Basking Shark: Disappeared or at Depth?

Exploring the Ocean's Gentle Giants: A Dive into Basking Sharks with Dr. Dave Ebert

In this episode of 'Rarefied,' host Meredith Meeker dives into the world of the basking shark, one of the ocean's gentle giants. Joining her is Dr. Dave Ebert, a renowned shark scientist and the director of the Pacific Shark Research Center. They discuss the enigmatic basking shark, its behaviors, threats, and the mystery of its declining numbers. Dr. Ebert also shares stories from his extensive fieldwork, the importance of shark conservation, and the fascinating behaviors of various shark species. Listeners will learn about the significance of sharks in the marine ecosystem, the challenges of studying elusive species, and the critical role of education and awareness in conservation efforts. This episode is packed with intriguing facts, expert insights, and passionate advocacy for our ocean's most misunderstood inhabitants.

Lost Sharks series: https://www.youtube.com/@lostsharkguy/
Beyond Jaws Podcast: https://www.speakupforblue.com/show/beyond-jaws/

00:00 Introduction to Rarefied Podcast

00:34 Meet the Basking Shark

01:17 Interview with Dr. Dave Ebert

02:18 Basking Shark Characteristics

04:19 Basking Shark Population Decline

07:00 Global Basking Shark Sightings

08:29 The Mystery of Disappearing Sharks

16:20 The Lost Sharks Program

29:50 Exploring the Diversity of Rays and Sharks

30:13 Challenges of Studying Deep-Sea Species

31:50 Searching for Lost Sharks

32:59 The Importance of Shark Conservation

33:48 Global Efforts in Shark Protection

34:54 The Mystery of Basking Sharks

35:52 The Vast Diversity of Shark Species

37:40 Encouraging Shark Research and Conservation

41:34 Fascinating Shark Behaviors and Discoveries

44:42 Rapid Fire Questions and Fun Facts

53:10 Concluding Thoughts and Call to Action

Transcript

Theme Song 0:00

In every stream, in every tree, a story lives, a legacy. Let's listen close, let's take a stand, to keep the wild across the land. In every stream, in every tree, a story lives, a legacy.

Meredith 0:23

Welcome. You found us. Let the adventure begin. This is rarefied the podcast where we learn to love some of our rarest and most imperiled species. I'm your host, Meredith Meer. In this week's episode, we're trading forests for waves and heading out to sea to meet a giant you've probably never seen even though it can grow as long as a school bus. This is the basking shark, the ocean's gentle giant, a slow moving filter feeder with a gaping mouth and an almost calm ghost-like presence. Here's a fun fact. Despite looking like a terrifying predator, the basking shark eats only tiny plankton and does this by swimming with its mouth wide open. Globally, nature serve ranks the basking shark as G three or vulnerable, which means it's rare, it's numbers are shrinking, and in some parts of the world it's already disappeared, but there's still hope. My guest today is Dr. Dave Ebert, a shark scientist with a serious knack for finding what others miss. He's devoted his life to studying the ocean's most elusive and misunderstood predators from the Deep Sea Ghost Sharks to the gentle giants like the Basking Shark. Dave is the author of more than 800 Scientific publications and 38 books, he's led expeditions around the globe in search of species, thought to be lost and even discovered new ones sometimes while filming. On location for Shark Week, he's the director of the Pacific Shark Research Center and an advisor to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. You've probably seen him on BBC Discovery Channel or National Geographic. And he's also the voice behind the Beyond Jaws podcast and the documentary series, searching for Lost Sharks, extinct or Alive. Put simply if there's a shark you've never heard of, Dave Ebert probably has. So let's dive in We're talking about sharks specifically, we're gonna start talking about the basking shark. Could you give us kind of a precursor on like, what is a backing shark?

dave@lostsharkguy.com 2:29

Well, Basque Sharks the second largest fish in the world behind the whale shark. And so it's, if when they're around, they're kind of hard to miss sometimes if you're in the right area'cause they're big. And a lot of people sometimes will mistake'em.'cause they're in the, they're in what's called the the, the group of sharks. They're called mackerel sharks. So they're actually closely related to the white shark. But the difference is. For basket sharks get much, much bigger. And they have like very tiny teeth that are like the size of your little fingernail. Whereas the white sharks obviously have much larger triangular teeth for eating larger things like sea lions and elephant seals. Whereas basking sharks, they mainly swim with their mouths open. And they'll pass, they swim at like about two kilometers an hour. They'll pass like 2000 gallons of water over their gill r which is what captures. The plankton that they're feeding on. And Basket sharks will get up to at least 10 meters or so, and they'll eat like the smallest things in the ocean, the plankton out there. Whereas white sharks, they get, you know, five, six meters. Some people think a little larger, but that's a big shark anyway. And they'll eat like obviously elephant seals, sea lions, and much larger prey. So you have, it's kind of interesting to kind of compare the two. The white sharks probably get a lot more notoriety because of a series of movies and just if, if people out there haven't, don't know this or not, but June 20th is gonna be the 50 year anniversary from the release of the movie Jaws coming up. So Happy Jaws anniversary to people out there. I was actually one of the people I was in high school when the movie came out. So I actually saw the movie when it premiered. Here down in where I live in the Monterey area, so I can actually speak to some authority having seen the movie when it came out that it was pretty awesome at the time. And then of course after Jaws. You had a lot more attention paid to every little shark instance. I kind of got off a little bit in the white shark thing here, but it's kind of important to the story with the basking shark in that basking sharks are quite common here in the Monterey area, and they used to be very common. And in fact, they used to show up around the same time as the white sharks here in the bay, sort of around April, may, the white sharks will start to show up around here and they'd be here still, sort of the end of the year. The white shark's still very common here, but the basking shark, in fact the white shark's probably become more common, whereas the basking shark what we've seen over the last sort of a hundred years is these blips where you'll see, several. Numbers, and I say numbers, you'll see'em in the, you know, maybe tens and twenties. There was one, a couple incidents back in the 1970s again, when I was in high school where people saw like, upwards of a hundred or so of these basking sharks here in the bay. They're quite common for a couple of years there around 19 76, 77. And then it kind of seemed to not be very common until the early nineties and people were seeing like fairly large numbers of'em, scores of them, you know, so upwards of 40, 50, 60 of'em would show up in fairly large numbers back around the early nineties. And then they disappeared again. And since then, you see small numbers of'em. I think the most I'd ever had a record of since then is about a half a dozen, six or so in a group. More likely it's one to three. What happened to'em? That's, that's a good question. There was a fishery for basking sharks back in the 1920s. And then again in the forties and fifties and into the sixties, and they were fish for their, mostly for their liver oil, which were using a lot of products, cosmetics like different paints, different different types of products. People, people even things like, you know, in, in different types of food products as well. And it pretty much ended in about 1969. It was pretty much the fishery had ended. So it's been quite a, you know, quite a few years now, you know, over what 55 years since the fishery ended. And except for a couple blips in the seventies and early nineties, they've never been seen in large numbers. I think to say that what was over fishing or something, I think is a, is kind of a, an easy excuse. And I know, I know off Canada, they also had a similar thing off Vancouver, Vancouver Island in that area around the, the, where they had this salmon farming. And they actually had an eradication thing where they thought that the basking sharks were impacting the salmon farm. So they actually went out and killed the basking sharks. And this was back in the sixties, I believe, into the seventies. They were still doing that. They finally stopped that. But they've never see, really seen basking sharks. I can't even remember if the last time they actually had a confirmed sighting of a basking shark off of, off the Pacific coast there in Canada. And I say this because there was a program we ran for about 10, 12 years. It was a tri national program with Canadian researchers American myself, mainly leading that with Noah Fisheries and then Mexican researchers documenting occurrences of the basking shark along the coast here. And while I would have some records of that, I got records annually. I don't believe the Canadians ever saw any in the sort of 10, 12 years we were doing that program. The program was a spot, a basking shark. It was a citizen science project we had, and basically we'd get sightings, people sent in photographs but to my knowledge, I don't believe they ever, during that period of time, from 2009 to the early 2020s, I don't believe they ever saw any off Canada that I'm aware of on the Pacific Coast. I don't believe they ever saw any there. And so that's, that's a mystery why they disappeared. Why they haven't come back. It's hard to say. I think generally, you know, on the Pacific Coast at least, I think the US and Canada has done a pretty good job as far as managing their shark and skate fisheries out here. And I think that's something people should acknowledge. there's certainly places in the world I could point to, I won't hear, but that are not so well managed. But here they've actually done stuff. And as I say, we've seen increases in the populations in a number of these species. I think they should, acknowledge that the Baskin shark, you know, that's kind of an enigma out there. And I think when you look at it from a global standpoint, each area has a little bit of a different story

Meredith 8:29

yeah, I was gonna say the ocean is, is such a big complex habitat, but oftentimes we kind of treat it as just like this one thing, oh, these things live in the oceans and here basking sharks are considered species at risk in Canada. So, you know, they, they have a huge range. They're everywhere. But it's interesting to see, you know, sharks where they have shared habitat are doing well, whereas maybe they're not doing so, so great. So maybe we can talk a little bit more about like the health of the oceans. How do we They're, specialists. They, you know, are these huge sharks that eat a lot of small food?

dave@lostsharkguy.com 9:11

I think, you know, if I look at the Baskin shark thing here, we had a little bit of a program where we tagged a couple of'em one went down to Mexico before the tag came off, but another one actually went out to Hawaii, which is interesting because we know white sharks will migrate to Hawaii. Annually. And the other thing from the study here as well as studies done, in fact on the east coast of the US in Massachusetts, in that area where they've tagged some of good friend of mine, Greg Skoal, they had some that either went across the Atlantic towards Europe and one went all the way down to Brazil. And so they seem to be have these quite long, which is not surprising. It's a big fish to have these long range movement patterns. But a number of things we found out is that basking sharks, even though they're really impressive to see at the surface, they spend like less than 10% of their time at the surface. Most of the times they'll be like three, 400 meters deep following a thermal climb. And so we're so. You're really trying to figure out like why, okay, these, these things are obviously falling. The thermal client, I assume they're down there'cause of the food. They're in the plankton layer is my guess. And then, there was a number, we did a few tag tracking studies, mainly on the east coast. And then, you know, those tags are really expensive. They're like, you know, you're looking four or$5,000 a unit. And you have to put out a number of'em to start to get some sense of what's going on. And then you have to really spend, basically it's a program that would take some money to do, to really get out there and see what they're doing. But I suspect there's probably been some changes in the ocean is why you don't see as many of them. They may be around but they could be adept and you're not seeing them.'cause they, they say they spend 90% of their time under, you know, a couple hundred meters deep. So you're not likely to see'em. They could be, they could be in Canadian waters. There's just, nobody's seen'em'cause they're too deep. And they only really come to the surface when there's plankton there. So to, so it's a complicated story. I guess you still have areas like off Ireland where they, in Scotland where they show up in fairly large numbers and there've been some amazing, if you go on social media, Instagram and stuff, you'll see some amazing footage of these things. I just saw one of some basking sharks breaching, which is really kind of cool that people think these huge sharks that get up to 10 meters can actually breach and come out of the, you know, breach out of the water. Which coming back to the movie Jaws for a moment, if you remember the big climax scene in there, the shark jumps in the back of the boat and I can remember I'm speaking to his teenage Dave now. We just thought that was crazy. Oh, these things, no way they can like jump outta there. It was just, but again, you know, we had no idea. And then funny story that I went to South Africa years later to do my PhD but local people down there said, well, you know, these white sharks breach. And they would take me out to these spots in false bay and around there where you could see these sharks breaching. It happens really quick. It's not this, you know, they slow it down and slow mo and stuff for tv, but it's really a very quick, when you see it, your eyes can't quite adjust to what you just saw. This, you know, five meter shark just leaping out of the water to. Catch a seal or something. So it's, it's, it's, it's impress. But now we know basking sharks do this. Of course they're not eating. They're, I don't know exactly what they're doing it for, but they obviously do the same thing.

Meredith 12:21

Yeah, I was gonna say, if it's not for prey, it's interesting that it's worth getting their massive bodies out above the water,

dave@lostsharkguy.com 12:29

yeah. Well an interesting story, I did a publication about 20 years ago on the occurrence of whale sharks off California. Whale sharks, people don't know that's, they are the largest fish in the world. They get like up to 20 meters. They're massive. And the only place in the world there's ever been observations of basking sharks and whale sharks. Co-mingling is right here in Monterey Bay. And this is back in the thirties that the marine biologists who were here at the time bill Ripley had documented this stuff. There's like, there had been one record from the fifties of whale sharks off California. Well, after I had published this paper with documented about 10, 12 records over about a 70 year period, I had all these marine mammal people who were out there doing aerial surveys for whales and turtles and stuff, said, oh yeah, we see, we see whale sharks all the time. I said You do. He said, oh yeah. And they just, these are people that would know what a whale shark is. They said Yeah, we never reported it.'cause it's like we didn't think there was very, you know, like we went out and saw a seagull at the beach today, like we saw some whale sharks. So that turned into a whole, and there always, I cite this story, it gets back getting, getting back to basking sharks and other things. They like that is that a lot of times people see stuff that are going on, but they just don't think like anybody would have any interest in it. So when you get into the whole basket shark story, like I think there's a story going on there, but unless you are paying attention to it or putting out the word or talking to people, you'll have no idea what's going on.

Meredith 14:00

I think there's, like, you're touching on probably one of the big challenges with, endangered species,

dave@lostsharkguy.com 14:07

I.

Meredith 14:07

is it's obvious when it's happening in your backyard. It's really hard when it's happening meters and meters and meters below the surface. So how do we know disappearing?

dave@lostsharkguy.com 14:19

Mm-hmm.

Meredith 14:21

And unless people are carrying and looking for it, you know, who's, who's waving the flag saying, Hey, we need to pay attention to sharks. I was gonna say, maybe we could talk about some of the threats, like we've talked about how it's, people kind of like to blame fisheries, but our fisheries here are fairly well managed. So it just the general health of our oceans? Like is this The coal mine situation?

dave@lostsharkguy.com 14:45

yeah, I mean, I would say like, I think off California and the Pacific Coast here, I. We've done a very good job as far as when it comes to sharks and rays and stuff, and I think that even in a broader sense, other fisheries have actually done a pretty good job. The problem is there's too many people like always talking the doom and gloom. And then, I talk with younger people and they feel like this sense of like, there's no, why bother?'cause it's, it's all negative. And I think here you have something that you. That's actually a positive story. And I say this from a, you know, I have more of a global perspective than a lot of people.'cause I travel all over the world. I go to places where you see impacts with fisheries and a lot of times it's not these big commercial fleets, but you have like a lot of artisanal fisheries going on and you have people that literally, if they don't catch anything, they don't eat. So it's a very, it's a big socioeconomic issue and it's a more complicated thing. You know, here people, if you want to, you run out to this grocery store for your food or you have it home delivered or something. You have a lot of selection of what you can have. But when you go to a lot of places I travel to, I mean, you know, 50% of the countries like malnutrition, you know, I was in like Timor Lessi last year, East Timor. They don't have huge fisheries, but they just, it's like whatever they can catch, whether it's a shark, a ray, or bony fish. And you know, I mean, nothing goes, the thing is nothing goes back. Everything gets caught getting utilized one way or another. And so that's a whole different story than like what we have here. And you just used about the canary and the coal mine is that I think here we do a pretty good job. You think you do a very good job, be honest, but you have, but you go to other places, you have no idea. I mean, there's species now that are just, I believe are disappearing and this is, gets into my Lost Sharks program, which is where I've really been focused on for now, for really decades, and talk to people where you have species that were once common, you know, generation ago, you know, the older fishermen, for example, know of it. But then the young, you know, but the younger guys have never seen it. You know, things like Sawfish are a good example. You talk, you go to places in Africa or South America, central America, and you can, sawfish are a good one if people, you know, they have a long rostrum. A lot of times people keep Ms. Curios, you can find'em in like pubs in some places and or just in people's yards. And so you k that's one species you can kind of know was around. And you can see places where there's lots of these these saws. And so you, you can get an idea that these things were once common. And that that's a species that you know, really outside like the us it's the southeastern US Florida and the Gulf states there Bahamas and Australia. That's really the last stronghold for that species. It's pretty much disappearing everywhere else. It's going away. That's a species that's, you know, it should be of higher concern. It's gonna tell you a lot more about the health of the environment there. Well, that again, that's a species that's still kind of, it has a little, because of the roster. You can tell if there we're, there, most species I'm looking for, I'm finding is we have no idea. Like all we can glean is like, well, they'd seen one like 30, 40, 50 years ago. And so there's a number of species that are kind of under scrutiny now that we're starting to look at. Things that are just disappeared. I mean, we have species like a, what's called a Java stingy, stingy from the Java Sea off, off off Jakarta, Indonesia. We know this, the species from one specimen that was collected in 1862, it was named in 1864. It said a museum in Europe. And if it was not for this one specimen, we'd have no idea this species is gone. And it was in last year, I was part of a team that would declared this the first marine fish extinct because there's been no records of this thing. And I actually went to Indonesia last year and we spent some time talking with local, you know, colleagues of mine there in the Indonesia. And, you know, you see other species around there, they're still catching sharks and rays and stuff. But this thing was actually declared extinct because it's just, it just seems to have gone, there's several, there's a few other species, and again, this is a, this is a species and because it's a, also it's a ray. And so people understand, a ray is really a flat shark. If you take what you think of as a shark and you flatten it down, that that's really array. But, you know, here's a species that like this this Java stingy that we, that's been declared extinct. And as I say, if it wasn't for this one specimen in a museum collection, you'd have no idea this thing ever existed. I could give other examples of this you know,

Meredith 19:09

I

dave@lostsharkguy.com 19:10

yeah.

Meredith 19:10

that's so tragic because RA raised sharks, flat sharks. These are such old, evolutionarily like, evolved

dave@lostsharkguy.com 19:21

Mm-hmm.

Meredith 19:21

that have been around for thousands and thousands of years. And where now at this point where our oceans have changed much that not as hospitable to them anymore or that we're starting

dave@lostsharkguy.com 19:34

Yeah.

Meredith 19:34

species, which it's, it is

dave@lostsharkguy.com 19:36

Yeah,

Meredith 19:37

And guess maybe could you tell us more about your Lost Shark program and the work you're doing to kind of sharks and rays or flat sharks?

dave@lostsharkguy.com 19:49

Well, I was kind of just to back up a little bit. We talked about jobs a minute ago, but like, and people, and I always like to bring this point up is people, always talk about the negative of, of the movie Jaws. And it, it's kind of cute to me'cause I got younger people like yourself that weren't even around when the movie came out. It's just more of a history thing for you. But having lived through that, and I, you can talk to other friends of mine, the movie Jaws created the entire field of contemporary shark research. There would, you know, it may have come about in its own, but the movie Jaws really expedited it. The movie came out in 1975 and by, the late seventies early eighties myself and a whole generation of us, I call the Jaws generation, we were just kind of all the young researchers that just, people got a point in the early eighties where they wanted, they're like, well, how many shark species are out there? Where do they live? Where do they move? How many young do they have? How old do they get? A lot of research went into. Answer these questions prior to the movie Jaws Shark researchers Really after World War ii? Before World War ii, there really was no such thing as shark research. It was just sort of some taxonomic, maybe describing something they found after World War II because of incidents that happened with sailors and people being stranded at sea, encountering sharks. There were shark attacks. It wasn't as probably as horrific as some of the stories came back, but a lot of pilots thought like, here I survive my plane being shot down, or my ship sinking, and now I'm in the water and I have to deal with sharks. And so a lot of the thing with the looking into shark repellent and how to keep sharks from attacking sailors. And so. Pretty much after the war, up until like basically the early eighties, it was all about shark attack. Well, when Jaws came out, everybody started shifting around asking questions as I just stated, like, how many species are they? How old they get, how many? And so it really, at the time, the Office of Naval researchers funded the research, shark research on shark repellent, stopped funding that PE we funding started coming in to answer these other questions. And I was just right at the cusp of that thing with a lot of my colleagues starting out. And so it was kind. So that was really, that's what really what JAWS meant to like us. It was like it really laid the foundation for shark research. And yeah, there's negative teeing. Every shark thing became a story. But the thing is, shark fishing competitions were going on before Jaws Shark fitting was going on before Jaws. All this stuff was happening before Jaws, but what the movie did, it brought that from outta the shadow and into the light, and people paid attention to this stuff. And so it was, for me, it was a dynamic time because at that time, I mean, it was something like a white shark we knew nothing about, but people asked, you know, it would literally, you could go to like your grad advisor and say like, Hey, I have this question about blah, blah, blah. And they'd say like, oh, I don't know. Go find out. And so it was just, it was like a, it was like a wild west. You could just, if you could think of some crazy idea, you go test it out. Sometimes it's like, Hey, that's kind of interesting. Let's go look at this a little closer. This is where I kind of started off, I didn't call'em lost sharks at, at first, but I was collecting a lot of shark species traveling around in Africa and Asia collecting sharks. And I started realizing a lot of these things had been misidentified. And my professor for my PhD, a fellow named Leonard Capano, and if you watch the end of the movie Jaws, the last name they'll come up is they thank Mr. Leonard jv, capa Stanford University. He was the guy that helped design the mechanical shark Bruce in the movie. And he was my advisor for my PhD. And so that's my, one of my direct connections to the movie Jaws. But I would bring back all these species I'd find and I'd show'em to him and he started going like, gosh, we haven't seen this shark in like 50 years. We haven't seen this shark in like a hundred years. And I was finding things that nobody had seen in decades at that time, it's hard for young people like yourself to understand there was no field of shark conservation. It didn't exist. That eventually came in the nineties, a colleague of mine, Sarah Fowler, started getting involved with the IUCN and doing shark conservation. In fact, trivia here, the first article I could ever find. I'm aware of it on shark conservation. I actually wrote in 1989 in a book section called, basically was shark conservation of sharks and rays. And it talked about how things like thinning and all these activities were going on, but we really didn't have any context to put it into. But these fisheries were happening. Just there was no, you know, nobody was looking in terms of, from a conservation standpoint, they were just all, it was all fisheries oriented. And it was probably about 15 years later before people started really getting onto shark conservation, they started coming onto the nineties. The other thing I wrote in this section I did with my advisor, Leonard Capano, is we estimated that there was about 63 million sharks and rays kill the year in bycatch in fisheries. This was 1989. Nowadays people are throwing around all kinds of numbers where it's a hundred million or 300 million or whatever. But the first really quantitative study after what we did. Came out in the early two thousands. It was a, another colleague of mine, Shelly Clark, estimated about 73 million were being caught in the early two thousands. Contrast that to the estimate Leonard and I came up with of 63 million, we're pretty darn close. But this, all, this all ties into the lost shark thing, is I was seeing species that people were not, did not even know we're still around. And they said, oh, we haven't seen this in a while. I'm fine with things people were not seeing. And then eventually somebody started saying, well, you air, air goes the lost shark guy. And that's kind of how the name came about. People started just calling me the lost shark guy'cause I'd come back and they knew if they went and followed me I'd probably find something nobody's seen for decades. And so it kind of evolved a bit over time and it is kind of gratifying to find these things. But yeah, you just don't know like a lot of these species and sometimes it's a matter of just going to a fish market to look for'em and you'll find them. A lot of times you start looking around, you're thinking like, wow, we haven't seen this thing in a long, like decades. Is it still around? So like, kind of the focus all shifted to like seeing what's going on with these species. Why are they disappearing? Some cases you could make an argument, it's probably overfishing in some areas just'cause. The people have to eat and it gives a whole socioeconomic issue. But come back to the comment you made earlier about these really are to me, these lost sharks or the canaries in the coal mine.'cause they're gonna tell you what's going on in the marine environment. If you have things that are disappearing, are they being replaced by other species? You know? And a lot of it's, you gotta talk to fishermen, interview'em in a lot of these communities. I work with local NGOs and local fisheries agency people because a lot of the communities I go to, they've never seen westerners before, I was traveled through Indonesia last year and I was in some communities out there where they just never see anybody from the west out there. It's just Indonesian people and they're fishing and they're just a, they're a wealth of information. you'll talk to younger guys, they'll say, oh yeah, we see this, this and this, but we've never seen this. You talk to older guys and maybe in their seventies, early eighties, and they're like, oh yeah, we used to catch this when I was a kid when I was 12 years old. We see this all the time. I haven't seen one in like 50 years.

Meredith 27:01

Are people generally concerned that they're not seeing these fish anymore, or is it just kind of

dave@lostsharkguy.com 27:08

it,

Meredith 27:08

part of life?

dave@lostsharkguy.com 27:10

In these communities, these artisanal communities they, you know, particularly older guys, they recognize something's going on. But also, again, it's, I can't emphasize that enough to people like in North America, like there's no, I mean, these are places like literally if you see the stuff they eat sometimes that they catch, they're like little bait people we use for bait over here, and that's all they have to have to eat. So it's a, I don't, I never go in there telling'em what to do, what, you know, I just like, I just document what I find and I'm work because I work with local people. I just provide the information. I'm not somebody who's gonna tell them what to do.'cause I don't, I don't live there. I'm going home back to, you know, my place here in California where I can go to the grocery store and get what I wanna get. Whereas, you know, and these guys, my goal there is to try to work with them so that they know how to take good photographs that I can identify stuff with, they, they, they're more knowledge about the species that they catch there. And,'cause a lot of times the fisherman start talking about stuff, you're like, what's he talking about? And you show'em some picture and you're like, I didn't even know this thing occurred here. And then you find out like this thing and then, you know, sometimes you file. You'll find out something's actually pretty common. We just had no, I, it is just, you know, to, to me, and a lot of their local the, the fisheries people, they thought they were rare. And it turns out the locals are known pretty well and they know where to get'em, how to get'em. And so it's pretty cool, you know, for me a little bit it's like, Christmas every day.'cause I never know what I'm gonna see. And that's what keeps me, I've been doing this for, 40 years and I just, I love doing it. I never get tired of it. It's challenging though when you go to places that are off the beaten path. I mean, these are off the beaten path, a lot of the places I go to. But that's where you need to go to find these things. And you can tell what they say. You can get a sense of what's going on from fishing. Another aspect that's hard to get a handle on is habitat degradation. Whether it's from building or aquacultures or other things. So that can have a huge impact, particularly for coastal species. Sawfish are a good example. Sawfish are really dependent on mangrove swamps for part of their reproductive cycle. And so you go into areas where you see like the a mangrove area's been obliterated for whatever reasons. Whether it's development, sometimes it could be a mining operation going on somewhere, and there's silt coming down. Where the mangroves been impacted. And when that's impacted, that's gonna impact the sawfish. So it gets, it's more, that's why I say it can be more complicated than just saying they're overfished. Because if the habitat's inadvertently destroyed, and I'm not saying it's intentional, but you know, people don't know like, well if I, I'm gonna go build something here in this mangrove area, not fully realizing that that's where the sawfish need to reproduce.

Meredith 29:48

And sharks. Rays are a huge family. There's a lot of different, species within it. What percentage are these coastal species? What percentage are these large, open ocean,

dave@lostsharkguy.com 30:03

Yeah,

Meredith 30:04

know, giant sharks

dave@lostsharkguy.com 30:05

that's a great question. I think the thing is, you know, there's hundreds of species, a lot of them, it's just a matter of somebody going to where you, find these things. Deep sea is a little bit of a dicier situation because it's the deep sea and you don't know, you know, we talked about basing sharks a lot earlier because basing sharks we know now spend a lot of their time. Underwater, you know, 90% of the time they're at depth. They move large distances. We know they'll move from the northern and southern hemisphere they'll move across ocean boundaries in the Pacific. They'll go to Hawaii, at least one specimen we know did they'll move out across towards Europe as well as to South America, the Atlantic. So that's a more, those are more challenging to try to nail down what's going on with those things because they're so, they're big, they're wide ranging and we don't see'em that often. The smaller coastal species are a different story because they tend to have a more restricted range and you know, like, okay, we know what occurs in this area, so you can kind of survey that area. To get a sense if, you know, as best you can to get a sense of what's going on there. So you had, and you could tell through if the, what's the habitat been like? Has it, has it been disturbed over the last 50 years or so? So you got a little better sense. You know, you, you know, so I mentioned like the Java Stinger earlier, you know, known from, from the Java Sea. That area has been so impacted and fished and with pollution and other stuff, you know, pick your whatever poison as far as whatever happened to that. You know, and, and who knows back in the 18 hundreds what was going on then that could have altered stuff.'cause we do know they catch other species. So that's more, that's more of a, gonna be more of like an investigation like a CSI type of, you know. Crime scene or shark scene investigation of what's gone on there because it was so long ago. There's nobody around that has any collective memories. I have a series going on called Searching for Lost Sharks, extinct or Alive, and it follows me around. So as a program funded by the Save RCS Foundation, and what I'm trying to do is bring awareness to the public on these sharks that are disappearing. And the one right now we're featuring is on Ecuador's Lost Shark and Part One's up on the website there, the Lost Shark Guy website. Part two's coming in the next few weeks, so I'm not gonna give away what happens in the story, but it serves as a good example of a species is what's happened to it. Stefan, we talked to fishermen. I worked with a team of young researchers, graduate students from Peru, from Indonesia, from Australia. Again, working with people, mostly PhD students or early career researchers. I'm trying to train these people if they know what to look for or what they keep an eye out for. That's come from my having done this for 40 years, and you pick up a lot of tricks along the way to tell people about it'cause they wouldn't know. But anyway, it's episode three will be coming up here and it'll kind of let you know what we found out about the Ecuador's lost Shark.

Meredith 32:53

We'll make sure we share all the updates because,

dave@lostsharkguy.com 32:56

yeah.

Meredith 32:57

yeah, it's fascinating.

dave@lostsharkguy.com 32:59

Yeah.

Meredith 32:59

But to follow it up with a bit of a callous question, why should people in general, like people who aren't relying on these fisheries for daily sustenance, care about what's happening to our sharks?

dave@lostsharkguy.com 33:13

Well, they're a top predator in the ecosystem. They have an influence on what goes on in the whole ecology of marine systems. And we've used the term a few times. These are literally the canary in the coal mine when it comes to the health and marine environment. Well, we should care because in the case here, I think we've done a lot of good stuff where the white shark populations rebounded. White sharks are a protected species in California and they've been protected in California since 1994 and they've been protected in the US since the 1990s. But the first country to develop a conservation protection plan for any shark. And it was the white shark with South Africa. And this is one of the ways, like things I was really fortunate of coming through when I did is that back in 1990, the fishing community actually'cause of the seal line population was growing so rapidly, they wanted to protect the Bain Predator, the white sharks. So the fishing community approached the South African Sea Fisheries agency, a government agency to asked if they could develop a, some kind of a plan to protect white sharks. And so they came, because I worked with those guys a lot, they came to Leonard Capano, my advisor and myself to gather all of the known research and white sharks at the time to help from develop that policy. In the early nineties in South Africa, 1991 became the first country to have a protection plan to taking white sharks. And then Australia did it in 1993 and California in 1994. And so it was kind of a neat to have a hand in that. But I think you see the fruits of that now because we have all these white sharks out here. Basking sharks like as well have been protected for a while. Not as long, but that's the big mystery coming full circle. Now, back to your basking shark question. Why do we don't see'em? Well, I wonder if we're just not seeing'em because they're staying deeper than, they're not coming to the surface in groups and they're deep be because they're gonna be where the food is and when they come to the surface, they're there because the food's there. Are they out here? Are they just too deep for us to see? I don't know. That's, you know, that would take some more research to be able to tag and track these things.'cause I don't think we have any idea what's going on with the population of these, of the basking sharks globally at all. But I think the information we could gather would really help kind of open up a little bit on what's going on with the mystery of the Baskin chart.

Meredith 35:30

Well, it's so hard to to develop a, a conservation plan or to know if it's effective if you don't know what's going So it definitely sounds like there's a lot of data gaps that people We, we need to do more research. oceans are a big topic.

dave@lostsharkguy.com 35:46

right. Oh, absolutely. You know, I think the basketing shark, because it is large, it does get some notoriety in certain areas. But because there hasn't been anything like on the Pacific Coast here, people don't tend to think about it as much, or they might see a shark or something, but they're all, like, as I said, there's literally hundreds of other species. And these are, a lot of'em are smaller species. People don't, you know, just if I asked you like how many species of sharks are out there, you know how many species you think you might know'cause you researched for the podcast. But when I say sharks, I include the flat sharks. And the ghost sharks. How many species do you think are out there?

Meredith 36:18

Oh, will just, I'll throw a number up. We'll say a hundred.

dave@lostsharkguy.com 36:22

Okay. Yeah. That, that's a very typical number I'll get if I tell you there's 1,300 species, you'd be like, yeah. It just blows people's minds. And a lot of'em, you know, we don't have any idea anything about them, but we can do something about'em.'cause we'cause a lot of the coastal species.'cause we can at least go out and determine are they still around? And again, it's not gonna be off California or you know, British Columbia. It's gonna be going to places that a lot of people won't go. So going to like places off Ecuador Isla de Plata, or going to Timor Lesse or going to Zanzibar. You know, places that people have to look at a map sometimes to find, and I realize that people think like, these are far away. Why should I care about this? Well, the ocean's a big, it's a big ocean out there. And what happens in one place can have, can have a, like, like, you throw a rock in the water to get these rings kind of going outwards from it. It's the same thing there. You have these problems in these other, other countries. It's gonna eventually catch up to you here. And so that's why you should, people should care and should pay attention.

Meredith 37:27

And other than, you know, getting our, our PhDs and, and basking sharks and, and other species, what can people do to help Conservation?

dave@lostsharkguy.com 37:40

I think as far as shark conservation just learn what sharks are out here and what some of the issues and concerns with sharks. The thing is, a lot of the sharks you hear about are gonna be more of the high profile ones. White sharks, oceanic white tips. But I think it's just educate yourself and there's a lot of good books out there on sharks and stuff. I say this a little bit because I wrote the Sharks of the World Book, which you can get on Amazon but it's educate yourself. Just educate yourself, but know about your local sharks and be aware of, a lot of these books have a lot of information on shark conservation and there's a lot of good information out there and I think just educate yourself on what's going on. And if you're taking a holiday someplace, just, see what sharks are there and if you're fortunate, you're in the water and you happen to see one, great. Enjoy the moment. I do my, my personal policy, if it's bigger than me, I do get out of the water, but most sharks don't get more than about three feet long. And 80% of all sharks don't get any more than about six feet in length. So most of'em are much smaller species. And so a lot of times, once you'll see, tend to be more docile, they're not gonna be represented danger to you. And I can guarantee you from years of diving, sharks probably are likely to see you before you'll see them. And you'll only see them if they want you to see'em.

Meredith 38:48

Think that's, that's great advice. And also maybe want to. Move into a little bit of, of hope is you've been in the water a lot, you've been free diving for years. Is there any like story or something you've seen that like gives you hope about the future of our oceans and the future of sharks?

dave@lostsharkguy.com 39:06

I think people are doing in some areas, more of the developed countries, you see stuff, people are doing stuff that are actually, I think are doing, doing positive things for shark conservation. And I think those should be applauded more.'cause there are some serious concerns. But you gotta also tell the happy stories. I know that probably doesn't fundraise as well as other stuff, but pay attention to some of these lesser known species.'cause everybody wants to go diving with a whale shark with the man ray and they're really cool. I've done that. So it's really nice, neat to do. But a lot of these species that, the smaller ones are really interesting and I, if I could pass along something to younger people that might be thinking like, well I wanna go study sharks, find a species that nobody's working on. And and there's plenty of'em out there. There may not be anybody studying a painted swell shark, for example.

Meredith 39:53

I've never heard of that.

dave@lostsharkguy.com 39:54

Exactly. That's the point. There's hundreds of species nobody knows anything about and you don't even, you don't have to go to some developing, you know, country. You can come right in off Canada. The US there's plenty of species there that we know almost nothing about. And again, that's where educating yourself and so, and find some, find one of these species, find some skates, find a flat shark that nobody's looking at. Become an expert. It's the skills you'll learn. Yeah, you might be the most knowledgeable person about that species, but it's the skills you'll learn you'll learn about the ecology of these things. You'll learn about their life history, how to do, reproductive or diet studies and those, you can apply to any kind of other species. Like I said, I tell graduate students like, I can teach you about sharks, don't worry about that. Learn skills, learn computer programming, which is really becoming a big thing. You know, learn how to use a drone, another thing I'd encourage people to network and going around to different communities and listen to people.'cause you know, even in Canada and in the us I talked to so many young people that they just very dismissive of fishermen. And those guys are gonna be, there's your library to go to.'cause those guys can tell you a lot because they've been out there every day even in a well-funded program, you'll be lucky to spend a couple weeks a year at sea, if you're lucky, and after grad school, good luck if you get to go to sea. But these fishermen are out there every day, and if you just talk with them, they're more than happy to share lots of information with you.

Meredith 41:19

That, that's great advice. And like you said, these fishermen, they're out there, they know their local waters. might even have generational

dave@lostsharkguy.com 41:27

Mm-hmm.

Meredith 41:27

And then as you advance in your career, you're perhaps less on the water and you rely on those stories even more. But I'd love to hear, you sound like you have, you know, global experience, but do you have a favorite or fun story from the field when you've been working with sharks or diving?

dave@lostsharkguy.com 41:45

I've had a lot I'll give you, I'll give you one one recent one. About six, seven years ago I was in Sri Lanka working with some colleagues there. And a few months before I'd gone there one of the guys had sent me a picture of a shark that a fisherman had caught. And I'm looking at this thing, and I looked at this picture and I go, man, I think this is a, this is a new species. I go, I've never seen anything like this before. And so a couple, few months later I went to Sri Lanka and I said, I wanna make sure we go to this one fishing place because. You know, the wanted, see if we can find one of these things. So we went to the fishing place, which is a whole, it turns out this whole area was where they were fishing these deep, this was a deep sea sharks. They were fishing. They were landing, the sharks they were catching were for was for the squalene, for the liver oil. And this was a whole, this was fishing at the Sri Lankans. Didn't even know what was going on other than that one guy had taken a picture and so they started looking into this a little more. So we went there and I talked to the fisherman the one day and I showed him a picture that had been sent to me. And they guys are looking at kind of nodding their head like, okay, okay, yeah, come back tomorrow. I was like, okay, I'll see you tomorrow. So come back the next day. They caught one and I can't tell you how unusual or rare this is that they actually, when you're only in a place for a couple days and they actually catch one. And of course after running around the beach, like doing fist pumps, I was so pumped that they caught this thing. I asked them, do you see these very often? And they said, well, we caught three yesterday. We just throw'em back.'cause they're not worth anything. The meat's crap and the squalene where they're fishing these other species for, that's valuable, but these things aren't worth. So we just throw'em back. And so here they brought me in a species that ended up, I ended up naming as a whole new species of shark based on a picture I got. And that was a few years ago. And I've had a number of stories similar like that. But that was, that was pretty good thanks to cell phone technology. I was able to like, the fact they caught that one. I'm only there for a few days and they bring one. Oh yeah, we catch these all the time. And this is after I told you, they don't throw things back. But this thing was, it's the smallest shark. It only gets two feet long. You know, the shark literally gets like two feet long, but the specimen they brought back, turns out they have what's called a phae, where the first shark in the uterus that develops eats all the siblings.

Meredith 43:58

Wow.

dave@lostsharkguy.com 43:59

Yeah. And this is a, again, people think, you know, white sharks do that. And some of the big, like basking sharks, they're known to do that. But these are big sharks. You don't think of a two foot long shark that the first embryo in each uterus eats all the siblings. That's how they nourish themselves until their birth.

Meredith 44:16

Yeah. There's so much about shark reproduction that I don't know, but that is wild. New meaning to sibling rivalry for

dave@lostsharkguy.com 44:24

Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. So you wanna be the first, you wanna be the oldest,

Meredith 44:28

yeah.

dave@lostsharkguy.com 44:29

So, but that was, yeah, anyway, that was one, that was one a few years ago that turned into quite a story.

Meredith 44:35

Yeah, no kidding. From a, from a cell phone to a newly described species, that's pretty incredible. do you have time for some really quick rapid fire questions?

dave@lostsharkguy.com 44:45

sure.

Meredith 44:46

Okay. So, we can make it more about basking sharks or if you want to choose a species, totally up to you. But what do you think is something that's underrated or overlooked about sharks?

dave@lostsharkguy.com 44:58

well there's a lot of stuff, but I'll give one. I think there social facilitation, their, their ability, like people don't know that. And that was why I was the first one to really document this, that larger sharks and these sharks are, are very social and they actual hunt in packs. And so you imagine a sharks hunting like sea lions and packs like seven gull sharks and stuff. That was something that I got onto like oh, 35 plus years ago. Wrote some papers on it and I thought that was something people would really start to get, would look at in terms of social facilitation, in terms of how these sharks hunt. If you think about how like lions and hyenas hunt in Africa, if you've probably seen a documentary with those, that's how sharks hunt some species of sharks. But I really thought that people would've gotten more, interested in that behavior.

Meredith 45:47

Yeah, that sounds fascinating. Some, you know, see it obviously with like famously with orcas

dave@lostsharkguy.com 45:54

Yeah.

Meredith 45:55

that you think of living in pods, but that's definitely not something that I would've been like, oh yeah, sharks are social. Like that's not something I would've really put together.

dave@lostsharkguy.com 46:03

Including white sharks? They will, they will. They will work cooperatively.

Meredith 46:08

Maybe that'll be the next one, jaws three.

dave@lostsharkguy.com 46:10

Yeah,

Meredith 46:10

sharks.

dave@lostsharkguy.com 46:11

The dude Jaws reboot or something.

Meredith 46:13

Yeah. What do you think is the biggest myth about sharks?

dave@lostsharkguy.com 46:16

I don't think people realize just how well, you know, how these things are more complex. You know, the catch trailer when the movie Jaws came out, and you still hear it now, about them being a mindless eating machine. They're not, they're not at all by any means. Of course, I had some of this figured out back in the eighties. But I'm trying to encourage some young grad students, go spend some time. Instead of like, just wa you know, this, this is something too. It took me years, probably close to 10 years of just watching and just observing what was going on. And I learned this when I was in Africa because when people go out to watch like lions hunt or hyenas that they just would watch what they're doing, their behavior and, and it's, you just get little glimpses. You're not gonna get this diving. You're gonna have to get, find a vantage point where you'll see sharks congregating and watch what they're doing and just try to observe it qualitatively and don't feel, and I think a lot of times things get too quantitative. I know I'm, I don't wanna get too off into the weeds here, but there's a lot of stuff you can watch. Just watch what's going on. And don't get, you don't have to embellish it. Just say, well, here's what this thing seems to be doing. This is what this is doing. And what got me onto a lot of this was, again, my professor, Leonard Capano, is one of the top guys in the world. He passed away recently, but, he got me reading up on, like how, how lions hunt, how hyenas hunt, how wildebeest migrate other terrestrial animals that you can watch and see if some of that's applicable to the sharks.

Meredith 47:44

Yeah, I'm sure you know, looking at different species can really help when you've got an ocean underwater species. That might make some observations a little more challenging. And if sharks were to give humans a TED talk, do you think the title of their of their talk is

dave@lostsharkguy.com 48:02

That's an interesting one. Because I study all kinds of different sharks and rays, I think each one's going to give you a different story. You know, the white shark might say, come on the water, don't worry. I'm not gonna bother you unless I'm hungry. The shy sharks, which are really cute and endemic to South Africa are probably gonna say something like, you know, please don't bother me. I curl up and I put my fin over my tail, foot over my eyes to show I'm shy because you guys are harassing me.'cause you can see these diving quite a bit and they're easy to catch when you're diving. You might see the pajama shark, which was from my octopus teacher was another species I'd studied. You might say, spoiler alert, we like to eat octopus at the beginning of the movie. So depending on your species you're talking about, it could be, it could vary. Each one's gonna have a little different story.

Meredith 48:45

And what is the

dave@lostsharkguy.com 48:47

I,

Meredith 48:47

or most unexpected reaction you've gotten from people when you tell them what you do for work?

dave@lostsharkguy.com 48:54

A lot of times they'll say like, oh, I've seen the movie Jaws. I get that a lot. And it's like, yeah, I saw it too. And then I'm not, I'm not Matt Hooper, believe me. But yeah, I get that a lot.

Meredith 49:02

Okay. Yeah, I mean I could understand why people like, that's their probably closest

dave@lostsharkguy.com 49:07

yeah.

Meredith 49:08

to another shark guy

dave@lostsharkguy.com 49:09

Yeah.

Meredith 49:10

Is there a feature other than maybe their social behaviors that make you go, wow, nature is so weird and amazing,

dave@lostsharkguy.com 49:19

Yeah, I, some of these sharks that you have things like are very wide ranging and then you have some of these species, like we talked about, they're soft fish, which gets get really large. You also have what are called a saw shark, which maybe get a meter and a half meter, meter and a half. The difference between those? Well, there's a lot of differences, but the obvious one is a saw shark has gills in the side of his head, whereas a saw fish are ventrally, A saw fish is considered a ray flat. Shark saw fish is considered a shark. Shark, and they, but they both have a long rostrum that does the same thing, like basically whips back and forth the stun and kill prey for them to eat. You have other sharks that secrete bioluminescence and these are deep sea sharks who live in the dark they'll secrete this bioluminescence and these are small sharks. They don't get real large and you can only assume they're gonna attract a mate or maybe attract food, but they're like glow in the dark sharks literally. And so, like there's, that's why I say there's such a wonderful diversity out there, sharks that people have no idea. These just different types of sharks. Those are some obvious things that we do know. There's other ones we don't really know, like why are these shy sharks that mentioned it a minute ago? Very colorful. That's another thing. People think of sharks as being gray or black or brown. They're actually extremely colorful. Like always tell people like, have you ever heard of a shark that's pink with blue fins? A goblin shark is, if you see one in the wild, which very rarely, you'd be really lucky to see one, it's this shark that gets up to five and a half, six meters. It's pink with blue fins

Meredith 50:50

Very

dave@lostsharkguy.com 50:51

So that's, those are just some of the things. There's just such an amazing diversity out there with the sharks and people just, I don't think people, they just tend to think about one or two species. They don't realize just incredible diversity and of course question people ask me like. Well, why are they so colorful or why do they, why do they have this, you know, rostrum that like they can, they use to, you know, catch prayer. Thresher sharks have a, which people might be familiar, they have a really long tail. They use that tail as like a whip to get in the swim to a school of fish, to, to stu and kill fish to eat. And it's just all these things that are developed from an evolutionary standpoint, or I just find fascinating and just keeps me going. And as a young person, those are, you know, when you get onto some species, you can ask those kind of questions like, well, how did this evolve?

Meredith 51:39

Yeah, with over a thousand species, you've got pretty much endless questions and probably

dave@lostsharkguy.com 51:44

Oh,

Meredith 51:44

endless possibilities of what evolution has

dave@lostsharkguy.com 51:47

yeah. I never, I've been doing it for, 40 years. I'll be doing this the rest of my life, hopefully. And I just never get tired of it. I think to go through your adult professional life, and as long as I have, I still get as excited as the five-year-old kid I was when I first got interested in sharks. I mean, I get that excited still to go do stuff and to be able to get on a plane and go travel and go discover some new sharks or whatever it is I'm studying. I think that's, a life well lived that I can still get that excited about it.

Meredith 52:14

Actually, that's perfect segue into last question I've got for you. Was there an aha moment when you knew you wanted to dedicate your life

dave@lostsharkguy.com 52:23

Oh yeah.

Meredith 52:23

or to

dave@lostsharkguy.com 52:24

Oh yeah. No, I was, I, true story, I tell this all the time. I was five years old and my parents gave me a book on sharks and my mom still has the book and I at five knew I was gonna go work on, I wanted to study Shark. Now I. This is the 1960s. There was no real field to shark research at the time. Thank you Peter Benchley and Steven Spielberg, because if it wasn't for the movie, I don't know what I would be doing right now. When I was 10 years old, you know,'cause most of the time kids grow outta the shark and dinosaur and whale faced, I just thought I was wanting to travel the world, get paid and study sharks. I had no idea where I was gonna go.'cause I was, you know, 10 years old. But I just kept that from the time I was five. I just knew what I wanted to do and I just stayed focused and here I am today.

Meredith 53:08

That's incredible. Well, Dave, thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed this

dave@lostsharkguy.com 53:13

Great. Anytime, Meredith. Thank you.

Meredith 53:15

And that's a wrap on this episode with the Basking shark and Dr. Dave Ebert. A huge thank you to Dave for sharing his passion and knowledge. I hope you found the world of lost sharks. As fascinating as I did this episode was chockfull of information, but I think my favorite fun fact had to be not just about how many shark species are out there, which is over 1300, or that raise or just flatten sharks. But I think my favorite fun fact was about the average size of sharks. It's incredible to me that 80% of sharks are under six feet, and then even beyond that, over half of sharks are under or around three feet. Definitely not the picture painted by the media. And I loved having Dave on. I think he's an expert science communicator. But I did wanna break down another anatomical piece of jargon this week, and that's the rostrum. The rostrum is a beak like projection, or especially stiff snout. And in sharks, it's a forward projection or an extension of the snout. A rostrum can be found in sharks, obviously, but also insects, crabs, and marine mammals. And if you don't know what a Sawfish Strom looks like, which we talked about in this episode, please do yourself a favor and Google it. Now. I'll wait. And while your browser is open, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. It helps rarefied reach even more people who care about protecting our planet's rare species. And as always, you can follow us on Instagram at rarefied pod and sign up for our newsletter on our website for updates and sneak peek. Until next time, get out there and explore the wild, because every species has a story and every one of us can make a difference. I'm your host Meredith Meeker. Thank you for listening and happy trails.