was really excited about it

699
00:46:09,749 --> 00:46:13,270
and that led to conversations and doing some fieldwork collaboratively with

700
00:46:13,310 --> 00:46:17,071
them with a hammerhead tagging and so Yeah,

701
00:46:17,111 --> 00:46:21,172
the sanctuary Has been a great partner. Yeah in

702
00:46:28,041 --> 00:46:31,243
Yeah. Okay. Florida Keys National Marine. Okay. I just want to make sure we got that

703
00:46:31,323 --> 00:46:34,764
out there. We're talking so much about the, uh, the, the sanctuaries

704
00:46:34,824 --> 00:46:38,366
program there. We didn't even get to the name of the, of the actual national place.

705
00:46:38,966 --> 00:46:42,428
Um, so now that you've just recently, you're recently

706
00:46:42,468 --> 00:46:45,769
received the, uh, the Jeanne Clark award. How does, how

707
00:46:47,830 --> 00:46:51,652
Um, that, that was, that was incredible. Um, it's again,

708
00:46:52,312 --> 00:46:56,175
one of those instances where, you know, you're

709
00:46:56,195 --> 00:47:00,438
not going to get it if you don't apply. So, so

710
00:47:00,458 --> 00:47:04,461
I, you know, I got the email from AES,

711
00:47:04,621 --> 00:47:08,243
I'd seen some other people at going to AES meetings winning

712
00:47:08,744 --> 00:47:11,886
the Jeannie Clark Award when I was earlier on

713
00:47:11,926 --> 00:47:15,908
in my graduate career. And I just thought, you know, wow, like, maybe

714
00:47:15,989 --> 00:47:19,391
someday, I could join that really

715
00:47:19,451 --> 00:47:23,243
incredible group of women. And so My

716
00:47:23,283 --> 00:47:26,885
advisors nominated me and they asked me to submit

717
00:47:26,925 --> 00:47:30,607
a full application and I did and I fully

718
00:47:30,687 --> 00:47:33,848
anticipated that I was not going to get to

719
00:47:33,948 --> 00:47:37,230
join those ranks. I was completely surprised at

720
00:47:40,092 --> 00:47:48,302
Well, you know, I still think

721
00:47:48,342 --> 00:47:51,643
of myself as relatively early on in my

722
00:47:51,703 --> 00:47:57,384
career path. And maybe

723
00:47:57,424 --> 00:48:01,065
I don't give myself enough credit. But I

724
00:48:01,105 --> 00:48:04,265
was surprised. I mean, it's a really prestigious award. They

725
00:48:04,285 --> 00:48:08,486
don't give the award every year. I've been

726
00:48:08,526 --> 00:48:11,887
at AES meetings where they haven't given the award. So I certainly knew

727
00:48:11,947 --> 00:48:16,887
that that was a possibility. Yeah,

728
00:48:16,947 --> 00:48:21,869
so I was incredibly honored to get to receive

729
00:48:22,129 --> 00:48:25,290
an award with Jeannie's ranks, or Jeannie's name on it, and

730
00:48:26,491 --> 00:48:30,793
And before that, you'd received the Samuel Gruber Best Student presentation

731
00:48:30,853 --> 00:48:34,134
as well. Yes. How long ago was that? Was it

732
00:48:36,675 --> 00:48:40,176
Yes, that was at the Spokane

733
00:48:42,457 --> 00:48:46,009
Okay, a couple years. Okay, okay. Yeah, I could actually Well, I spoke to Jenny

734
00:48:46,049 --> 00:48:49,531
Bigman, who was the last recipient of the Jeannie Clark Award. She was a former student

735
00:48:49,571 --> 00:48:53,133
of mine as well there. And so it's kind of kind of cool. I

736
00:48:53,153 --> 00:48:57,576
was supposed to go. I mean, I couldn't make it there at the last minute. So it's kind of cool to see

737
00:48:57,776 --> 00:49:01,179
one of my former students get that award. I presume

738
00:49:01,219 --> 00:49:04,661
like you're probably too young, but you probably never met Jeannie Clark

739
00:49:07,168 --> 00:49:10,851
No, I didn't get to meet either of them, unfortunately. I've

740
00:49:11,331 --> 00:49:15,034
heard great stories about both of them. But

741
00:49:15,475 --> 00:49:18,717
especially Jeannie, I know that she's been

742
00:49:18,757 --> 00:49:22,080
very kind to some of the women that have been my

743
00:49:22,120 --> 00:49:25,343
mentors through my selfish work

744
00:49:25,403 --> 00:49:28,745
in AES. So Dana Bethea, Tanya Wiley,

745
00:49:28,785 --> 00:49:32,348
and Sonia Fordham have all always had wonderful

746
00:49:32,388 --> 00:49:35,747
things to say about Jeannie. really nurtured me

747
00:49:35,827 --> 00:49:39,048
as I've kind of gone through my shark journey as well.

748
00:49:41,028 --> 00:49:44,149
Yeah. And I'll say that she was a very, I knew her back when I was

749
00:49:44,189 --> 00:49:47,310
a master's student back at Moss Lanny in the days there. And she

750
00:49:47,330 --> 00:49:50,530
was actually, um, I don't know if you noticed, I mentioned some of the little history stuff,

751
00:49:50,550 --> 00:49:54,451
but she was actually a Gavin Naylor's main PhD advisor.

752
00:49:56,391 --> 00:49:59,832
Yeah. Yeah. She'd actually, she actually was, I didn't, she was a mentor.

753
00:49:59,852 --> 00:50:03,033
I just, I got to know her back when I was a grad student. I'd stayed in touch with her

754
00:50:03,093 --> 00:50:06,385
over the years. Cause she was, If you go back in the 80s and stuff,

755
00:50:06,405 --> 00:50:09,986
she was doing a lot of submersible work for National Geographic. And

756
00:50:10,026 --> 00:50:13,347
she was seeing sixgill sharks, which is what I was working

757
00:50:13,387 --> 00:50:16,908
on for my PhD. So I had a lot of, I'd met her in person. And

758
00:50:16,948 --> 00:50:20,129
then I had, I kept up correspondence with her

759
00:50:20,149 --> 00:50:23,389
for over the years. And she was always very gracious. I always had a very good, good

760
00:50:23,449 --> 00:50:26,710
relationship with her. But yeah, she mentioned, mentored some a

761
00:50:27,090 --> 00:50:30,531
number of other people like Gavin and some others as well going, of course, going

762
00:50:30,591 --> 00:50:33,892
way back, back into the day there as well. But yeah, she was very, I just wanted

763
00:50:33,912 --> 00:50:37,193
to add, she was very kind person and I had very

764
00:50:37,233 --> 00:50:41,374
good memories of her. Again, I didn't work with her directly, but I always corresponded

765
00:50:41,414 --> 00:50:44,576
with her. And if I asked her some questions on six gill sharks, she'd

766
00:50:44,596 --> 00:50:47,837
always take the time to send me a letter. And this was back when you actually had

767
00:50:47,877 --> 00:50:51,118
to hand write a letter before there was like people had computers and stuff. So

768
00:50:51,158 --> 00:50:55,660
those are very, kind of very special to me. In fact,

769
00:50:55,780 --> 00:50:59,121
if I could share one quick story here, Jeanne Clark story. Back

770
00:50:59,141 --> 00:51:02,242
when I was doing my degree, she did, there was an

771
00:51:02,322 --> 00:51:06,811
article in National Geographic It was about 1986 that

772
00:51:06,851 --> 00:51:10,312
she said that in the caption said 25 foot six gill shark.

773
00:51:11,132 --> 00:51:14,473
I was going 25 foot, man, that's like way bigger than anything I've seen

774
00:51:14,553 --> 00:51:18,314
or heard anywhere around. I think about, I think about 16, 17 feet was

775
00:51:18,334 --> 00:51:21,375
the biggest at the time. So I wrote her a, so I wrote her a

776
00:51:21,435 --> 00:51:24,976
letter and said, and I knew her at that time. I said, I said,

777
00:51:25,016 --> 00:51:28,196
wow, I said, did you verify, how well were you able to verify this thing

778
00:51:28,216 --> 00:51:31,711
was 25 feet? Couple

779
00:51:31,731 --> 00:51:36,212
weeks later. I get this and I still have this I get this really nice Big

780
00:51:36,392 --> 00:51:39,993
picture that she took for National Geographic It

781
00:51:40,053 --> 00:51:43,354
said it said it said basically from from

782
00:51:43,414 --> 00:51:46,834
hex anchors and Jeanne Clark at 2,000 feet Thanks

783
00:51:46,874 --> 00:51:50,115
Dave Ebert or something like that it turned out that she she wrote a

784
00:51:50,175 --> 00:51:53,916
letter with it that said The shark really wasn't 25 feet.

785
00:51:53,936 --> 00:51:57,857
It was more like 14 feet who got a little exaggerated Hope you

786
00:51:57,877 --> 00:52:01,132
understand, but it's a very kind letter. She wrote I mean, it's one

787
00:52:01,152 --> 00:52:04,414
of those things you treasure in life. But that was the kind of person. I'm sharing

788
00:52:04,434 --> 00:52:07,636
that because that was the kind of person she was, that she just took it

789
00:52:07,676 --> 00:52:11,418
all very good. And I was just kind of curious, like, wow, this thing's really big. She's a

790
00:52:11,438 --> 00:52:15,001
very good sport about that type of stuff. And I still have that framed

791
00:52:15,041 --> 00:52:18,122
in my office at home. So it's very, very kind of

792
00:52:18,242 --> 00:52:21,444
cool. But again, I just wanted to share that because that was the kind of person she was

793
00:52:21,464 --> 00:52:24,726
as a person. And people like yourself didn't have a chance

794
00:52:24,746 --> 00:52:28,399
to know or just wanted to share that. So

795
00:52:28,419 --> 00:52:31,760
now that you have your, with the Jeannie Clark award and everything, what's sort

796
00:52:31,780 --> 00:52:34,840
of your, what are your future plans that you want to go

797
00:52:34,860 --> 00:52:38,321
into? You want to pursue academia and have

798
00:52:39,722 --> 00:52:42,942
Yeah, that, that's definitely the hope would be

799
00:52:43,062 --> 00:52:46,963
that I'd be able to have my own research lab, um,

800
00:52:47,503 --> 00:52:51,344
be able to mentor graduate students and undergraduates do

801
00:52:51,384 --> 00:52:54,825
some teaching and ask my own research questions and

802
00:52:55,393 --> 00:53:03,416
keep writing those grant proposals that I supposedly really love writing.

803
00:53:03,896 --> 00:53:06,997
What type of research, like if you had your own lab, what would be

804
00:53:11,419 --> 00:53:16,340
Oh, the first research project. I'm

805
00:53:16,380 --> 00:53:19,561
really excited by the space that

806
00:53:19,581 --> 00:53:22,642
I've been able to kind of carve out with shark depredation. I

807
00:53:23,423 --> 00:53:26,522
think that that Well, not even I think I

808
00:53:26,582 --> 00:53:30,384
know that that is a really emerging and

809
00:53:30,484 --> 00:53:34,106
hot button issue. I know that, you know,

810
00:53:34,146 --> 00:53:37,727
people are calling the HMS nymphs managers about

811
00:53:37,787 --> 00:53:41,429
it on almost a daily basis from things that they have said to me. Right.

812
00:53:41,469 --> 00:53:46,572
People are really fired up about it. And so I think that depredation

813
00:53:46,632 --> 00:53:49,966
is kind of something that is going

814
00:53:50,026 --> 00:53:53,307
to vary in severity and how we maybe try to solve

815
00:53:53,347 --> 00:53:56,688
those problems from fishery to fishery and kind of also

816
00:53:56,748 --> 00:54:01,129
from shark species to shark species that's interacting in those fisheries. So

817
00:54:01,149 --> 00:54:04,730
I think that there's a lot that can still be pursued

818
00:54:04,790 --> 00:54:08,331
there. So that's definitely definitely a line of questioning that

819
00:54:08,371 --> 00:54:11,911
I'd like to keep going down. But sort

820
00:54:11,931 --> 00:54:15,232
of more generally, I'm just I'm really excited about projects that

821
00:54:15,252 --> 00:54:19,462
can tell us a little bit more about spatial ecology of animals,

822
00:54:19,962 --> 00:54:24,164
whether it's sharks or other recreationally important fish species, better

823
00:54:24,204 --> 00:54:27,425
understanding movement and behavior is really, I

824
00:54:29,966 --> 00:54:33,167
Have you had a chance to advise or mentor any students to

825
00:54:34,968 --> 00:54:38,229
Yeah, not advise, per se, since I'm not

826
00:54:38,749 --> 00:54:42,011
a PI yet, but I've gotten to mentor a number

827
00:54:42,051 --> 00:54:45,372
of students. I had some really great undergraduate students that

828
00:54:45,412 --> 00:54:49,587
worked with me during my dissertation, One

829
00:54:49,627 --> 00:54:52,749
of them graduated in the middle of the pandemic and

830
00:54:52,789 --> 00:54:56,290
was trying to figure out how to navigate the

831
00:54:56,830 --> 00:55:00,612
sort of weird landscape of seasonal work when the

832
00:55:00,652 --> 00:55:03,873
world was shut down. And so they ended up getting to come out in the field and

833
00:55:03,893 --> 00:55:07,015
help me during my field season, which most of my

834
00:55:07,075 --> 00:55:10,196
field work was during spring semesters. So normally that

835
00:55:10,256 --> 00:55:13,477
wouldn't have been able to happen, but it was really exciting to get to get them

836
00:55:13,698 --> 00:55:17,071
out in the field with me. And he's pursuing his

837
00:55:17,111 --> 00:55:21,632
PhD now at University of Maine. I'm super proud of him. And I

838
00:55:21,672 --> 00:55:24,853
work with a master's student and a PhD student in

839
00:55:24,873 --> 00:55:28,054
my lab now on their various projects, one of which is

840
00:55:28,094 --> 00:55:31,596
the striped bass project that I talked about a little bit earlier. So I

841
00:55:31,976 --> 00:55:35,337
really love getting to be out in the field

842
00:55:36,681 --> 00:55:40,123
with people that are still kind of cutting their teeth on fieldwork and learning new things.

843
00:55:40,143 --> 00:55:43,584
I love being in the field in general, but I also find it to be very

844
00:55:43,644 --> 00:55:47,526
fun to get to kind of be part of those early field experiences when

845
00:55:48,406 --> 00:55:51,747
everything is new and exciting and that kind

846
00:55:55,069 --> 00:55:58,190
Yeah, yeah. That's terrific, Grace. I

847
00:55:58,230 --> 00:56:01,752
got, so I got to ask, this has been a really wonderful interview with

848
00:56:01,792 --> 00:56:05,053
you and we hope you come back again, but I got to ask you before we go here,

849
00:56:05,602 --> 00:56:08,744
What advice would you have for young students that

850
00:56:11,726 --> 00:56:15,048
I think my biggest piece of advice and something that has served

851
00:56:15,088 --> 00:56:19,872
me is just be persistent. So things

852
00:56:19,952 --> 00:56:23,254
might not come together right away the way that

853
00:56:23,294 --> 00:56:27,417
you think or want them to. I didn't

854
00:56:27,517 --> 00:56:30,879
necessarily want to take two years between my undergraduate and

855
00:56:30,919 --> 00:56:34,432
my master's degree to go work. But I

856
00:56:34,752 --> 00:56:38,376
didn't get into any graduate programs fresh out of my

857
00:56:38,436 --> 00:56:42,040
undergrad. And in the end, doing those internships and

858
00:56:42,080 --> 00:56:45,884
working as a field tech actually had me way more prepared for

859
00:56:46,284 --> 00:56:49,467
graduate school down the line. And, you

860
00:56:49,507 --> 00:56:53,251
know, I wanted to go into a PhD program, started as a master's student,

861
00:56:53,332 --> 00:56:56,513
got there anyway. So I think just There is

862
00:56:56,553 --> 00:56:59,676
a lot of rejection in this field and that's something that you need to

863
00:56:59,936 --> 00:57:03,278
kind of just like steal yourself against, but if

864
00:57:03,298 --> 00:57:06,561
you keep pushing through it, I feel like half of

865
00:57:06,661 --> 00:57:10,143
it is just being persistent and not giving up on that dream.

866
00:57:11,304 --> 00:57:15,587
That's great. That's really good advice, I think, to people. It's definitely

867
00:57:15,607 --> 00:57:18,978
a field you need to A, have a thick skin and be,

868
00:57:19,238 --> 00:57:24,560
be persistent. And if you want to want a friend, get a dog. They are

869
00:57:28,701 --> 00:57:32,102
Good. Well, Grace, thank you very much again for coming on

870
00:57:32,142 --> 00:57:35,623
this and congratulations on receiving the Jeanne Clark award.

871
00:57:36,363 --> 00:57:40,084
And we wish you all the best and get in your lab, get

872
00:57:40,404 --> 00:57:44,125
in your own personal lab up and going. Please come

873
00:57:44,165 --> 00:57:47,406
back again in the future and we'll catch up. And what are you, what you've been

874
00:57:50,965 --> 00:57:54,812
Thank you. Thank you, Grace, for joining us on the Beyond Jaws podcast.

875
00:57:55,112 --> 00:57:59,053
What an interview. It's unreal to see You

876
00:57:59,073 --> 00:58:02,316
know, the people that we have on, you know, a lot of times, Dave, when we have people on,

877
00:58:02,336 --> 00:58:06,360
they've been in the business for, you know, just like yourself, like 35 plus

878
00:58:06,400 --> 00:58:09,663
years. And then we have people who are what seems to be just

879
00:58:09,703 --> 00:58:13,226
starting their careers, but they're already so well established in

880
00:58:13,266 --> 00:58:16,649
terms of the amount of things that they've been able to accomplish, the amount of projects they've

881
00:58:16,669 --> 00:58:20,032
been able to do. And Grace is no exception to that rule. She is

882
00:58:20,192 --> 00:58:24,255
someone who's been able to study small tooth sawfish.

883
00:58:24,515 --> 00:58:27,738
She's been able to study tarpon, shark depredation. She's

884
00:58:27,758 --> 00:58:30,860
been able to do quite a bit in such a short span of

885
00:58:30,920 --> 00:58:34,142
time. I can just imagine what she's going to be able to accomplish over

886
00:58:34,162 --> 00:58:37,484
the next 20, 30, who knows, 40 years in

887
00:58:37,504 --> 00:58:40,706
the industry. What are your thoughts on today's interview, what she's been able

888
00:58:42,120 --> 00:58:45,361
Well, you know, it's kind of cool, Andrew, having people on like grace early

889
00:58:45,401 --> 00:58:48,622
in their career like this is that hopefully 20 years from now, they'll

890
00:58:48,642 --> 00:58:52,003
be able to like pull up this episode or we'll remind them and see

891
00:58:52,023 --> 00:58:55,264
what they had to say, like back in 2024, what they, what

892
00:58:55,304 --> 00:58:58,505
they, what they, uh, what they are projecting. Cause it's, it's cause

893
00:58:58,585 --> 00:59:01,866
you know, they're, they're at that great time in, uh, in, in your career, like

894
00:59:01,906 --> 00:59:05,307
when you're starting out and you have so many roads you can go on

895
00:59:05,787 --> 00:59:09,228
and grace is no exception. She's had a lot of, had a lot of broad background in

896
00:59:09,268 --> 00:59:12,960
her, options that were her career working, you know, with sawfish, with

897
00:59:13,440 --> 00:59:16,602
tiger sharks, with, you know, turtles and

898
00:59:16,642 --> 00:59:19,845
just all kinds of different, different backgrounds and experience working with

899
00:59:19,885 --> 00:59:23,347
Greg Skolmo and with white shark stuff. So it'll be interesting

900
00:59:23,367 --> 00:59:27,410
to see like where, where she winds up in 5, 10, 20 years

901
00:59:27,450 --> 00:59:30,832
from now, you know, where you have people that are being like Greg Skolmo

902
00:59:30,852 --> 00:59:33,994
or myself and others that are kind of at the towards the latter part, we can reflect on what

903
00:59:34,014 --> 00:59:37,136
we've done. But it's be interesting to hear, hear someone like

904
00:59:37,176 --> 00:59:40,657
Grace in a few years, where they've actually been able to go with their career. So

905
00:59:40,937 --> 00:59:44,080
it was really exciting. I love having people on like Grace against one of these

906
00:59:44,120 --> 00:59:47,624
really early career rising stars in the field. We've

907
00:59:47,644 --> 00:59:50,847
had enough, you know, we've had a number of them on this year. Yeah, quite

908
00:59:50,867 --> 00:59:54,450
a few have had it. We've had a number of really outstanding early

909
00:59:54,510 --> 00:59:57,753
career people on there. And again, it'll be really fascinating to see

910
00:59:57,773 --> 01:00:01,717
how where they wind up in a, you know, decade

911
01:00:03,147 --> 01:00:06,408
I mean, that's the beauty of doing this podcast, is seeing

912
01:00:06,448 --> 01:00:09,569
what people have already been able to do in their careers that they've established for

913
01:00:09,629 --> 01:00:12,731
quite some time. And then watching some of the

914
01:00:12,751 --> 01:00:16,112
people that are coming up that dreamed about being shark

915
01:00:16,152 --> 01:00:19,433
scientists or fishery scientists and then been able to go

916
01:00:19,513 --> 01:00:23,335
back and forth between, especially in Grace's case,

917
01:00:23,375 --> 01:00:26,556
going between fisheries and shark science and going back and forth. And

918
01:00:26,576 --> 01:00:30,077
I think it's really interesting to see people do really

919
01:00:30,137 --> 01:00:33,718
well and excel within this field. giving that inspiration to

920
01:00:33,799 --> 01:00:36,940
people who are listening to this who may be just starting out their careers being like, I can

921
01:00:36,960 --> 01:00:40,141
do this too. This is something that can still be done, not just by

922
01:00:40,201 --> 01:00:43,682
people who have done it, you know, 35, 40 years ago, but

923
01:00:43,782 --> 01:00:47,083
people who are doing it now and continue to do that and

924
01:00:47,123 --> 01:00:50,905
their past and how like their challenges and some of their successes

925
01:00:50,945 --> 01:00:54,086
that we talk about. And I think that's what I love about doing this

926
01:00:54,126 --> 01:00:57,287
podcast and sort of to get to know the people who are

927
01:00:57,327 --> 01:01:01,328
doing it. you know, everybody we've had are very humble in

928
01:01:01,368 --> 01:01:05,089
doing their work, very proud of their work and looking

929
01:01:05,149 --> 01:01:08,370
forward to doing new things and really focusing on the questions at

930
01:01:08,430 --> 01:01:11,891
hand of what they want to find out and what they want to learn about

931
01:01:11,951 --> 01:01:15,212
sharks or about fisheries. And I think that's what really is

932
01:01:16,752 --> 01:01:20,233
the great spirit of science, right, is figuring out these

933
01:01:20,293 --> 01:01:23,615
questions, like Dave, your question, not to speak for you, but your question

934
01:01:23,635 --> 01:01:27,157
is like, how many sharks can we find? Can we find sharks that have been extinct before?

935
01:01:27,517 --> 01:01:30,699
You know, are they extinct? Are they not? Like, where are these sharks and

936
01:01:30,739 --> 01:01:34,461
how do we find them? I just love that aspect. It really inspires

937
01:01:34,541 --> 01:01:38,003
me to sort of look at different ways to do marine science

938
01:01:38,043 --> 01:01:41,345
and conservation and to continue to say, hey, what questions do

939
01:01:41,405 --> 01:01:44,607
we have that we can move forward on? And I think that is what

940
01:01:45,468 --> 01:01:48,896
That's what people like Grace bring to the podcast and bring to science, and

941
01:01:50,755 --> 01:01:54,217
Right. And that's the thing is really I like about our podcast and that we

942
01:01:54,237 --> 01:01:57,438
can let we let the people give it their story in their words. So

943
01:01:57,458 --> 01:02:00,720
they can tell. So it's not being orchestrated or

944
01:02:00,740 --> 01:02:03,982
whatever, not that it would be, but it's like, but they can hear they can just tell about their

945
01:02:04,042 --> 01:02:07,363
journey, their story, how they got to where they are now.

946
01:02:07,844 --> 01:02:11,205
And it's interesting, we have people on from different stages in their career from an early

947
01:02:11,245 --> 01:02:14,387
career person like grace. Yeah, I got people like

948
01:02:14,427 --> 01:02:17,580
myself and others we've had on to the show. Uh, like

949
01:02:17,600 --> 01:02:20,843
we mentioned, Greg Skomal that have been around and Lisa Natanson, some of these people

950
01:02:20,863 --> 01:02:24,027
that were around and people in their middle of their career. And just kind

951
01:02:24,087 --> 01:02:27,270
of, and they can, again, it's, it's kind of, it's told in their own words and

952
01:02:27,310 --> 01:02:30,554
that's what's so neat about grace. And especially, you know, I get excited when

953
01:02:30,574 --> 01:02:33,818
we have some of these young people on like grace, because she could see where, you

954
01:02:33,838 --> 01:02:36,880
know, she can tell her story where she's at and it's. Hopefully it'll be an

955
01:02:36,940 --> 01:02:40,443
inspiration to other young people starting out in their careers

956
01:02:40,483 --> 01:02:43,586
to hear how someone like Grace was able to get to

957
01:02:43,626 --> 01:02:46,849
where she is. And then hopefully we'll plan to have Grace on

958
01:02:46,889 --> 01:02:49,972
again sometime in the future and kind of hear where she's at and

959
01:02:51,160 --> 01:02:55,083
I can't yeah, I can't wait. This is gonna be a lot of fun We'll have her on because she's gonna obviously

960
01:02:55,123 --> 01:02:58,244
next time we have her on She's probably gonna be up to ten more projects that we're gonna want

961
01:02:58,264 --> 01:03:01,767
to find out more about knowing her So that'll be great. It

962
01:03:01,787 --> 01:03:05,269
was great to have grace on We'll put all of her links that

963
01:03:05,309 --> 01:03:08,491
we have in the show notes and Dave if people want to get a hold of

964
01:03:09,451 --> 01:03:12,753
So the best way is on social media is a lost shark

965
01:03:12,793 --> 01:03:16,396
guy on Instagram Lost sharks guy on on

966
01:03:16,556 --> 01:03:20,020
X and lost sharks on Facebook best way you know

967
01:03:20,080 --> 01:03:23,365
come on and you know follow along on the journey the place that

968
01:03:23,405 --> 01:03:26,869
I what I'm up to and please go to our YouTube channel

969
01:03:28,011 --> 01:03:31,235
beyond jaws podcast and subscribe and and

970
01:03:32,789 --> 01:03:36,590
Yeah, absolutely. Those links are all in the show notes. One

971
01:03:36,630 --> 01:03:39,751
thing to look out for too, this is going up

972
01:03:39,771 --> 01:03:43,171
a little later, but Dave's going to be away and he's looking for lost

973
01:03:43,191 --> 01:03:46,492
sharks. And if you want to really follow his journey and what he's

974
01:03:46,532 --> 01:03:49,753
looking at and what he sees, I highly recommend you follow him

975
01:03:49,833 --> 01:03:53,014
on Instagram or on his social media that he just mentioned because this

976
01:03:53,094 --> 01:03:56,535
is going to be the time to watch what he's up to. And I think it's really interesting.

977
01:03:56,555 --> 01:04:00,215
You talk about going to fish markets and looking in different places.

978
01:04:00,235 --> 01:04:03,496
Where are you going? couple of places that

979
01:04:04,237 --> 01:04:08,299
Well I'm gonna be starting off in Northern Australia with

980
01:04:08,460 --> 01:04:11,962
a good friend Pete Kine and his crew and we'll

981
01:04:12,002 --> 01:04:15,344
be traveling around looking for sharks in Northern Australia

982
01:04:15,364 --> 01:04:18,446
and then we're on to Timor-Leste which also known as

983
01:04:18,666 --> 01:04:21,768
East Timor which has never been explored before so that's gonna be

984
01:04:21,808 --> 01:04:25,726
exciting. And then we'll be on to Indonesia to several locations

985
01:04:25,746 --> 01:04:29,770
within Indonesia and then I'll be winding up in Singapore. So

986
01:04:30,191 --> 01:04:34,155
I'm going to be hitting a number of places and hopefully I'll

987
01:04:37,031 --> 01:04:40,214
Absolutely, and I'm sure you will and I look forward to seeing it. We're gonna miss

988
01:04:40,254 --> 01:04:43,458
you Of course by the time this airs you're gonna be back and we're gonna

989
01:04:43,498 --> 01:04:46,901
be already recording it more episodes But but

990
01:04:46,961 --> 01:04:50,104
yeah, like I said everybody if you want to see what Dave's up to

991
01:04:50,124 --> 01:04:53,408
and how to look for lost sharks That's what you do. Go follow at lost

992
01:04:53,428 --> 01:04:56,590
shark guy on Instagram and all the other platforms and And thank you

993
01:04:56,630 --> 01:04:59,851
again, Dave, for doing this. And thank you, Grace, for joining us and

994
01:04:59,931 --> 01:05:03,131
talking about your career so far. We really appreciate it. And for

995
01:05:03,171 --> 01:05:06,352
everybody, thank you so much for listening. And if you know someone who wants

996
01:05:06,392 --> 01:05:09,552
to go into shark science or shark conservation, just interested in sharks at all,

997
01:05:10,092 --> 01:05:13,533
share this episode with them. Share other episodes. Share the whole show with them. We

998
01:05:13,673 --> 01:05:16,894
grow based on your recommendations. So if you love this show and you want

999
01:05:16,934 --> 01:05:20,114
somebody else to listen to it, please feel free to let them know about it.

1000
01:05:20,274 --> 01:05:23,935
We really appreciate it. But thank you so much for joining us on today's episode of

1001
01:05:24,075 --> 01:05:27,665
the Beyond Jaws podcast. from Dave and I. We really appreciate you.