What kind of work does the Pelagic Shark Research Foundation do?
We are an independent and non-profit, research, education and advocacy group. We specialise in field research to bolster the existing database on shark behaviour, which still has vast holes in it. We make our data available and sometimes use it to argue for shark conservation. In 1990 there were a couple of non-fatal shark attacks near here in Santa Cruz. We had people arming themselves, wanting to go out and thin out the shark population. We went out with slide shows and told people sharks were mostly not dangerous at all. California is considered a hotbed for dangerous sharks, but there have been fewer than a dozen fatalities from shark attacks here since 1946. On the other hand, humans are wiping out sharks at a far more alarming rate. What has your work turned up? We have found out a lot about shark behaviour and migration that people didn’t know. For instance, people thought great whites lived off the coast – that they weren’t “pelagic”, that they didn’t live in the open sea. In 1
