Remembering Dr. Leonard Campagno: A Giant in Shark Biology

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Welcome to another episode of the Beyond Jaws podcast, and I'm your co-host Dave

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Ebert. I'm filling in doing what Andrew usually does to introduce an

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episode, a new episode, but today is kind

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of a special one for me. It's a bonus episode where I'm

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going to give a little bit of a talk about my former advisor, Dr.

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Leonard Campagno, who was really a giant in

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the field of shark biology, shark ecology, shark

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taxonomy. It's a little bit of a celebration of life, sort of a little bit

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of a a goodbye from me

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to Leonard. And so I hope you enjoy the show. I'm going to share some memories,

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some stories I've had with Leonard. Some of you may have heard of over the years and

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you can now you have him for posterity. But anyway,

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I hope you enjoy the show and we'll get started

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right now. And

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welcome back to another episode of the Beyond Jaws podcast. I'm your co-host,

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Dave Ebert, and here with my co-host, Andrew Lewin. And

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we're going to be talking a little bit. I'm going to be reminiscing a little bit of a Celebration

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of Life episode for my former advisor, Dr. Leonard

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Campagna, who passed away on September

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24, 2024. And so I'm going to

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share some stories with you, talk a little about my experience with him. I

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knew Leonard for over 40 years. And going back to

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when I was a young master student, really starting out

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in the Bay Area in California here. And

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so we'll so we'll get started now. OK, so

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I so I talk about Leonard, he

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was an interesting character and he's. I don't want

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to not can't be overstated, but he really was a giant in the field of

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shark biology, shark taxonomy. He really his

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classification of how we classified sharks

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and rays and chimeras or ghost sharks back

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in his paper he published back in 1973 called

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Interrelationships of Chondrichthyan Fishes really

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laid the groundwork for how we classify sharks and

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rays and that classification is still used today and

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actually molecular research done by

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Gavin Naylor and many others over the years have really found that

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he was his classification really holds

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up well. And back when he did this, he didn't have a lot of

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the modern tools such as genetics that we could use today. And

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so he's quite an interesting character. And he

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grew up in San Francisco in the Little

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Italy section. And he was born in 1943, December

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4th. And a lot of people don't know that because he spent the last 35, almost

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40 years in South Africa. And a lot of people thought he was South African. But

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he did grow up in the Bay Area. He went to San Francisco Community

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College. And he went on to San Francisco State, and from there to

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Stanford University. And some things that people don't often know

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is that Stanford University used to have one

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of the preeminent ichthyology collections in the world. And

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it was only in about 1979, 1980, they finally closed down the ichthyology department. and

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sent all their specimens over to the California Academy of Sciences. Now

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it's kind of funny because most of the people, the professors there, had

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either passed away or retired. And here Stanford

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University had this whole department open for one guy who was

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still a grad student. Leonard, I think, probably had the record for

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one of the longest PhDs. He was a student there for about

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14, 15 years before he finally finished up his PhD. That's

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got to be the longest, for sure. Yeah. And

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he was just kind of squirreled away down in the basement there working

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away. And finally, the biology department chair

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realized that they had this whole department open for a grad student. and

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then a 15 year grad student. And so he went down and he

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just said, hey, Leonard, we're closing up the department. You're going to need to finish up

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and get out or get out. But we're closing the apartment. And Leonard

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told me the story. So I'm just I'm giving you a firsthand account of what

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he told me. And so he he

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went from there over to the Tiburon Marine Lab, which is

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just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco in Marin County.

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And over there, they had some old army barracks. It had become a marine

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lab. Station for San Francisco State University, but it

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was really their old army barracks and was old army bearing Buildings

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from going back to World War two because they had they basically an army army

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Group base there because they were concerned about People

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Japanese ships coming into San Francisco Bay. Anyway, they sat

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vacant and Leonard took over one of these Buildings

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I mean he literally took it over and I

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remember as a young grad student. I first started in the early 1980s

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and My professor at Moss Landing Marine

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Laboratories, Greg Kaye, said, uh,

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you know, you ought to talk up, talk, give Leonard Campagna a call and,

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and, and let him know you're gonna be working up in San Francisco Bay. Cause I, I

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was going to work on seven gill sharks, which are, were very common in San Francisco

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Bay. So, you know, I was a young 22 year old. I didn't know anything. I

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thought, okay, great. I'll give Leonard a call. So I just kind of cold call

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this guy up and I get this answer on the phone. Like, yeah,

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who is this? And I said, like, oh, hi, this is Dave Ebert. I'm a

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graduate student at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, and I'm studying seven

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gill sharks in the bay. I'd like to know if I can come up and talk with you.

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He goes, I haven't got time for this. And he hung up on me. And

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that was my first introduction to. How old were you at this time? I

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That was your first that was your first like any

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kind of response from any kind of interaction with the first interaction with

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And I was like, whoa, that was a pretty cold and abrupt. And

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so I went back to Greg and I said, Greg, I

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said, this is what happened. I explained to him and Greg looks and he goes, well, Leonard

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can be a little eccentric. I thought, yeah, eccentric and

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be kind of rude. But so I went about, so

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I just was like, okay, well, Clary didn't want to talk to

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me or didn't want to talk to anybody. But I knew nothing about him at the time other than what Greg

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had told me. So I went about doing my thesis

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project and probably about About

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a year later, it was the winter time

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and I was, I was using the boat at San Francisco state there going

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out to fish. And so I kind of knew he was based there, but I

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didn't know where he was based at the time. And I came in

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one day, I didn't, you know, we're out fishing and we caught a few spiny dogfish, nothing

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big. It was my brother. It was myself, my brother, and a good friend of mine, uh,

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uh, out there fishing. We came in there and it was just,

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it was just pouring rain, just cats and dogs. And

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so we're trying to clean up the boat, pick up the gear. And this guy walks by

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and he kind of looks in the boat. He sees these dogfish. I mean, nothing special.

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These are spiny dogfish, you know? And and he says, oh,

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yeah. Oh, what do you do with those sharks? I said, oh, I am. You know, I'm

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from Moss Landing Marine Laboratories. I'm I'm studying sharks here in the bay.

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He goes, oh, really? I didn't know anybody was studying sharks in

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the bay. And so clearly

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Well, at this point, I kind of knew I'd never seen Leonard. I didn't know

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what he looked like. Right. And I thought like,

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but I knew he was there. And I thought, like, I wonder if this is Leonard Campagna. And

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then he just started talking. And we spent about

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the next hour. I mean, it was just raining. And

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he never said like, hi, I'm Leonard Campagno. He never said,

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Hey, let's go inside to get out of the rain. We

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stood there. And of course I was like, I was probably, it might've been 23 at

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this time. And I was going like, this is my end with chance to

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talk to Leonard Campagno. And so we stood there for

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about an hour. And then finally my brother and my friend go, uh, Hey

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Dave, can we go get out of the rain? It's raining pretty hard

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here. We're soaked like rats. And I was like,

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yeah, yeah, can I go? And I go, by the

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way, my name is Dave Eber. And he goes, oh, I'm Leonard Campagna. He goes, why don't you

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come over to my office? And I go, where is it? He goes, well, it's that Army barrack over there.

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And this guy would drive his beat up 1964 black Beetle Bug

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VW. Go

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look online if you don't recognize it. Some people of a certain age know what I'm talking about.

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He'd drive it in there and he'd close it. You'd have no idea this

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guy was there. And so we went

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over there and I spent another like two hours talking with the guy.

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My brother and friend were there. it was the most amazing experience I

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ever had even though I was soaking wet dripping and

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We just he just went in there, and I really I looked in there. I realized like well. He lives here

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He basically was living in there had a cot he had all these stations set

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up the workstations. He was using and For

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again for those in the shark world you'll know what I'm talking about, but he was working on

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the the 1984 Sharks

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of the world book that was published by the Food and Agriculture Organization FAO

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is a classic reference It was published in 1984 and this is probably about

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19 Late 82, you know a winner

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of 8283 right in that time frame and

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At the time is like well, it's kind of cool. He's working on this, you know sure he told me about the

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project he was doing he just been on like this round-the-world tour and everything and

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And so like I had an amazing visit. He said, Oh, come up, stop in anytime

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you're up here. Well, obviously I wasn't going to pass on that because he was just

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like a wealth. And I was literally like having a, uh, uh, an

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audio version of the encyclopedia at the time. This

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guy was just could talk, stock, non-talk, stock, non-stop.

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And So I went up there and I met with, you know, I would go up there when I was up there

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and stop in and visit with them. And for me it was, you know,

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and I've talked about this a little before in some of the earlier episodes, but you

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know, when you're traveling kind of in your journey in life, you're really fortunate

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if you meet somebody who's a fellow traveler on the same road

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you're embarking on. And Leonard was that guy that,

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I mean, it has some great people in my, you know, that had met, you

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know, Greg Kai is the top of the list. John McOsker, if you bet, Leonard

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was that fellow traveler. He was that guy who was on the road that I

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was studying off on. And we just really connected very,

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really well. And I just, it was just, it was an amazing experience.

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And so I got to know him over the next, you know, a couple

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of years going up there and talking with them. And sometimes I just go up

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there and spend like literally my, when I say I've spent a few hours

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with them, they're more like anywhere from three to six hours just talking nonstop.

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And it wasn't just sharks. It would, we talk on rays, we'd talk on,

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Chimeras and I was just like this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to learn I

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did I was was not focused on any one species But

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I was looking I was want to learn about everything and that's really

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Laid the foundation for my search for lost sharks

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Then I really this is going back the early 80s this

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Yeah, I can imagine. When you were talking with Leonard about

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these different species, were you talking more about the ecology,

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distribution, and that sort of aspect? Or

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were you talking more about where to find them, where they are,

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At the time, the whole field of shark research was

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just really, and modern shark research was really The

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groundwork was being laid. And as I've mentioned before, like myself, Lisa

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Natanson, Chris Lowe, Greg Skomal, we were like,

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really that, as I've said, that the Jaws generation of,

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of, of young shark researchers really started in the eighties. And

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we really laid the foundation for what came later in

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the terms of sharks. So I, we talked, so a lot of the stuff people

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talk about, like shark conservation, they throw that term around now. It

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wasn't even a term at that time. There was no, it wasn't even anybody's mind.

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It more had to do with fisheries at the time, but we talked

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about like sharks. We knew at that point that sharks were slow growing and

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long lived, but nobody really knew anything about, you know, how

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old they get or how many young they have or where they go. And so all

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of that was, we were starting, we were starting to lay the groundwork for that. And

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Leonard was that guy who we could talk on all kinds of stuff. We talked on

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taxonomy, talked on ecology, life history. And

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I'll tell you a story in just a moment how just to give you an idea, but Leonard

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was that guy who would think outside the box. I mean, he really would think

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of things that people weren't even, weren't even on the lexicon yet

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at the time. And during, uh,

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as I, as I got to know him and stuff, and he was like, so at the time he was looking for a job. He

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was in his, uh, early, early forties

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at the time. And, uh, he got a

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job. in South Africa, interestingly, at the South African,

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or actually it was nowadays, it's the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity.

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But at the time it was known as the J.L.B. Smith Institute of

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Ichthyology. And for those of you that don't know, J.L.B. Smith

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was the guy who discovered the coelacanth back

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in 1938. Old Four Legs it was called. And

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so he, he was, that was his sort of name recognition. And

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J.L.B. passed away in 1968, but his wife, Margaret

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Smith, which is a whole story I'll tell in just a moment. She actually

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drove and got this whole funding and everything for what was later called

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the J.L.B. Smith Institute of Ichthyology, which opened in about

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1980, 79, 80, I believe it was. Or actually, I think it might've been a couple, it might've

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been 77, 78, late 70s when it opened, when it officially

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opened. But anyway, Leonard got a job at this place,

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and this is in about 1985. Uh,

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you know, I'd finished my master's and I was looking around what I was going to do and I was working

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a few different jobs, but I was still going up there collecting data and still going up there to

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see Leonard. And when he told me he was taking this job, you know,

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I went up there and saw him and, you know, kind of say goodbye. And I've,

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again, I've told this story before, but as I was kind of leaving and

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saying goodbye, I said, well, Hey, you know, Leonard, if, if, if you need anybody to

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carry a suitcase or anything, Give me a call. And,

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you know, it's a complete throwaway line. You think nothing you'll never that, you

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know, Oh, well, you know, good luck on that. You know, maybe see him sometime in 20 years. Well,

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about eight months after he calls me up from South

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Africa and says, you know, Hey Dave, I have a PhD

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position here at the, it was a road university,

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but it was, it was JLB Smith Institute. He goes, I have a PhD position.

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Would you like it? And, you know, It

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took me like a nanosecond to say like, hell yeah, um,

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I'm on the way. And so, uh, and so it

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was just one of those crazy things in life. This

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is, this was in 1985. He called me up and

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I went, I went to South Africa, I went to South Africa in 86. So it

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took, I had to, I had to go through and apply for, uh, apply

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for the school and I had to get all the paperwork together, the visa and all that

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type of stuff, which took me about nine months to do. I

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died actually closer to a year actually, but I so I finally went in 86 and

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it was the most transformative time of my life and Again

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to kind of put perspective into people certain age will understand this

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but it at that time South Africa wasn't a

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place people were generally clamoring to go through because it was on the world stage There's

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apartheid was going on. Yeah, and there's a lot of stuff going

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on at the time And here I am like, sure, I'm

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going to go to South Africa. And I, that was all I knew is I'm going to South Africa.

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I'm gonna go study sharks. That's all I cared about. Cause I

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was really fulfilling a dream. And I had, again, I've shared

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some of these adventures. I won't go into all of them today, but I, I have

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a number of adventures I had at the time that were very, uh,

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life getting sort of life changing. And I kind of tell the story that

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I was on basically like a four plus year camping trip when

258
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I went to South Africa. So yeah, I

259
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literally had not been there know anything about it other than what Leonard told me

260
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and so I just literally got on a plane and I went and

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It was an amazing experience. I Got

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to Graham's town and then you know, I Got set up

263
00:16:17,913 --> 00:16:21,196
got going right away was out in the field looking for stuff and

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I kind of funny stories and Graham sounds kind of a I

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come from a small town in California. I thought oh great now I'm in another small town in

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rural town in South Africa. And the reason the Institute was

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there is because J.L.B. Smith was based at Rhodes University. And,

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uh, and so now actually another side story of the whole thing is when

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I was first there, my first Christmas there, I was house sitting for

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Margaret Smith, whose husband J.L.B. Smith was

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the guy that did the coelacanth. And of course, Margaret was, Margaret

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was actually 20 years younger than him. And she was a young, uh, she'd

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had been a chemistry student at his, uh, because he

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used to teach chemistry as well back in the 30s when they got married. And

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so she recounted the whole story to me. I was house-sitting for

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her and her sister Flora, who was a vaudeville performer. And

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I had a separate room they had set up for people to live there.

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And I was house-sitting for a couple who

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lived there. And every night about 7 o'clock, Margaret

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and her sister Flora would come next door, literally bring tea and crumpets,

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which is about how English can you get. And we'd sit and talk

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for about a half hour, 45 minutes. And she would share stories

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with me about, about JLB and

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her, uh, do studying fishes in Southern Africa.

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And some of the stuff people would be horrified to hear these stories now, but Margaret,

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when she was a young woman, she was a very good swimmer and stuff. And she

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would go out in the field and JLB was older, 20 years older, and he had some

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health issues. And so stories that tell me is like they'd

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go out on these pristine reefs like in Mozambique and

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this is how they used to do things so don't be horrified about this but they would he

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would dynamite the reefs and all these fishes would float up

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dead and so margaret being a swimmer she

293
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would swim around she'd go swimming around collecting all the fish And

294
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she asked me the question, she goes, you know, Dave, there used to be a lot of sharks would

295
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come in around, swimming around us, collecting the fish. And I kind of look

296
00:18:17,108 --> 00:18:20,449
at JLB and I said, is it okay here? There's a lot of big sharks swimming

297
00:18:20,469 --> 00:18:23,650
around. He goes, oh, don't worry about them, they won't bother you. And so the

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guy has his wife swimming around in the water, collecting all

299
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these dead fish that were coming up. And he said, I don't worry, sharks don't

300
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bother you, they won't bother you or anything. Which is mostly true, I'm sure. I

301
00:18:34,494 --> 00:18:38,898
don't know what kind of sharks they were, She said some of them are pretty big, but

302
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she'd share some of those stories and I really became to appreciate this thought

303
00:18:42,261 --> 00:18:45,544
like here's this young woman in the 30s

304
00:18:45,604 --> 00:18:49,628
and 40s and 50s really still going

305
00:18:49,748 --> 00:18:53,091
out and collecting his stuff and she made

306
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quite a name for herself and she was very accomplished in

307
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what she did and she did she illustrated a lot of the the

308
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fishes that JLB would describe. And,

309
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but it wasn't, it really, she was kind of in his shadows until after

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he passed away and set up this institute that

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she really kind of came into her own, but she's a very accomplished woman.

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If you ever, again, if you ever want to go look up some of the stuff she did, um, she,

313
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she, she, but she really helped drive his legacy. Um, so

314
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anyway, a little bit of a side story there, but this was the kind of, Opportunities I

315
00:19:24,212 --> 00:19:28,058
talk about like, you know, I went to look for lost sharks, but I had some amazing

316
00:19:28,138 --> 00:19:31,344
stories like, you know, meeting Margaret Smith and I met several, a number of

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00:19:31,404 --> 00:19:34,629
other people. You know, I talk about going to the grocery store and

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00:19:34,669 --> 00:19:38,831
standing there getting some groceries and I'm, I got Desmond Tutu standing

319
00:19:38,851 --> 00:19:42,132
next to me. We're kind of standing in line at the checkout counter, just shooting

320
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the breeze, very casual and stuff. And, uh, cause

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I was, I was there at a very dynamic time in South Africa's history.

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And if people, again, if they know anything about like, you know, February

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00:19:54,738 --> 00:19:58,000
11th, 1990, um, Nelson Mandela was

324
00:19:58,040 --> 00:20:01,611
released from prison. and came down and gave a speech at the Grand Parade

325
00:20:01,651 --> 00:20:04,813
in Cape Town. I was there because I, and

326
00:20:04,853 --> 00:20:08,135
it wasn't, I just, cause it was all this stuff was going on. I thought, Oh,

327
00:20:08,195 --> 00:20:11,257
it's kind of interesting to experience some of

328
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this stuff. You know, I was kind of the outsider making right where everybody knew that.

329
00:20:15,339 --> 00:20:18,781
Yeah. Oh yeah. And I, and where I was based at the South African museum,

330
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I used to look at, uh, parliament was literally right, right outside

331
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my front window. And so I would, I have to walk by there

332
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every day to go to the gym I was going to at the time. And I would see

333
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all these guys, Mandela, Tutu, several other

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people, you know, de Klerk. They'd be going

335
00:20:35,339 --> 00:20:38,701
in and out for different parliamentary meetings at the time. And

336
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so I was there at a very transformative time. And that was some

337
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of the big rewards I got out of that, working with

338
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Leonard, you know, having the opportunity to go there and work with Leonard. But

339
00:20:49,667 --> 00:20:53,169
talking about working with Leonard, that was an interesting experience as

340
00:20:53,229 --> 00:20:56,485
well. because Leonard

341
00:20:56,505 --> 00:20:59,967
was an interesting guy. Like if you knew him, like when I knew him in California, he

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was a really good guy. If you got to know him, he'd be very generous. I

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learned a ton of stuff from him. But when I was a

344
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student, it was a little different in a sense. And I

345
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won't go into all the details here. It'll be in my forthcoming memoirs.

346
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But he would, I could go to his office and I'd sit there

347
00:21:17,737 --> 00:21:21,038
and ask him some questions and stuff. And I'd get like, uh-huh. Yeah.

348
00:21:21,398 --> 00:21:24,803
Uh-huh. Okay. Yep. Sounds good to me. Very

349
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little, very little interaction. But then him and I

350
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would go out and have dinner usually, you know, two, three, four nights a week.

351
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And, you know, this is when I was in town. And

352
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then I just wanted to like have a tape recorder going because it would

353
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just be a complete data dump. He just go

354
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on about this and that. And just, and I was just going like in,

355
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in one of the papers that I, I recommend, if you look on

356
00:21:49,226 --> 00:21:52,387
my Instagram posts and on Facebook, I was

357
00:21:52,427 --> 00:21:56,629
a 1990 paper he did on alternative life histories, styles

358
00:21:56,729 --> 00:22:00,290
of, uh, Condric the and fishes through time and space. It

359
00:22:00,410 --> 00:22:04,552
is, if you are any kind of a serious shark researcher,

360
00:22:04,652 --> 00:22:08,692
conservationist, this is like a mandatory paper you need to read. And

361
00:22:08,712 --> 00:22:12,773
you can go into my Instagram and you can find the citation

362
00:22:12,793 --> 00:22:16,094
there. It's Environmental Biology of Fishes, 1990. But it was

363
00:22:16,534 --> 00:22:19,835
him and I would spend hours there long after we'd finished a

364
00:22:19,895 --> 00:22:23,255
pizza and stuff and just talk about this. Because he was bouncing ideas. I realized that

365
00:22:23,275 --> 00:22:27,436
he was bouncing ideas off me. And I was just like a young PhD

366
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student. And he's asking me questions about about different,

367
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different things. And so that was really an exciting time. And again, just

368
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reinforce with me, like, this was the guy I needed to meet on

369
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my journey that made the huge difference. And, and one

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of the more direct things. So that was an amazing, that was really amazing. Like

371
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I said, going out and having a pizza, we'd have lunch. And it was just like, we'd, we'd

372
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spend hours. I mean, literally like three, four hours would go by, they'd be

373
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closing down the pizza place. And, and I just, and then

374
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we'd kind of go for a walk, walk back to the lab. And he was just at that point, he

375
00:22:58,573 --> 00:23:02,074
was real chatty. Um, for me personally, one

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of the coolest things I experienced there was one of the things that

377
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people got to know me early on was I did, I

378
00:23:08,895 --> 00:23:12,496
did a lot of, uh, observational field studies

379
00:23:12,716 --> 00:23:16,097
on foraging, hunting and hunting, hunting and sharks.

380
00:23:16,937 --> 00:23:20,260
And one of the things I came on was that big

381
00:23:20,320 --> 00:23:23,663
sharks will hunt in packs. And the main

382
00:23:23,743 --> 00:23:27,146
one was seven gill sharks, but I've seen other white sharks and other sharks.

383
00:23:27,206 --> 00:23:30,809
People don't realize, but they will hunt in groups in coordinated

384
00:23:30,930 --> 00:23:35,434
groups. Um, I refer to social facilitation and

385
00:23:35,454 --> 00:23:38,616
I was just trying to, and this is again, the beauty of working with

386
00:23:38,656 --> 00:23:42,025
Leonard was that I was talking with him. you know, a couple

387
00:23:42,105 --> 00:23:45,488
nights they were having out having our pizza. And I said, like, you know, Leonard, I'm watching

388
00:23:45,528 --> 00:23:50,172
these sharks feed. I've seen this all over the world, California, South

389
00:23:50,292 --> 00:23:54,095
Africa, Namibia. And I go, they're not just randomly,

390
00:23:54,115 --> 00:23:58,459
you know, random killing machines, as you know, the Jaws movie suggested.

391
00:23:58,879 --> 00:24:02,282
But there's a coordinated effort that's going on. And it wasn't just this one

392
00:24:02,362 --> 00:24:06,506
lone marauder shark. That certain types of prey, like

393
00:24:06,526 --> 00:24:10,170
if, for example, if they were taking a sea lion, that the, that

394
00:24:10,190 --> 00:24:13,331
the seven gills would gang up on him. And he said, he

395
00:24:13,371 --> 00:24:16,773
goes, I got a couple of books for you to read. And this is where Leonard was. He's

396
00:24:16,813 --> 00:24:19,974
known as a shark person, but he could talk to you about wildlife in

397
00:24:20,034 --> 00:24:23,135
general, birds, all kinds of stuff. And so he said, I

398
00:24:23,155 --> 00:24:26,416
got a couple of books for you to read. So he went back, went back to his office

399
00:24:26,456 --> 00:24:29,817
and he gave me a book, um, called the, uh, the spotted

400
00:24:29,857 --> 00:24:32,978
hyena by, uh, Hans Crook and

401
00:24:33,038 --> 00:24:36,379
another book, uh, called the Serengeti lion by,

402
00:24:36,639 --> 00:24:40,210
um, um, George Schaller. And

403
00:24:40,270 --> 00:24:43,672
I could, I literally went back to my office and I couldn't stop reading.

404
00:24:43,732 --> 00:24:47,114
I just read through these books in over a couple of days. I just couldn't stop

405
00:24:47,174 --> 00:24:51,197
reading them. And I was just like, went back to Leonard and said, Leonard, this is it. Because

406
00:24:51,257 --> 00:24:55,179
in those books, it talked about how lion prides

407
00:24:55,319 --> 00:24:58,561
and hyena groups work cooperatively within the

408
00:24:58,601 --> 00:25:01,823
group. And it talked about how they got into a lot of how they hunt

409
00:25:01,903 --> 00:25:05,186
as a group and, and, and just all the strategies. And

410
00:25:05,226 --> 00:25:08,578
I was just like going, this is what these sharks are doing. Just the problem is

411
00:25:08,618 --> 00:25:11,720
because they live in a marine environment that we can't watch them all the

412
00:25:11,760 --> 00:25:14,902
time. We can't, you know, you can watch like hyenas and

413
00:25:14,942 --> 00:25:18,245
lions feet. Cause you sit in a land Rover and at a distance and

414
00:25:18,285 --> 00:25:21,528
watch what they're doing, how they hunt. And I was just like, this is

415
00:25:21,608 --> 00:25:25,150
what, and again, lions and hyenas will, depending on what they're hunting,

416
00:25:25,691 --> 00:25:29,314
they will work in a cooperative group to take down large prey. And

417
00:25:29,354 --> 00:25:32,696
I'm like, this is what the seven gills will do. And other large

418
00:25:32,736 --> 00:25:36,119
sharks that if we're, if you're taking on a large species that one couldn't do.

419
00:25:36,706 --> 00:25:40,809
They all work in a cooperative group. And so that

420
00:25:40,829 --> 00:25:45,452
was one of the most just amazing experiences I had, uh,

421
00:25:46,052 --> 00:25:49,694
learning stuff. And that was just one example of, of several I could give where

422
00:25:49,774 --> 00:25:52,956
Leonard was just thinking outside the box, which is where I was going. We're

423
00:25:52,976 --> 00:25:56,198
like, okay, here's some cool stuff. And he asked about like

424
00:25:56,259 --> 00:25:59,676
the, where I got onto the lost shark stuff. It was all during

425
00:25:59,696 --> 00:26:03,259
these, my informative years, um, grad school.

426
00:26:04,300 --> 00:26:07,523
And because besides people knowing me for doing a lot of that,

427
00:26:07,543 --> 00:26:11,446
cause my background was really in ecology for, you know, feeding ecology, uh,

428
00:26:11,506 --> 00:26:14,909
reproduction, but, you know, looking at how these sharks hunt. But

429
00:26:14,969 --> 00:26:18,352
one of the other things, uh, people got to know me for

430
00:26:18,412 --> 00:26:21,495
is I was the guy who would find these weird sharks. We

431
00:26:21,535 --> 00:26:25,159
didn't use the term lost shark at the time that came later. But

432
00:26:25,319 --> 00:26:28,742
I was, I was like, if you want to find the weird or the unusual, the

433
00:26:28,762 --> 00:26:32,384
little known sharks, just follow Dave. And cause

434
00:26:32,404 --> 00:26:35,907
I would go out in the field and I'd find these things and I didn't know initially

435
00:26:36,067 --> 00:26:39,249
at first I'd find these sharks, wow, this guy had an interesting one. And I'd

436
00:26:39,269 --> 00:26:42,572
bring it back to the lab and show Leonard and Leonard

437
00:26:42,592 --> 00:26:45,934
would go like, Oh geez, we haven't seen this shark in like, you

438
00:26:45,954 --> 00:26:50,097
know, 80 years. We haven't seen this shark in a hundred years. And

439
00:26:50,157 --> 00:26:54,690
so, you know, again, this is back in sort of the late 1980s. I

440
00:26:54,710 --> 00:26:57,812
was, people were already, I was, so I was, you know, like, oh, wow, this is

441
00:26:57,832 --> 00:27:01,194
kind of cool. I got onto this, like, okay, so there's this need

442
00:27:01,294 --> 00:27:04,636
out here that people are, you

443
00:27:04,656 --> 00:27:07,958
know, these, where I'd go, we're catching sharks that people weren't aware of.

444
00:27:08,338 --> 00:27:12,320
And again, there was no real field of shark conservation at the time. And

445
00:27:12,380 --> 00:27:15,762
so again, people kind of got to know, like, oh, if you want to go find some

446
00:27:16,322 --> 00:27:19,404
weird sharks, go follow Dave. And people would go to

447
00:27:19,444 --> 00:27:22,926
like Namibia, people go to Taiwan, you know, California, and

448
00:27:22,966 --> 00:27:26,308
they'd go like, where's Dave been? because they knew wherever I'd been,

449
00:27:26,368 --> 00:27:30,231
that was where they were going to find the weird sharks, if I haven't found them already. And

450
00:27:30,251 --> 00:27:33,673
so that's kind of how, really, how the whole lost shark thing

451
00:27:33,713 --> 00:27:36,915
started, was just me going out, finding these

452
00:27:36,935 --> 00:27:40,317
things, and Leonard saying, oh, we haven't seen this shark for 100 years.

453
00:27:41,218 --> 00:27:44,580
And then also, I bring back a lot of species that

454
00:27:44,600 --> 00:27:48,140
Leonard would look at and go, well, this is an entirely new species to science. So

455
00:27:48,180 --> 00:27:52,282
I thought, well, this is kind of cool. Cause it was totally something nobody was doing and

456
00:27:52,322 --> 00:27:55,664
nobody really does today. Still goes and looks for these lost

457
00:27:55,704 --> 00:27:58,906
sharks. They don't really, I'm just, I mean, it's been

458
00:27:58,986 --> 00:28:02,167
a process you, you pick up over years to,

459
00:28:02,227 --> 00:28:05,589
you know, decades really to learn this type of stuff. So that

460
00:28:05,629 --> 00:28:08,991
was real, that was a very, you know, really informative thing to

461
00:28:09,051 --> 00:28:12,293
do. And kind of during the course of this thing, I talked to

462
00:28:12,353 --> 00:28:15,700
Leonard about. Villages I'd go to a place I travel around

463
00:28:15,820 --> 00:28:19,422
Africa and about different about you

464
00:28:19,442 --> 00:28:22,783
know I was trying to explain to some of these people like how to identify things

465
00:28:22,823 --> 00:28:26,925
and of course this again is the 1980s so you didn't have Resources

466
00:28:26,965 --> 00:28:30,787
like you do now like PDFs and email and cell phones So

467
00:28:30,827 --> 00:28:33,989
we ended up writing I had some like keys by has some

468
00:28:34,009 --> 00:28:37,390
identification keys that may or may not have been up-to-date Right, right.

469
00:28:37,791 --> 00:28:43,159
So we had so there really was nothing to you. So there's this book called Guide

470
00:28:43,179 --> 00:28:46,641
to the Sharks and Rays of Southern Africa that kind of really

471
00:28:47,001 --> 00:28:50,384
sprung from this need for this field guide. And Leonard

472
00:28:50,444 --> 00:28:53,706
being a birder, we set the book for like a bird

473
00:28:53,746 --> 00:28:58,189
guide to make it simple and easy for the average person to

474
00:28:58,229 --> 00:29:02,292
be able to key through it and to be able to identify the sharks. And Anne

475
00:29:02,332 --> 00:29:05,795
Hecht, who is a wife of another advisor of mine, a key person,

476
00:29:05,835 --> 00:29:09,577
Tom Hecht, who's head of the department, did all the illustrations,

477
00:29:09,617 --> 00:29:13,321
which at the time, They were really,

478
00:29:13,581 --> 00:29:17,402
really amazing. And again, the

479
00:29:17,442 --> 00:29:20,483
thing in this book, because it was published in 1989, I mean, I'm a

480
00:29:20,924 --> 00:29:24,225
grad student. I'm writing my first book. I'm still in my 20s. And

481
00:29:24,385 --> 00:29:27,486
I've talked about this. The one thing that

482
00:29:28,366 --> 00:29:31,568
made it was so good working with Leonard was that on

483
00:29:31,588 --> 00:29:35,349
my own, I probably wouldn't have the confidence at that age to do my own book. But

484
00:29:35,409 --> 00:29:39,245
working with him, I learned how to do a book. And

485
00:29:39,365 --> 00:29:42,568
it really gave me confidence for later on when I went and did my

486
00:29:42,628 --> 00:29:46,112
next book, which ended up being a solo effort years

487
00:29:46,172 --> 00:29:49,315
later. But we were

488
00:29:49,355 --> 00:29:52,659
doing that book and again, this was like Leonard thinking outside the box. We'd start

489
00:29:52,679 --> 00:29:56,062
with him and I'd be having these discussions and we got into this whole

490
00:29:56,203 --> 00:29:59,962
area of talking about like, Uh, you know, I go to these different

491
00:30:00,002 --> 00:30:03,745
villages and places in Africa and I would see things like sharks

492
00:30:03,785 --> 00:30:07,148
being finned, you know, um, sharks being the livers

493
00:30:07,188 --> 00:30:10,370
being taken for oil and right. You

494
00:30:10,390 --> 00:30:13,773
know, nobody was even thinking about shark, you know, you

495
00:30:13,793 --> 00:30:17,096
know, you know, they've been Chinese been using shark fins for soup

496
00:30:17,136 --> 00:30:20,418
for generations, like literally like hundreds of years. But

497
00:30:20,458 --> 00:30:23,603
nobody thought about it. And Leonard grew up in San Francisco. He grew

498
00:30:23,663 --> 00:30:26,967
up near Chinatown, so he'd wander around as a young boy. He'd see

499
00:30:27,007 --> 00:30:30,411
the, he saw the Finns, basically him and I arrived

500
00:30:30,451 --> 00:30:33,555
at the same place, just in different routes and different paths. But

501
00:30:33,575 --> 00:30:36,840
we were, but we thought it was kind of curious. And this led

502
00:30:36,880 --> 00:30:40,295
to a whole discussion on like, well, how many, how many sharks

503
00:30:40,955 --> 00:30:44,257
are killed a year? So we've gotten this whole discussion and,

504
00:30:44,598 --> 00:30:47,920
and like, you know, nobody, I mean, who, nobody in the 1980s

505
00:30:47,960 --> 00:30:51,322
was thinking about like, how many sharks are caught in bycatch and are killed?

506
00:30:51,663 --> 00:30:55,205
No, nobody. And so I ended up writing a section

507
00:30:55,846 --> 00:30:59,028
and I've posted this before on social media, but I'll just

508
00:30:59,348 --> 00:31:02,911
hang it up. I'll show it up here again. Um, if

509
00:31:02,951 --> 00:31:10,297
I can find it here somewhere. Uh, Let

510
00:31:10,337 --> 00:31:13,438
me see here. I should have marked this before we came on the air.

511
00:31:13,478 --> 00:31:16,939
But anyway, in this book. No worries. Now,

512
00:31:22,321 --> 00:31:31,964
Let me see here. OK.

513
00:31:49,337 --> 00:31:52,539
There it is, sorry. There's a section in the back of

514
00:31:52,579 --> 00:31:57,703
this book, if you get a copy of it, it's a classic book now, page 143, called

515
00:31:58,243 --> 00:32:01,826
Conservation and Management. And

516
00:32:03,387 --> 00:32:06,710
that was the first time that I can, I didn't know this at the time, but

517
00:32:06,930 --> 00:32:10,252
that was the first time anybody had ever written anything on the conservation of sharks

518
00:32:10,292 --> 00:32:13,795
and rays. And in that section,

519
00:32:13,815 --> 00:32:17,077
so I mean, that was, I can't explain how revolutionary that was.

520
00:32:17,137 --> 00:32:20,316
Nobody had ever done that. Sarah Fowler, who's been on our

521
00:32:20,336 --> 00:32:23,598
podcast, and she was really one of the really founders that laid

522
00:32:23,618 --> 00:32:27,981
the foundation for future conservation in sharks

523
00:32:28,021 --> 00:32:31,263
and rays. And she was kind of heading in that direction at the same time, but

524
00:32:31,283 --> 00:32:35,025
I don't believe anybody had ever published that. And in that section, I

525
00:32:35,085 --> 00:32:38,428
commented on like, well, how many sharks and rays are

526
00:32:38,468 --> 00:32:41,650
caught a year? And Leonard, being Leonard, went home after our

527
00:32:41,750 --> 00:32:44,950
pizza night and wrote up this whole thing, just some

528
00:32:44,990 --> 00:32:48,592
calculations. And we estimated that between 10 and

529
00:32:49,292 --> 00:32:53,054
63 million sharks a year were caught in bycatch fisheries.

530
00:32:53,495 --> 00:32:56,716
And, and, and we figured on average, there's probably around

531
00:32:57,336 --> 00:33:01,419
38 million somewhere in there. Well, this is 1989. It

532
00:33:01,439 --> 00:33:04,800
was in the early 2000s, like 12, 15 years later

533
00:33:04,820 --> 00:33:09,343
that a colleague, Shelly Clark actually did a more quantitative estimate

534
00:33:09,383 --> 00:33:12,802
and calculated that about 73 million sharks were caught

535
00:33:12,842 --> 00:33:16,083
a year. Average was around, you know, I

536
00:33:16,123 --> 00:33:19,284
think she came up with a similar average of that's around 38 million or so as

537
00:33:19,304 --> 00:33:22,685
well. I don't remember the exact number, but I know her numbers were almost

538
00:33:22,745 --> 00:33:27,187
spot on with what Leonard and I had calculated back in 1989. And

539
00:33:27,247 --> 00:33:31,068
so that was pretty good, but that was really the first estimate ever

540
00:33:31,168 --> 00:33:34,734
published on the number of sharks caught a year. And that was in 1989. Again,

541
00:33:35,295 --> 00:33:38,716
people weren't even, I can't even explain this to young people. It wasn't even on the radar.

542
00:33:39,337 --> 00:33:43,019
And also in that section, we talked about the whole shadowy, referred

543
00:33:43,039 --> 00:33:46,601
to as a shadowy fishery of shark finning. And

544
00:33:46,641 --> 00:33:50,142
again, nobody was really talking about that until 20, 30 years

545
00:33:50,223 --> 00:33:54,037
later. Nowadays, people talk about shark finning and Shark

546
00:33:54,077 --> 00:33:57,159
liver oil, but here we were writing on this. It was more from a

547
00:33:57,739 --> 00:34:00,941
how's this impacting shark populations? We didn't know but we put it

548
00:34:01,041 --> 00:34:04,603
out There's a question and we wrote up that this was going on and

549
00:34:04,643 --> 00:34:08,306
species like again I would see these like sawfish for example, you

550
00:34:08,326 --> 00:34:11,908
know, they were kind of a nuisance if they were caught in African villages But

551
00:34:11,948 --> 00:34:15,530
also at the same time, you know, it'd be food for the for the community

552
00:34:16,210 --> 00:34:19,612
but also like they could they you know, you have these Chinese buyers

553
00:34:19,652 --> 00:34:22,829
would go around buying up the fins and And so with the

554
00:34:22,909 --> 00:34:26,510
fins, with these fins that were being, uh, landed,

555
00:34:27,830 --> 00:34:31,471
uh, they impacted because then there's worth a lot more money. And

556
00:34:31,571 --> 00:34:34,692
so that was, again, that was some of the stuff with Leonard. I shared a lot of these

557
00:34:34,712 --> 00:34:38,152
different stories, but that was the, that was the uniqueness with Leonard.

558
00:34:38,172 --> 00:34:42,033
That's what set him apart. And that's the kind of stuff that really

559
00:34:42,053 --> 00:34:45,414
made him a giant in the field. And I don't say that lightly.

560
00:34:45,514 --> 00:34:48,895
He really was a, okay. He was a big guy personally, but physically he

561
00:34:48,915 --> 00:34:52,135
was a big guy, but he was, um, But he was just

562
00:34:52,456 --> 00:34:56,518
really that guy that's thinking in a different plane. And,

563
00:34:56,538 --> 00:34:59,740
you know, I finished and eventually I finished up my PhD. We did

564
00:34:59,780 --> 00:35:03,363
a lot, a lot of stuff at Leonard's. One of the, I've very heavily published

565
00:35:03,383 --> 00:35:06,565
with Leonard and kind of a cool thing years later, as

566
00:35:07,405 --> 00:35:10,788
I mentioned earlier, when he was doing the sharks of the world, the FAO

567
00:35:10,808 --> 00:35:13,950
guide was published in 84. I always thought like, well, that'd be kind

568
00:35:13,990 --> 00:35:19,831
of cool to do a, do my own book on the sharks of the world. Well, in 2013, you

569
00:35:19,851 --> 00:35:23,454
know, Leonard and I co-authored a book with Mark Dando and Sarah Fowler

570
00:35:23,554 --> 00:35:26,796
on the sharks of the world. And so that was kind of brought

571
00:35:26,836 --> 00:35:30,039
my journey full circle in a way with

572
00:35:30,079 --> 00:35:33,161
Leonard. At that point, Leonard was kind of on his way out in his career and he

573
00:35:33,201 --> 00:35:36,424
didn't really do a heck of a lot, but he was

574
00:35:36,484 --> 00:35:39,586
pretty much retired. He was starting to have a lot of health issues at

575
00:35:39,646 --> 00:35:42,989
that time, but it was just kind of nice to have that one little

576
00:35:43,773 --> 00:35:47,214
You know having done that and of course I've gone on a lot of other things now,

577
00:35:47,314 --> 00:35:50,755
but it was nice And I have just a lot of good Memories

578
00:35:50,795 --> 00:35:54,396
it was a lot of funny stories that are probably a little off-color to tell on the podcast But

579
00:35:54,416 --> 00:35:57,517
I'll put that somewhere else catch me at a conference over a

580
00:35:57,557 --> 00:36:01,598
beer. I'll tell you some some other ones, but he had He

581
00:36:01,638 --> 00:36:05,759
had some some interesting stuff one story. I will share I think

582
00:36:05,799 --> 00:36:09,517
I've shared this before I know Andrews heard this one, but Paul

583
00:36:09,557 --> 00:36:12,619
Callie, and I want to make give a mention to Paul Callie who was kind of

584
00:36:12,659 --> 00:36:16,242
my partner in crime with the At the time we were co-grad

585
00:36:16,262 --> 00:36:19,384
students together and Paul and I just had some

586
00:36:19,444 --> 00:36:22,646
amazing experiences With Leonard and stuff. But

587
00:36:22,726 --> 00:36:26,108
one of the things I talked about some of my public presentations is

588
00:36:27,009 --> 00:36:30,171
Paul and I'd go off to Namibia And at that time there

589
00:36:30,191 --> 00:36:33,800
was nothing there. There's no communications. No GPS no cell phone And

590
00:36:33,820 --> 00:36:37,021
so I'd tell Leonard, which is a little sketchy, and tell other people that we're going

591
00:36:37,041 --> 00:36:40,162
to be gone for eight weeks. And if you didn't hear from us in 10 weeks, you

592
00:36:40,182 --> 00:36:43,644
might send somebody to look for us. And off we'd go. Well,

593
00:36:43,664 --> 00:36:48,226
again, this is back in the late 80s. And you didn't have things like

594
00:36:48,606 --> 00:36:52,767
when you had your student bursary would come through each month. Nowadays,

595
00:36:52,827 --> 00:36:56,129
it's automatically deposited. Well, back then, you had to physically go pick

596
00:36:56,189 --> 00:36:59,610
up your check. Well, when you're gone for eight weeks in the field,

597
00:37:00,501 --> 00:37:03,682
there's nobody there to deposit your check. And on our

598
00:37:03,702 --> 00:37:06,743
first trip to Namibia, we literally, we wound up in

599
00:37:06,783 --> 00:37:09,964
a place called Luderitz, which is literally like the end

600
00:37:10,004 --> 00:37:13,185
of the world. If you want to get lost, go to Luderitz. Um,

601
00:37:13,745 --> 00:37:17,426
and, uh, it was a, at that time it was a wild West town.

602
00:37:17,906 --> 00:37:21,428
Literally. It was like a, why they'd be like drunken bar fights. There'd be people

603
00:37:22,248 --> 00:37:25,589
passed out in the street. It was, it was a wild West town, but

604
00:37:25,609 --> 00:37:29,050
there was a, there's thousands of seven gill sharks in the lagoon there.

605
00:37:29,664 --> 00:37:32,725
And so we spent some time there and we ran out of

606
00:37:32,785 --> 00:37:36,445
money. I mean, literally neither of us had a penny

607
00:37:37,085 --> 00:37:41,026
in our accounts. And so I had to, we had like 3000 kilometers

608
00:37:41,046 --> 00:37:44,347
to get home. So I bumped some money off one

609
00:37:44,367 --> 00:37:47,587
of the guys there we knew. And, you know, just

610
00:37:47,627 --> 00:37:50,848
like there was like three Rand, which was like, you

611
00:37:50,868 --> 00:37:54,329
know, two us dollars at the time. And I made a phone call

612
00:37:54,369 --> 00:37:57,784
back to ask Leonard if he could put in a couple hundred like literally like

613
00:37:58,124 --> 00:38:02,126
300 Rand, so we had gas to get home. And

614
00:38:02,166 --> 00:38:06,028
I got a hold of Leonard. He asked, of course, Leonard, brevity

615
00:38:06,068 --> 00:38:09,250
was not synonymous with Leonard. He could talk. And so

616
00:38:09,310 --> 00:38:12,512
he would share all the, he'd say, oh, how's it going, blah, blah. I'd say, oh, yeah, it's going really

617
00:38:12,532 --> 00:38:17,555
good, Leonard. But if we ran out of money, can you put

618
00:38:17,575 --> 00:38:20,837
some money, a few hundred Rand, maybe 300 Rand, so I can get home, just for

619
00:38:20,897 --> 00:38:24,031
gas, not even for food. And he's like, well, you

620
00:38:24,071 --> 00:38:27,197
know, money's kind of tight. And he hung up on me. And that was

621
00:38:27,217 --> 00:38:30,603
the second time he hung up on me. I told the story earlier. And so

622
00:38:30,643 --> 00:38:35,352
here you got a couple of your two grad students at the time, 3,000 kilometers

623
00:38:35,372 --> 00:38:39,436
from home in the a hole of the world place.

624
00:38:39,577 --> 00:38:43,019
And I don't want to say that to be disrespectful, but it wasn't, it was a tough place

625
00:38:46,141 --> 00:38:49,464
It was a rough, it was a rough place. And so I, here I have to go back

626
00:38:49,524 --> 00:38:53,366
and bum another few Rand and I called Tom Heck back

627
00:38:53,867 --> 00:38:57,147
at, who was the head of the department at the time. And said, Hey,

628
00:38:57,167 --> 00:39:00,808
Tom, I, um, I need some money to get home. And he's

629
00:39:00,828 --> 00:39:04,009
like, well, did you talk to Leonard? I said, yeah. And

630
00:39:04,029 --> 00:39:07,510
he says, what happened? I said, well, he hung up on me. And

631
00:39:07,630 --> 00:39:10,971
you know, Tom being German, he's like, there's silence at first. He's

632
00:39:10,991 --> 00:39:14,131
like, no, no problem, Dave. I'll put, I'll put 500 bucks in

633
00:39:14,171 --> 00:39:17,279
your account tomorrow morning. You'll be able to withdraw it. you

634
00:39:17,299 --> 00:39:20,721
know, welcome home, have a safe drive. And so, but

635
00:39:20,761 --> 00:39:24,163
that was like, that was like Leonard. He just had, didn't have like a lot of empathy, like,

636
00:39:24,643 --> 00:39:28,025
oh, well, you're stuck. You know, oh, well, you know, good luck.

637
00:39:28,625 --> 00:39:32,047
See you back. See you sometime. Hope

638
00:39:32,067 --> 00:39:35,368
you get home. And, um, but I had, yes, but

639
00:39:35,388 --> 00:39:38,770
that was kind of the, some of the funny stories we'd have. Paul and I just had

640
00:39:38,810 --> 00:39:42,012
an amazing experience. We'd go, Leonard and I would go out. We used to go a lot of times.

641
00:39:43,072 --> 00:39:47,274
just wildlife looking. We'd go out to game, we'd take a couple days. Leonard

642
00:39:47,314 --> 00:39:50,656
liked to bird, I liked to look at the game animals. We'd go out to a lot

643
00:39:53,757 --> 00:39:57,199
Yeah, we were definitely fellow explorers. And

644
00:39:57,999 --> 00:40:01,341
as I say, it was an amazing time in my life. And Leonard

645
00:40:01,361 --> 00:40:04,582
and I remained good friends. But the last sort

646
00:40:04,622 --> 00:40:09,724
of 10 years of his life, he declined a lot health-wise,

647
00:40:09,884 --> 00:40:13,064
physically and mentally. And, uh, so I, you know, I didn't get,

648
00:40:13,144 --> 00:40:16,405
we kind of really lost touch there just cause he was just, he

649
00:40:16,445 --> 00:40:19,945
was in South Africa and wasn't in good health. The last time I saw him was about 10 years,

650
00:40:20,786 --> 00:40:24,086
years ago. Um, but you know, even though

651
00:40:24,106 --> 00:40:27,187
he's, he's gone now, I have just a

652
00:40:27,227 --> 00:40:31,107
lot of very fond memories working with them. We published a

653
00:40:31,227 --> 00:40:35,008
lot together. Um, we coauthored about 10 species

654
00:40:35,048 --> 00:40:40,393
together and, um, it was an amazing, It

655
00:40:40,413 --> 00:40:43,894
was an amazing time. And it was just, you know, I kind of, if

656
00:40:43,934 --> 00:40:47,556
I had to impart anything off to any, any young people there, you should

657
00:40:47,576 --> 00:40:50,937
be so lucky when you're early in your career to find someone who's that real

658
00:40:50,977 --> 00:40:54,299
fellow traveler, because, you know, he, he, he just, he, he, he

659
00:40:54,359 --> 00:40:57,640
wasn't just an advisor, you know, he was a mentor and above

660
00:40:57,720 --> 00:41:00,942
all, he was a friend. And, um, you know, his,

661
00:41:01,222 --> 00:41:06,019
his late, his late wife, Martina, probably one of the Biggest

662
00:41:06,059 --> 00:41:09,201
compliments I ever received was we're out. I was

663
00:41:09,221 --> 00:41:12,823
showing her here out visiting California one time before she passed away

664
00:41:13,603 --> 00:41:17,385
in 2006 and we're talking at a restaurant and

665
00:41:17,425 --> 00:41:20,927
Leonard went to go use the bathroom and I kind of apologized to

666
00:41:20,967 --> 00:41:24,109
her because she was a cephalopod biologist. But I kind of said, oh,

667
00:41:24,129 --> 00:41:27,271
I'm really sorry, Leonard. I just blabbing away nonstop. And

668
00:41:27,311 --> 00:41:31,140
she goes, Dave, don't worry about it. She goes, Leonard. Everybody

669
00:41:31,160 --> 00:41:34,643
at Cogtex Leonard wants something from him. You're like

670
00:41:34,683 --> 00:41:38,046
his one of his few true friends out there and

671
00:41:39,166 --> 00:41:42,689
I just that really touched me a lot and it was very You know

672
00:41:42,729 --> 00:41:45,991
very nice to hear that because you know, and that's true Leonard had a lot of people

673
00:41:46,031 --> 00:41:49,894
were not always looked out You know for his best interest and

674
00:41:50,034 --> 00:41:54,318
just hearing that from him was very much was very it was very genuine and

675
00:41:54,898 --> 00:41:58,260
And I know, you know, and I know other people could share similar stories. I

676
00:41:58,300 --> 00:42:01,441
have a whole bunch of stories. One of the things I think we got a little clip we'll

677
00:42:01,461 --> 00:42:04,602
have with Gavin Naylor here. And Gavin was

678
00:42:04,622 --> 00:42:08,304
a young PhD student. In fact, Gavin had finished before me. And he'd

679
00:42:08,324 --> 00:42:11,532
come to South Africa when I was still there. Which

680
00:42:11,592 --> 00:42:14,835
I won't go into the stories today because it's just a bonus episode may all share in

681
00:42:14,855 --> 00:42:18,178
some other future episodes But he came to South

682
00:42:18,318 --> 00:42:21,921
Africa in 1989 he was there for about six

683
00:42:22,001 --> 00:42:25,404
weeks and we had It was an we had just as some incredible

684
00:42:25,424 --> 00:42:28,906
experience with Leonard and Gavin and I still to this day laugh at

685
00:42:28,926 --> 00:42:32,149
some of the stories that took place that time work with Leonard because I say he

686
00:42:32,169 --> 00:42:35,512
was Leonard was a character if you if you had the chance

687
00:42:35,552 --> 00:42:39,091
to meet him He was a character is the best way I could describe it And,

688
00:42:39,451 --> 00:42:42,853
uh, as I say, uh, Gavin, uh, we're both young

689
00:42:42,893 --> 00:42:46,275
students at the same time. And I know he had also had a profound effect

690
00:42:46,375 --> 00:42:49,957
on him as well. And, uh, in fact, Gavin's done a lot of the genetic work

691
00:42:49,997 --> 00:42:54,019
that show that Leonard's 1973, uh, classification really

692
00:42:54,039 --> 00:42:58,021
has held up over the last 50 years. And so, um,

693
00:42:58,722 --> 00:43:01,904
anyway, I just, um, appreciate people listening to

694
00:43:04,943 --> 00:43:09,127
I was just going to say before we kind of end off here, like, you know, from

695
00:43:09,427 --> 00:43:12,549
some of the stories you mentioned, I didn't know, you know, with with

696
00:43:12,569 --> 00:43:15,712
the relationship you had with him, but also he's the reason why you're the

697
00:43:15,752 --> 00:43:19,215
lost shark guy. I think that's pretty cool. You would go to him to, like, bring back

698
00:43:19,275 --> 00:43:22,416
the specimens that you had. And you would be like, what is

699
00:43:22,456 --> 00:43:25,857
this? And he'd be like, oh, we haven't seen this in like 10 years. And it's kind

700
00:43:25,897 --> 00:43:29,138
of interesting, because before we recorded, we were talking about how people come to

701
00:43:29,178 --> 00:43:32,819
you now to be that person, that

702
00:43:32,859 --> 00:43:36,599
authority to come in and say, hey, I found this. What

703
00:43:36,659 --> 00:43:39,740
is it? And you'd be like, oh, well, we actually haven't seen that in five years. Or we

704
00:43:39,780 --> 00:43:42,901
haven't seen that in 10 years. Or we haven't seen that in 20 years. Or this is a new

705
00:43:42,941 --> 00:43:46,501
species. Let's work on this together. And I think that it

706
00:43:46,541 --> 00:43:50,102
just goes to show that you're kind of like, continuing the

707
00:43:50,162 --> 00:43:53,384
legacy that Leonard had in terms of

708
00:43:53,404 --> 00:43:56,786
just knowing the species so much and being so interested in

709
00:43:57,166 --> 00:44:00,848
all the species, not just the iconic sharks,

710
00:44:00,888 --> 00:44:04,090
not just the great white shark, which there's nothing wrong with that. It's just he

711
00:44:04,130 --> 00:44:08,032
just had this impeccable knowledge of and detailed

712
00:44:08,072 --> 00:44:11,314
knowledge of all the sharks, hence the book, The Sharks of the World,

713
00:44:11,354 --> 00:44:14,476
and what you have lived on in terms of that legacy and

714
00:44:14,496 --> 00:44:17,898
continued on with that legacy and built your own legacy as the lost shark

715
00:44:17,938 --> 00:44:21,099
guy. For a reason because you're the one you're

716
00:44:21,119 --> 00:44:24,460
the one who continues on that curiosity That you

717
00:44:24,481 --> 00:44:27,722
both had and you both shared and I think you know it's it's really funny because

718
00:44:27,762 --> 00:44:31,163
there is this relationship with a Supervisor and and a student

719
00:44:31,223 --> 00:44:34,905
that a lot of people have and sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad But

720
00:44:34,925 --> 00:44:38,066
you got to see him in two lights you got to see him at work and in the office But you

721
00:44:38,086 --> 00:44:41,208
also got to see them outside of work where he was seemed to be a little bit

722
00:44:41,268 --> 00:44:44,930
more relaxed and a little bit more in like He's interested

723
00:44:45,050 --> 00:44:48,152
in talking about science. He's interested in talking about sharks that

724
00:44:48,192 --> 00:44:51,595
he'd had a genuine interest birds, whatever species game

725
00:44:51,655 --> 00:44:54,878
species. And I think that's, that's really interesting to

726
00:44:54,918 --> 00:44:58,721
hear, to see like a supervisor who has that kind of relationship

727
00:44:58,761 --> 00:45:01,903
with student where you guys were not only colleagues or not even student, like

728
00:45:01,983 --> 00:45:05,386
mentor student, but you were genuine friends. And I think that's, that's

729
00:45:06,167 --> 00:45:09,770
Yeah, no, he laid the foundation for, let's

730
00:45:09,790 --> 00:45:13,603
say we didn't use it back in the eighties. I didn't think about the term lost shark. guy

731
00:45:13,643 --> 00:45:16,925
or any or lost sharks, but he really laid the foundation. And if

732
00:45:17,005 --> 00:45:20,547
I hit, if I impart some of the young people listening to shows like be knowledgeable

733
00:45:20,567 --> 00:45:23,769
about all the sharks and rays, don't focus on one species, you know,

734
00:45:23,829 --> 00:45:27,112
just be knowledgeable. You know, the, the wider, the broader with

735
00:45:27,132 --> 00:45:30,333
the knowledge you have, the better, you know, the, the more you'll know, and

736
00:45:30,354 --> 00:45:33,535
the more you learn, the more questions you could ask. And

737
00:45:33,575 --> 00:45:36,617
as I say, I just, you know, I mean, I never thought I

738
00:45:36,657 --> 00:45:39,739
was going to, you know, the direction I've gone, I'm kind of a

739
00:45:39,759 --> 00:45:43,104
direction I never thought about. But when he's learned more

740
00:45:43,124 --> 00:45:46,546
about all the different species and I started bringing back these different

741
00:45:46,586 --> 00:45:50,468
things that people hadn't seen I thought well That's kind of a cool thing. Nobody else is doing this and

742
00:45:50,489 --> 00:45:53,891
it just was Larry says I've been started doing that

743
00:45:53,951 --> 00:45:57,173
and I started focusing I didn't focus in on him because I just go look for what was there

744
00:45:57,213 --> 00:46:00,575
and document stuff but then when Leonard started telling me like a

745
00:46:00,635 --> 00:46:04,237
number of these species had not been seen for decades and

746
00:46:04,257 --> 00:46:07,558
You know 20 30 years or more Then I started like going like,

747
00:46:07,658 --> 00:46:11,219
okay, I, and I started paying attention to and started, you know, keeping a database of

748
00:46:11,259 --> 00:46:14,701
like, well, how long are these, some of these sharks haven't

749
00:46:14,721 --> 00:46:18,022
been seen. And there were sharks that I'd saw. I can tell you there were sharks I

750
00:46:18,062 --> 00:46:21,743
found back in the eighties that haven't been seen since I found them. I

751
00:46:21,763 --> 00:46:24,944
mean, I know where to go back to find them, but you know, it's

752
00:46:24,984 --> 00:46:28,185
like, you don't, cause I know where they are. And I think that they're, I call

753
00:46:28,205 --> 00:46:31,326
them lost, but I think if you just bother, if someone bothers to go

754
00:46:31,366 --> 00:46:34,527
look for them, you know where to go, but I've just kind of carried on

755
00:46:34,547 --> 00:46:37,718
with that. And that led to my. sort of moniker my

756
00:46:37,758 --> 00:46:43,044
brand now, The Lost Shark Guy, you know,

757
00:46:44,585 --> 00:46:48,009
over the last couple of decades, that's really what it was led to.

758
00:46:48,089 --> 00:46:51,312
And, you know, I get, I have such a network now, I get, I

759
00:46:51,332 --> 00:46:54,720
get people all over the world contact me every week.

760
00:46:54,760 --> 00:46:58,565
I go a few days a week. I get emails from people asking

761
00:46:58,585 --> 00:47:01,908
me to identify stuff from them. And you know, a lot of times it's like,

762
00:47:01,988 --> 00:47:05,372
Oh, this is, this is this, this is that and stuff. But sometimes they get some really cool

763
00:47:05,412 --> 00:47:09,216
stuff that, Hey, we haven't seen this species in 40 years. And

764
00:47:09,236 --> 00:47:12,420
they show up here and I'm like, so then I can, I can help them

765
00:47:12,520 --> 00:47:15,851
out and provide them some more information. So It's kind of cool. And

766
00:47:15,871 --> 00:47:19,194
you know, one of the thing with Leonard is like he always, and I think people

767
00:47:19,214 --> 00:47:23,538
listen to podcasts or hear me talk, you know, I still have that enthusiasm,

768
00:47:23,578 --> 00:47:26,901
that passion. I had it when I was five years old and Leonard was the same

769
00:47:26,961 --> 00:47:30,564
way. He was like eight. Leonard was, he would have been 81 this December.

770
00:47:31,364 --> 00:47:35,288
Um, but he was, he was, he was just that perpetual kid. Um,

771
00:47:35,408 --> 00:47:38,631
or he was just, he never lost his enthusiasm. And

772
00:47:38,671 --> 00:47:42,074
I had that same thing where I still feel today. Like, you know, I'm going to keep going until,

773
00:47:43,104 --> 00:47:46,505
I can't, which, you know, will probably be when they drop me in the ground. And I

774
00:47:46,525 --> 00:47:50,167
love it, you know, and that's

775
00:47:50,347 --> 00:47:53,488
not anytime soon. Well, if you listen to the recent podcast I

776
00:47:53,508 --> 00:47:56,709
did on my trip to Indonesia and Timor Leste, you can,

777
00:47:56,729 --> 00:48:00,091
you can tell that, you know, and I have a, I think one thing with the Lost Shark stuff

778
00:48:00,131 --> 00:48:03,532
now is I really, I enjoy working with a lot of the young people,

779
00:48:04,052 --> 00:48:07,894
you know, like the crew I was just working with in, in, in Indonesia, Timor

780
00:48:07,934 --> 00:48:11,872
Leste. I love working with young people and passing along. Because

781
00:48:11,892 --> 00:48:15,014
now it's my turn to pass on that information to all these young people. And they'll hopefully be

782
00:48:15,034 --> 00:48:19,418
the new Lost Shark guys and gals in

783
00:48:19,438 --> 00:48:24,021
the future. And that would be my biggest legacy is to leave impart

784
00:48:24,041 --> 00:48:27,604
my knowledge to a lot of these really up-and-coming people, many of

785
00:48:27,644 --> 00:48:33,288
whom we've had on the podcast. So I just keep

786
00:48:33,308 --> 00:48:36,670
going on. And all that was instilled with me with Leonard. You

787
00:48:36,690 --> 00:48:40,052
know Leonard some of these days we'll I'll see in that big shark park in the sky

788
00:48:40,192 --> 00:48:43,534
one day and we'll I'm sure be back having a pizza and

789
00:48:43,574 --> 00:48:47,757
a coca-cola even though I don't really like coca-cola I was talking and

790
00:48:47,777 --> 00:48:52,239
talking so um but yeah it was phenomenal

791
00:48:52,279 --> 00:48:55,341
experience and uh if you're and I'll just one last shout out if

792
00:48:55,361 --> 00:48:59,163
you ever see you guys particularly young people if you see me at a conference sometime

793
00:48:59,843 --> 00:49:03,227
just come up and say hi I'm pretty approachable and Just

794
00:49:03,247 --> 00:49:06,728
want to talk about Leonard stories and some of the stuff born

795
00:49:06,768 --> 00:49:10,248
happy to share sharks shark and sharks. Yeah, and just Talk

796
00:49:11,549 --> 00:49:15,089
to you about stuff. And so so anyway Andrew,

797
00:49:15,109 --> 00:49:18,490
I appreciate it. I everybody I just listened to the show and

798
00:49:19,010 --> 00:49:22,671
thanks for having a chance to part some of my stuff because It

799
00:49:22,691 --> 00:49:25,872
was a really a big thing in my life met

800
00:49:25,912 --> 00:49:29,246
Leonard and getting to know Leonard and I I

801
00:49:29,306 --> 00:49:33,112
just hope to see him again sometime in the sometime

802
00:49:33,132 --> 00:49:36,337
in the next life. So anyway, thank you very much. Thank you

803
00:49:36,357 --> 00:49:39,723
everyone for listening and keep

804
00:49:43,589 --> 00:49:46,632
I love it. Well, Dave, thank you so much for sharing these stories. I

805
00:49:46,692 --> 00:49:49,874
know this is a hard time for you. You know, you can tell in your

806
00:49:49,894 --> 00:49:53,037
voice, you can tell that Leonard had such an impact on your life as

807
00:49:53,117 --> 00:49:56,559
well as others. You know, when you posted in the American Alasdair

808
00:49:56,579 --> 00:50:00,302
Brank Society the notice of that he had passed, there

809
00:50:00,342 --> 00:50:03,485
are so many amazing things that people have said about him,

810
00:50:03,505 --> 00:50:06,727
you know, recounting stories and how much of a legend that

811
00:50:06,767 --> 00:50:10,651
he was in this industry and in this field. So

812
00:50:10,671 --> 00:50:14,554
you're not the only one who feels this but definitely you had a different relationship

813
00:50:14,614 --> 00:50:17,757
with him because you were his student and you did

814
00:50:17,797 --> 00:50:21,020
his PhD with him and obviously a lot more than that. So we

815
00:50:21,060 --> 00:50:24,783
appreciate you being vulnerable with us and you letting us know more

816
00:50:24,823 --> 00:50:29,247
about Leonard and I appreciate it definitely as a friend and we

817
00:50:29,287 --> 00:50:32,830
hope for the best. And like you said, one day you'll be reunited and having

818
00:50:32,850 --> 00:50:35,972
a having a coke, having a pizza and talking shows. It's awesome. So thank

819
00:50:38,054 --> 00:50:42,697
Thank you. David has asked me to comment

820
00:50:43,878 --> 00:50:47,161
on the contributions of Leonard

821
00:50:47,201 --> 00:50:52,304
Campagnolo, who passed away last week. I've

822
00:50:52,344 --> 00:50:56,948
known Leonard since I was a graduate student. And

823
00:50:57,892 --> 00:51:02,996
He's certainly a very unusual person. He

824
00:51:03,896 --> 00:51:07,059
was frankly obsessed with sharks and

825
00:51:07,119 --> 00:51:10,861
rays. He wanted to understand

826
00:51:11,422 --> 00:51:15,385
everything about them. He wanted to understand their anatomy,

827
00:51:15,845 --> 00:51:20,549
their behavior, their life history, their taxonomy, and

828
00:51:20,649 --> 00:51:24,471
he would pursue any avenue to

829
00:51:24,511 --> 00:51:27,791
learn more about them. We're familiar with

830
00:51:27,831 --> 00:51:32,775
Leonard because of his influential publication record. But

831
00:51:32,815 --> 00:51:37,839
I put it to you that that really is the tip of the iceberg. What

832
00:51:37,959 --> 00:51:41,542
Leonard published was a tiny fraction

833
00:51:42,723 --> 00:51:47,687
of what he knew. Instinct

834
00:51:48,347 --> 00:51:52,391
is nothing more than a capacity

835
00:51:52,991 --> 00:51:57,184
to access a huge amount of context-sensitive

836
00:51:57,244 --> 00:52:00,866
information. And it seemed that Leonard

837
00:52:00,926 --> 00:52:04,588
had tremendous instinct for understanding

838
00:52:04,628 --> 00:52:08,791
these animals, and that's because he had huge knowledge about

839
00:52:08,911 --> 00:52:12,413
these animals from all of his work. On a daily

840
00:52:12,513 --> 00:52:16,916
basis, he would be trying to find out more about them. As

841
00:52:16,976 --> 00:52:21,058
a person, he was fairly diffident, fairly shy, and really,

842
00:52:25,314 --> 00:52:29,037
uncomfortable in public settings. But

843
00:52:29,277 --> 00:52:34,662
if you were somebody who was

844
00:52:34,722 --> 00:52:37,885
interested in the same things as Leonard was, he

845
00:52:37,925 --> 00:52:41,247
was amazing. Whenever I would meet with Leonard,

846
00:52:41,588 --> 00:52:45,051
I'd really look forward to it. Because just

847
00:52:45,111 --> 00:52:48,954
a few minutes with Leonard would provide tremendous insights.

848
00:52:49,634 --> 00:52:52,737
He would make these casual observations about sharks and rays as

849
00:52:52,817 --> 00:52:56,104
if everybody knew about them. but they

850
00:52:56,164 --> 00:53:00,245
might be casual for Leonard, but there'd be profound

851
00:53:00,325 --> 00:53:03,866
statements to the rest of us. So

852
00:53:03,886 --> 00:53:08,227
I'm particularly sad that

853
00:53:09,007 --> 00:53:12,308
Leonard passed away because he carries with him

854
00:53:12,508 --> 00:53:16,529
so much knowledge of these animals. And

855
00:53:16,589 --> 00:53:20,509
also, I don't think that he's as

856
00:53:20,609 --> 00:53:23,916
widely appreciated by young scientists as he

857
00:53:24,116 --> 00:53:27,538
is by all the colleagues. Many young

858
00:53:27,578 --> 00:53:31,360
scientists I've talked to never even heard of Leonard, but

859
00:53:32,120 --> 00:53:35,602
he's somebody to look up to, to aspire to be like.

860
00:53:36,642 --> 00:53:41,065
He was primarily deeply

861
00:53:41,145 --> 00:53:45,207
curious and I for one will

862
00:53:45,227 --> 00:53:48,848
miss him. It's a huge loss to Ik Theology