Sea Notes

Of Fins and Things

California AB 376 - legislation to ban the sale of shark fins in California - is heading toward its first committee hearing in the California Assembly.

You can show your support by sending an online letter to your assemblyperson from our website. Thank you to our supporters who've sent over 1,600 letters so far!

The bill has received lots of great press and has made front page news, not just in California, but also in the New York Times.

At the same time both Oregon and Washington are working on similar legislation and in fact the Washington state bill just passed a Senate vote this week  47-0! And all this in the same week that Guam signed its legislation into law. Hawaii enacted its own ban last year. (As in California, the Hawaii bill was co-authored by a Chinese-American legislator.)

Perhaps the most exciting news of all is that a prominent Chinese businessman and legislator, who just made the Forbes billionaire list is proposing a ban in China! According to the Agence France Presse report, such a measure would be highly controversial and take many years, but the fact that it's even being discussed is a quantum leap forward! And it's very likely his proposal was inspired by action in California and along the West Coast.

Meanwhile, we shouldn't underestimate the value of eliminating the market here in the U.S. Tons of shark fins are offloaded on our shores each year. Tons of shark fins equals an awful lot of dead sharks. We must lead the way and do what we can to prevent this wasteful practice that is decimating shark populations around the world.

Just this week, scientists estimated that there are as few as 219 adult great white sharks in the California population. No one knows if that is a population on the rise or decline, but either way, it's a small number. A juvenile great white released from the Monterey Bay Aquarium was finned after being caught in a fishery. That's one shark that never made it into the adult population. It's impossible to know how often juvenile sharks like great whites end up in a bowl of soup. But chances are, while there's a market for fins, it will keep happening.

PS: Have a hankering for shark fin soup, but not at the cost of the planet? Try our faux-fin recipe, created by Asian-Pacific chef and Seafood Champion Peter Pahk!

And if you'd like to hear more from AB 376 author Paul Fong about why he's championing the trade ban, check out this great video interview from the 8Asians website:

 

Best of the Blog: Top 10

A lot of folks have been checking out the latest news about our two new penguin chicks. And why not? They're incredibly cute (the penguins, not the blog entries -- though the stories do feature great photos of the two tiny birds on exhibit).

The story of the first penguin will be one of our most popular blog entries for all of 2011 -- and we're barely halfway through January.

If you're a fan of great white sharks, sea otter pups, ocean-friendly seafood -- and immortal jellyfish --  you won't want to miss some older blog entries that were the most popular stories last year. (Let us know if you like them half as much as you do the penguin chicks.) Here are your Top 10 favorites from 2010:

No. 1: Can a jellyfish live forever? Researchers believe they've found an Immortal Jellyfish, and we provide the details.

No. 2: There's a "Baby Otter on Board" at the Monterey Bay Aquarium -- the first sea otter pup we've ever put on exhibit. 

No. 3: Babies are popular, including the second baby sea otter ever to go on exhibit.

No. 4: There's more to a can of tuna than meets the eye, and Seafood Watch provides the lowdown on how to guarantee yourself a sustainable tuna sandwich.

No. 5: In "Whither the White Shark?", we share the sad fate of a young great white shark we released from our Outer Bay exhibit a few months earlier.

No. 6: Some people get hot under the collar when talking about climate change, but that hasn't stopped us from encouraging "A Spirited Climate Conversation" in "Hot Pink Flamingos" -- an exhibit with plenty of very cool animals.

No. 7: We celebrate a partnership with Whole Foods Market to label wild-caught seafood in the case to help consumers make ocean-friendly choices.

No. 8: Julie Packard cheers "A Great Day for the Oceans" and talks about progress on a national ocean policy as well as federal legislation to give real protection to our living ocean.

No. 9: Yes, sea otter pups and penguin chicks are cute all right. But can anything top a little ocean sunfish?

No. 10: In the wake of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, Julie Packard issues a challenge and a call to action on World Oceans Day.

Not Your Average 9-to-5: An Inside Look at the Life of an Aquarist

 

Imagine if the first task of your day was to feed shrimp to an octopus, unload a truckload of live sardines, or don a wetsuit and swim with sharks. Welcome to the workaday world of our aquarists, whose lives are as varied as the bay itself.

Kevin Lewand, whose title is simply “collector,” has been at the Monterey Bay Aquarium since 2002. As with many of our husbandry staff, salt water seems to run in Kevin’s veins. “I’m a California boy,” he says. “I’ve always loved surfing and diving.”

His career goal, however, never involved working at an aquarium. Instead, he wanted to be a doctor. But along the way he got a degree in marine sciences and took a temporary job as a guide and a diver at the Aquarium of the Bay in San Francisco. While there, he took a trip to the Farallon Islands, where he had the opportunity to dive with sharks. It opened his eyes to a whole new world. “I had never dove with sharks before,” he says. Suddenly, becoming a doctor didn’t seem so important.

“Once I started to get into aquariums, it hit me. I just loved it. I’d always been around the ocean, and the idea of working and getting paid to be near the water was a perfect fit.”

An Accurate Picture of the Bay

What really motivates Kevin is the idea of displaying animals that have never been shown before. “We’re always looking at what species are not represented,” he says. “Then we ask ourselves: ‘Why aren’t they there?’ We try to take on those challenges.”

One such example, of course, is our White Shark Project. The Aquarium is unique among institutions worldwide in being able to successfully display great white sharks and, along the way, convey important messages about the threats they face in the wild. “I’ve always felt passionate about sharks,” says Kevin,

But for Kevin and the rest of the husbandry staff, it’s not just about the challenge of displaying unique species—they’re also trying to educate people about their preservation. “We’re always looking at animals that are hard to display, and that are important to conservation issues,” says Kevin. “If people can see these animals, maybe they’ll understand how important it is to preserve them.”

Daily Surprises

When you work in husbandry at the Aquarium,  every day holds a surprise. While out doing research in the bay, Kevin’s had whales breach so close to the boat he thought they were coming aboard. Once, an enormous steller sea lion stared him down on a dive, eyeball to eyeball. 

But one incident stands out above the rest. While on a night dive with Joe Welsh, associate curator of collecting, a sea otter decided to engage in a tug of war over a flashlight. Having won the battle, the otter swam away, then turned and shined the light back, as if to give the two divers a dose of their own medicine. But the otter wasn’t done yet.  “All of a sudden,” says Kevin, “he returned and gave the flashlight back to us.”

As with any job, some tasks are less than glamorous. Gear must be assembled and inspected, boats and trucks made ready, and the necessary permits and paperwork completed prior to every trip. A plan may need to be filed with the Aquarium’s dive safety officer, and other staff may need to be scheduled for heavy work and transport tasks. Often, says Kevin, preparation takes more time than the actual collection. And afterward, there’s a lot of cleanup. “It’s like when you’re a kid,” says Kevin. “You need to clean up your toys. We have to rinse our gear and make sure everything is in order for next time. The salt water environment is incredibly corrosive. Cleaning is a necessary evil. It’s part of the profession.”

 “A Wealth of Knowledge”

Kevin is continually amazed at the professionalism he encounters every day on the job. “I don’t think people realize how good the staff is here at the Aquarium,” he says. I have so much reverence for the people here and what they’re able to accomplish—not just husbandry, but also our exhibits staff, public relations, marketing, our craftsmen and every other department. The displays, the exhibit labels, and every step in the process—people really strive to present things in the best way possible.

“I also believe in what [Executive Director] Julie Packard and her father did in creating the Aquarium. David was an engineer, and his philosophy was that anything can be done. And Julie is about our mission. So we’re always trying to do things no one else has done before, while striving to inspire conservation of the oceans.

“We don’t fake it—we really act on it.”

(Watch a video of Kevin feeding sharks underwater in the Monterey Bay Habitats exhibit.)

White Shark Summer

This summer is the ninth year of our White Shark Project. Through this work we have been able to display five juvenile great whites in our Outer Bay exhibit and have tagged and tracked these sharks, and nearly 40 others in the field, to learn more about the movements of these young animals along the coast.

 

This year, with the Outer Bay exhibit about to undergo a transformation, we won’t try to bring a shark to Monterey. But the field work continues.

 

From our previous research results we’ve seen that some young white sharks tagged in the southern California region move to, or return to, warmer winter waters off Baja California. We’d like to know if they return to California and regularly make this south-north migration, but the size of the young sharks limits the tag we can use, and thus how much information we can gather.

 

That’s why this summer, in addition to tagging animals accidentally caught in commercial fisheries, we’re using a different technology to try and establish if sharks seen and caught on both sides of the border are in fact part of the same population -– an important issue when it comes to management and protection of the species.

 

We’ll employ special acoustic tags, a technology already used in tracking salmon as well as other sharks. It involves fitting young white sharks with a transmitter that has its own electronic signature, one that will be recognized (and recorded) by a receiving station whenever a tagged shark passes by. We’ll be tagging six animals this summer this way and collecting data from all animals tagged in the field.

 

With recent DNA confirmation that California’s great white sharks are genetically distinct from other populations around the world, it’s important to gather as much information as possible to help us protect this top predator, an animal that plays a vital role in maintaining a healthy ocean.

Great White Comeback

This is video well worth sharing -- and with a likely connection to the Monterey Bay Aquarium's great white shark research project:

Adventure sportsman Chuck Patterson was stand-up paddle surfing off San Onofre in southern California recently when he and his buddies encountered two sharks in the water.

The next day he headed back out, with a pole-video camera in hand, to see if they'd come back. As he explains on his Vimeo video entry, two young great whites swam over to check him out. He caught one on camera during a brief encounter; the second stayed around for 15 minutes.

Around the 1:16 to 1:30 mark on the video, you'll notice something yellow-green on the shark's left side. According to John O'Sullivan, with our white shark research team, it's very likely the leader left behind when one of electronic data tags we put on young sharks pops free and transmits its data via satellite to our researchers in the lab. (John's pictured above, with our veterinarian, Dr. Mike Murray, releasing a tagged shark.)

We won't know for certain if this was was one of ours -- unless Chuck or another surfer is willing to wipe the algae off and record the identifying number on the leader next time he spots the shark.

We do know that we -- and many others -- see lots of young great whites in southern California. Outdoor writer Peter Thomas just wrote about the apparent population boom among great whitesin state waters. We and our colleagues have tagged 38 young white sharks off Santa Barbara, Ventura and Los Angeles counties since our project began in 2002

For now, enjoy Chuck's memorable video clip!

Me my Shark and I from Chuck Patterson on Vimeo.

How Many Fish in the Sea?

We're frequently asked at the Aquarium, "How many fish are there in the ocean?"

That's pretty easy to answer if you're talking about who lives in one of our exhibits, but if you're asking about a fish you'd find on one of Seafood Watch pocket guides, then it's not so simple.

And if you don't know how many fish there are in the sea (and equally important, how many there should be in a well-functioning ecosystem), then how can you properly manage fisheries in a sustainable way?

That's one of the reasons for the Census of Marine Life. An extremly ambitious 10-year project, its aim was to -- quite literally -- account for every fish in the sea. The project also wanted to set the census in context of what used to be in the ocean, as well as project ahead to what will be there in the future.

At the beginning of August, the Census released a number of papers summarizing findings to date. (It als put together a music video, which you can watch below.)

The Monterey Bay Aquarium's colloboration with Stanford University and the Tagging of Pacific Predators (TOPP) program contributed to the findings. Tagging and tracking apex predators like great white sharks and bluefin tuna is helping scientists understand how animals use the ocean, but also identifies whether populations are mixing with animals found in different ocean basins, or are otherwise distinct or unique in some way.

There's so much more to learn about our ocean planet, and despite all of this great effort, we're still only scratching the surface.

Man and Shark: The Musical

Time for something a little lighter, after yesterday's horror show of shark-finning photos:

Andy Brandy Casagrande IV made his mark a couple years ago with his Great White Shark Song. Good natural history, strong conservation message, plus quirky and goofy lyrics that should give it long legs as a novelty song. (Dr. Demento, are you listening?) Heck, Andy was even invited to perform at an ocean film festival, and for researchers at an international white shark symposium in Hawaii earlier this year.

Now he's taken things to a whole 'nother level. He brought his his guitar (and his song) to Guadalupe Island, off the Pacific Coast of Baja California, to perform underwater for an audience of free-swimming great white sharks. Andy, too, was free-swimming. No cage for him, thank you.

As he told The Sun newspaper:

"When you first see that first white shark approach the boat, it's a feeling you'll never forget. You'll never forget that image for the rest of your life: this big, giant smile coming straight at you. And you realize you're not afraid of that animal at all. It's just beautiful, majestic, come swimming, gliding by."

He's his full, quirky self, in this Q&A for the San Francisco Ocean Film Festival Blog. And, of course, in the music video of his adventure -- here to enjoy, in all its glory.

 

Whither the White Shark?

Last November, we released a young great white shark that had been with us for more than two months. During that time, she served as an ambassador to tens of thousands of visitors, helping convey the awesome beauty of these animals and letting us tell the story of the dangers they face in the wild.

So where is she now? The good news is that she did very well on release, traveling from Monterey Bay to Baja California, a distance of more than 500 miles. The last time we heard from her, she was near Ensenada, Mexico.

But about two months ago, her satellite tracking tag “started talking on land,” according to John O’Sullivan, the Aquarium’s curator of field operations. The white shark had been incidentally caught in a gillnet and died. She is the only one of the five white sharks exhibited at the Aquarium known to have died following its release.

Still, that shark, and the more than 180 others that have been tagged and tracked as part of the Aquarium’s White Shark Program, have provided invaluable information on where juvenile and adult great white sharks are traveling and how we might better protect them from overfishing, habitat destruction and other human activities.

Future Plans

So what can white shark watchers expect this summer, the time when we normally collect and display seasonal “young of the year?” The million-gallon Outer Bay exhibit is scheduled for renovation starting in August, and that means we won’t be hosting another white wonder until 2011 at the earliest.

For the Aquarium’s White Shark Project, however, it’s full speed ahead. “Our field research continues even though there will be no exhibit white shark this year,” says John.  

Working with colleagues at Tagging of Pacific Predators, as well as colleagues in Mexico and southern California, Aquarium staff hopes to answer one looming question: Where do young white sharks go? “Many of our released sharks have gone south to Mexico,” says John. “But we don’t know where they came from before that, and we don’t know where they’re bred or pupped.” Further tagging efforts can help answer these questions.

Data from other tagged sharks indicate that there are “two major population centers in the Eastern Pacific—one in central California, off the Farallon Islands; and one off of Guadalupe Island in southern California,” says John. The adults of these two distinct populations appear to travel back and forth to Hawaii and the “Shark Café,” a remote area between Baja and Hawaii known as winter and spring habitat for adult great whites.

“It’s a huge migration, and there must be an important reason they’re doing it, possibly related to feeding or breeding,” says John. “But no one knows for sure. Continued tagging will help us determine that.”

Tagging Technology

To help solve these mysteries, researchers will employ satellite tagging technologies. Currently, before a shark is returned to the wild, it’s fitted with two types of electronic tags. The first is an externally attached pop-up satellite (PAT) tag that eventually pops off, floats to the surface and transmits data via satellite. A second type, the smart position-only (SPOT) tag, sends data every time the shark’s dorsal fin breaks the surface. But these tags have limited lifespans and don’t supply information past six months. 

Now, to track shark movement for periods up to five years and closer to shore, researchers will be using implanted acoustic tags. This technology requires underwater “listening stations” to record the “pings” emitted by the tags. “The adult white shark program uses these extensively off the Farallones and Point Reyes, near San Francisco Bay,” says John. “But we’ll be deploying 11 more listening stations off southern California and Mexico’s Baja Peninsula in the next year.”

A fourth type of tag, the archival tag, may also be used. These are surgically implanted and can record temperature, compass heading and depth, and last up to seven years. The shark must be caught in order to recover the tag and its storehouse of data.

It’s all part of solving the mystery of the white shark.

“They’re a big piece of the ecosystem, and yet we know so little about them,” says Dr. Chris Harrold, the Aquarium’s director of conservation research. “What we do know is that there are not many of them. And that alone is cause for concern.  We’re trying to learn as much as we can, so we know their role in the marine ecosystem, and what kind of protection they need.”

We’re looking for people who love sharks just as much as we do. Tell us why you love sharks.

Shark TV: Great White Stories

It's white shark season -- at least on television, if not in the waters off California.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

Three new videos debut, both on-air and online, through KQED public televison's QUEST science series in the San Francisco Bay area. Earlier, national television viewers got an opportunity to join Anderson Cooper and his 60 Minutes crew as they got up close with white sharks in South Africa.

QUEST's The Great White Shark: Meet the Man in the Gray Suit, debuts this week, and will live online at the QUEST website. Two "web extras" focus on great white sharks we've had on exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the chain mail our divers use to stay safe in the water while diving with great whites in the million-gallon Outer Bay exhibit.

QUEST also links to an earlier story about the work of the Tagging of Pacific Predators team (with whom we collaborate) to tag adult great white sharks off the Farallon Islands and Año Nuevo State Reserve near San Francisco -- as well as tunas, sea turtles and other far-ranging ocean animals.

For CBS, Anderson Cooper went free-diving with adult great whites during his profile of Mike Rutzen, known in South Africa as "The Sharkman." It's a riveting story.

All of the stories feature incredible footage of adult and juvenile great whites, insights into our growing knowledge about their lives and important messages about the threats facing not just great whites but all sharks worldwide. They also link to the research we're doing at the aquarium and in the field to help save great white sharks.

Definitely worth checking out.

Calamari Cafe?

 
  

For some time, great white shark-ologists have speculated over the reason why white sharks head out into an area of the Pacific dubbed the "White Shark Cafe."

Despite this name, it was really believed to be more internet-type cafe, than diner. But now there's a new hypothesis that perhaps the latter may be the case.

Marine ecologist Michael Domeier is suggesting, somewhat controversially, that the dish of the day is giant squid.

These denizens of the deep, like the white shark, are often much maligned. Perhaps the two species just get together to commiserate. At this time, the evidence really is a matter of the two species being in the same place at the same time. Sperm whales also attest to the presence of the squid. These two are well-known combatants.

So for now, the research continues. Scientists, including those that work in our own White Shark Research program continue to unravel the mystery. Tagging, tracking, following the clues, connecting the dots. For now, the sharks' purpose yet unknown. Are they coastal sharks that visit the deep ocean, or ocean predators that come to the coast? Case unsolved, but not closed.