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Speaker 5: Oh hey, it's your two talkative petticab driver who eerily
Speaker 5: guessed your astrological sign. It's Ali Ward back with another
Speaker 5: fresh as hell episode of Ologies. This is the quickest
Speaker 5: turnaround ever in the history of the show ever, and
Speaker 5: I guess, given its oceanic I like to think of
Speaker 5: it as some treasure that washed up on the beach,
Speaker 5: delivered to your senses while it's still shimmering with sea
Speaker 5: froth before it starts to stink. Now I have been
Speaker 5: tracking this ologist for months and he was always off
Speaker 5: on expeditions in remote corners of the Earth being awesome.
Speaker 5: And we had an appointment to talk sharks last Friday,
Speaker 5: and then I realized, boy howdy, this week is shark week.
Speaker 5: This is perfect timing. I don't mean shark week like anything, Uterine,
Speaker 5: It's actually Shark Week on Discovery and Natchio has a
Speaker 5: Shark week. And then he had to cancel because of
Speaker 5: work stuff. It's fair enough, but then he said he
Speaker 5: could record just hours before I got on a plane.
Speaker 5: So I drove my ass Giddaly down to Long Beach
Speaker 5: and I hung out in his lab and I'm now
Speaker 5: back home. I'm turning around asides. I'm having the amazing
Speaker 5: Stephen Ray Morris edit this in probably a red Bull
Speaker 5: induced mania. Honestly, we couldn't be happier about it. It's
Speaker 5: very exciting. But before we get to the episode, some thanks,
Speaker 5: and some please and some thanks again. So first off,
Speaker 5: thanks to the patrons for making this whole show happen
Speaker 5: pretty much. At patreon dot com slash ologies, you can
Speaker 5: be a member of the club that knows what episodes
Speaker 5: are coming up next and submits questions to the ologists
Speaker 5: and sees behind the scenes photos from their labs. And
Speaker 5: also you help keep the pod free and available to all.
Speaker 5: You can also support by putting Ologies on your human body.
Speaker 5: You can go to ologiesmerch dot com and you still
Speaker 5: have a few more days to cash in on the
Speaker 5: July sale. I was like, let's have a summer sale
Speaker 5: ten percent off everything. Your whole dang order with the
Speaker 5: code Campologies. There's backpacks and bikinis. You can put Ologies
Speaker 5: stuff on your butt. You can also support with no
Speaker 5: coin at all. Just by subscribing. You can review or rate,
Speaker 5: you can tweet about it, you tell your dentist, whatever. Also,
Speaker 5: as you know, I creepily read your reviews and then
Speaker 5: I prove it each week by reading you on this
Speaker 5: week fantasy Football. Gal says, help, now I have an
Speaker 5: Ologies addiction. Guys, I can't stop with this podcast. Send
Speaker 5: help or don't, actually please don't and leave me to
Speaker 5: keep bathing my mind in Ologies. So nice, so, she
Speaker 5: says she got hooked after listening to the two parter
Speaker 5: on Fearology, which resulted in a four hour long post
Speaker 5: episode discussion on the topic with my mom, herself a psychologist,
Speaker 5: and she says, and because this pod normally drops on Monday,
Speaker 5: I now actually look forward to everyone's least favorite day
Speaker 5: of the week. Technically it drops Monday nine pm Pacific time,
Speaker 5: depending on where in the world you are. So thank
Speaker 5: you to everyone who left reviews this week. I read
Speaker 5: every single one of them. Sometimes they make me cry
Speaker 5: because I feel so appreciated. So thank you for that. Okay,
Speaker 5: now back to silacka mophology. I know it sounds like
Speaker 5: your drunk cousin add a bunch of scrabble letters and
Speaker 5: is doing her best to convince everyone that it's a
Speaker 5: triple word score, but really it's a term. It's a
Speaker 5: rare one, but it exists. So it comes from the
Speaker 5: ancient Greek for having the appearance of cartilaginous fish. And
Speaker 5: what does it mean. It means we've got a shark
Speaker 5: spurt in the house. What a shark expert he is.
Speaker 5: So he's been studying sharks for decades. He's appeared on
Speaker 5: so many TV shows about sharks it's absurd. And he's
Speaker 5: been a marine biology professor at cal State University Long
Speaker 5: Beach for twenty years. He's tall, slim, with close cropped hair,
Speaker 5: and what I imagine is a perennial tan. He greeted me
Speaker 5: this past Sunday today the day I'm recording this, and
Speaker 5: he showed me around the Shark Lab. This is a
Speaker 5: facility of these gurgling seawater tanks and high tech telemetry devices, cameras,
Speaker 5: and suspended in the rafters as a nod to the past,
Speaker 5: was a vintage sh shaped submersible. It was amazing. So
Speaker 5: we sat down in his tidy office and I asked
Speaker 5: him all kinds of stupid shit and he answered with
Speaker 5: affable wisdom. So get ready to deep dive into a
Speaker 5: world of ancient badasses, eye lasers, behind the scenes, movie trivia,
Speaker 5: inside out butts, cannibal twins, Seeming immortality. They're sea kink,
Speaker 5: surfer intuition, lottery odds, and your aquatic Many toothed new
Speaker 5: role models during this their week Shark Week with selackimorphologist
Speaker 5: doctor Chris Lowe.
Speaker 4: It's actually the worst sweet. It's great in that we
Speaker 4: celebrate sharks. Yeah, just the way we celebrate them is
Speaker 4: sometimes not great.
Speaker 5: So here's your mic and these are stage mics, so yep,
Speaker 5: just got it talking to it, and yeah, thank you
Speaker 5: for doing this this week. Of all weeks, is this
Speaker 5: your Is this week your nightmare? It's shark week your nightmare.
Speaker 4: So I was quoted in an article recently saying shark
Speaker 4: wee is like my Christmas. Actually it's more like my Halloween.
Speaker 4: So so, so it's great in one way, and that
Speaker 4: people are celebrating sharks and they're very excited about sharks,
Speaker 4: and that's something that that I find great. However, the
Speaker 4: Halloween part comes from the horror that's also partly created
Speaker 4: in that same kind of tone. So, you know, it
Speaker 4: makes it really difficult to educate people about sharks and
Speaker 4: to help dispel some of the myths about them when
Speaker 4: we still do a lot of fear mongering in some
Speaker 4: of the media. So it's really challenging. I'll give you
Speaker 4: an example. So here I am on a Discovery Channel
Speaker 4: show talking about why shark conservation is so important and
Speaker 4: sharks are vital to the ecosystem and why people need
Speaker 4: to protect them, and in the background here did it?
Speaker 2: Did it?
Speaker 4: Did?
Speaker 5: It?
Speaker 4: Just doesn't match right? So it comes very frustrating and
Speaker 4: a little conflicting for the public to understand. Well, wait
Speaker 4: a minute, is it about conservation or are we supposed
Speaker 4: to be scared.
Speaker 5: And so what made you love sharks so much? What
Speaker 5: was the moment where you're like, sharks, I'm on your team.
Speaker 4: So you know, as a person who grew up fishing
Speaker 4: and loving to fish, and I caught thousands of fish.
Speaker 4: The first one I caught, the first shark I caught,
Speaker 4: I was like, this is different. There's something about this,
Speaker 4: This is very different from all the other fish I'd catch.
Speaker 4: And it actually forced me to go to the library.
Speaker 4: I was not a good student, I hear to school.
Speaker 5: Really, how old were you when you went and started
Speaker 5: looking into it?
Speaker 4: Probably about nine, really, nine or ten. And then I
Speaker 4: went to the library and I remember finding a book
Speaker 4: about sharks and trying to figure out what kind of
Speaker 4: shark this was. And then I was looking through this
Speaker 4: book and I'm like, oh my god, there's all these
Speaker 4: cool things about these animals. They're like fish, but they're
Speaker 4: a different type of fish. And there was just something
Speaker 4: about that that just sucked me in.
Speaker 5: Is it crazy to you that you get to do
Speaker 5: this for a living, Like you're one of the leading
Speaker 5: shark experts in the world, Like do you drop your
Speaker 5: name and people are like, oh, oh, doctor Christen. Yeah,
Speaker 5: he's legit, Like, is it crazy to you that you're
Speaker 5: that dude? Now?
Speaker 4: Yes, I have to pinch myself every day. But part
Speaker 4: of it is I am so lucky to have the
Speaker 4: job that I have. I really am. I absolutely love
Speaker 4: what I do and it's not just about the sharks.
Speaker 4: It's about teaching other people about sharks and teaching other
Speaker 4: people about science and why we do it.
Speaker 5: So Doctor Lowe grew up off the coast in New
Speaker 5: England in a family of working class, honest, cool fishermen.
Speaker 5: He told me his favorite day was Wednesday because it
Speaker 5: was a Hamburger night. All other knights were seafood nights,
Speaker 5: because that's just what his family did, and that's what
Speaker 5: they expected him to do, just be a commercial fisherman
Speaker 5: or a carpenter. But he really wanted to study marine biology,
Speaker 5: and he became the first person in his family to
Speaker 5: graduate college, getting a bachelor's in marine bio in Rhode Island,
Speaker 5: a master's in biology in Long Beach, and then his
Speaker 5: PhD studying hammerhead sharks in Hawaii, which sounds like something
Speaker 5: only the guy in those Dozeki's commercials to do, but
Speaker 5: it's a real life and he lived it. Hammerhead sharks
Speaker 5: in Hawaii. Okay, and so when it comes to shark outreach,
Speaker 5: what do you think is the most important thing that
Speaker 5: you do, because that is one thing I feel like
Speaker 5: humanity can get behind. It's like, if there is a
Speaker 5: villain we can all be scared of and pissed at,
Speaker 5: it's gonna be sharks. Like we can't even be mad
Speaker 5: at bees anymore. We're like, oh, outside of the breeze.
Speaker 5: But no one's like, say the sharks. Everyone's like, let's
Speaker 5: kill all of them.
Speaker 4: Well, I think it's getting better. Okay, that's an exciting part.
Speaker 4: I think things are starting to change. It's just taken
Speaker 4: longer than I think many of us would have liked
Speaker 4: to see happen. And my best example are whales. Okay,
Speaker 4: so one hundred and fifty years ago, if we walked
Speaker 4: down like Sampedro, or we walked down New Bedford and
Speaker 4: you ask people what kind of animal they thought a
Speaker 4: whale was, they would say horrible things. Whales were. There
Speaker 4: are demons, there are you know all, they're horrible animals.
Speaker 4: They killed people. Moby Dick, right, So you think of
Speaker 4: the image portrayed in Mobi Dick.
Speaker 5: So if like me, you have not yet gotten around
Speaker 5: to reading Herman Melville's classic Moby Dick. It's about this
Speaker 5: whale who was real, angry, just a son of a bitch,
Speaker 5: And it was based on a real, actual albino whale
Speaker 5: by the name of Mocha Dick, who, despite sounding like
Speaker 5: your friend's barista ex boyfriend, was in fact a sperm
Speaker 5: whale and is said to have been a renown monster
Speaker 5: who evaded pursuers, was white as wool, and just crew
Speaker 5: the seas with nineteen harpoons hanging off of him like
Speaker 5: grass clippings on a sticky thigh. Didn't even notice. Now,
Speaker 5: for a long time people were like, get bent whales
Speaker 5: and their populations declined.
Speaker 4: Okay, so around the seventies, when whale populations were really
Speaker 4: in the tank, they got the perfect pr makeover. Whales
Speaker 4: went from being these demon evil animals to oh my god,
Speaker 4: they're like humans. They have babies, they nurse them, they
Speaker 4: have little eyelashes, they're intelligent, social animals. And I thought,
Speaker 4: if we can do it for whales, why can't we
Speaker 4: do that for sharks. So I think that we're in
Speaker 4: that motion, we're heading in that direction. But it's really
Speaker 4: difficult when the A lot of the programming still pushes
Speaker 4: the fear.
Speaker 5: Factor, so discoveries Shark Week, who is in no way
Speaker 5: sponsoring the show, has been this cable mainstay for like
Speaker 5: thirty years. They have shows like Bloodline, The Spawn of Job,
Speaker 5: and even a few years ago ran some docu fiction
Speaker 5: aka fake news about the extinct Megalodon shark resurfacing and
Speaker 5: later they were like, oh yeah, sorry, that was like
Speaker 5: not real, we thought, you know. Natt Geo has also
Speaker 5: joined the Blood Fund with two weeks of shark Fest.
Speaker 5: They have shows like Shark kill Zone and my personal favorite,
Speaker 5: Sharkatrez about the sharks near Alcatraz. Now the point is
Speaker 5: whales cute and smart. Sharks are scary, steely eyed murderers.
Speaker 5: They're branded is like the sociopaths of the sea. Do
Speaker 5: you think that if sharks had eyelids their whole story
Speaker 5: would be better?
Speaker 4: Well, they do have islids, they do, yeah, of course,
Speaker 4: some do. Some do. They're called little nick detating membranes,
Speaker 4: and they'll fold them up to protect their eyes. They
Speaker 4: just fold the wrong way. So maybe that's it. Maybe
Speaker 4: they look too alien to us, But I think that's
Speaker 4: only part of it, you know, Like dolphins have the
Speaker 4: cute little smile.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: You know, if you can only get some sharks with
Speaker 4: cute little upturned jaws, maybe that would help. Don't say jaws,
Speaker 4: don't say jaws. Yes, but I think, you know, part
Speaker 4: of it is being slowly demystified. People are starting to
Speaker 4: see sharks as being, you know, just like any other
Speaker 4: fish in the ocean, although they have a very different
Speaker 4: role than many other fish.
Speaker 5: So quick question, is a shark of fish? It is,
Speaker 5: but about four hundred million years ago they split off
Speaker 5: from bony fish and sharks. Instead of bone, they have
Speaker 5: skeleton made of lightweight and springy cartilage. They also don't
Speaker 5: have swim bladders for buoyancy, but they use their fins
Speaker 5: kind of like airplane wings, and they have these real
Speaker 5: fatty oily livers to keep them afloat. And they range
Speaker 5: in size from great white sharks more on that name later,
Speaker 5: which are like twenty feet in length, to these eighty
Speaker 5: bitty eight nine inch dwarf lantern sharks and Panama ghost
Speaker 5: cat sharks, which kind of both sound like and d characters.
Speaker 5: But the point is they're not all the stuff of
Speaker 5: cinematic nightmares.
Speaker 4: So it's getting people to think along those lines.
Speaker 5: And do you think this all started with the Jaws
Speaker 5: franchise or have people been kind of demonizing sharks for
Speaker 5: you know, before the seventies.
Speaker 4: Well, actually, I think that our perception of sharks and
Speaker 4: that fear goes way back. It goes back to the
Speaker 4: way humans portray all predators. So you know, imagine back
Speaker 4: in the early cave days and the men would go
Speaker 4: out and hunt some wild animals and they would come
Speaker 4: back and tell these stories about these crazy, vicious animals
Speaker 4: they saw, and of course the families are sitting around
Speaker 4: listening to these stories are going, wow, that's so scaring.
Speaker 4: They're describing this animal and the reality of it is
Speaker 4: people listen when people talk about that, because your brain
Speaker 4: gives you a little squirt of happy juice when you're scared.
Speaker 5: Happy juice aka adrenaline aka nor epinephrine is a hormone
Speaker 5: that's gleaked out from your adrenal glands during fight or flight.
Speaker 5: So for more on this and why fear is a
Speaker 5: very lucrative business, you can listen to the two part
Speaker 5: Ferology episode with Mary Poffenroth, who is a life changer. Okay,
Speaker 5: back to adrenaline.
Speaker 4: And It tells you to pay attention to characters that
Speaker 4: may be important for your survival. So now what happens
Speaker 4: is if people don't encounter that animal, they can embellish
Speaker 4: the stories, right, because the chances of that person ever
Speaker 4: seeing the animal themselves may be very low. And now
Speaker 4: the storytellers are getting rewarded because people are listening to them.
Speaker 4: So now they can embellish the stories. They can go
Speaker 4: on and on about the gnashing jaws and think about
Speaker 4: whalers and fishermen that were out to see for years
Speaker 4: and they would come back and they would be telling
Speaker 4: these stories to their families, and their families are like,
Speaker 4: oh my god, these sharks sound horrible. But now as
Speaker 4: people began to see those animals more, as they begin
Speaker 4: to encounter them more, those things don't match. So you know,
Speaker 4: television's played off that. Jaws played off that. I mean,
Speaker 4: when you think about the book and the movie, you
Speaker 4: know they're describing something that people were envisioning in their head, right,
Speaker 4: and you only had to show a few pictures to
Speaker 4: help seal that deal. So the problem was is we
Speaker 4: knew very little about sharks at the time Jaws was written,
Speaker 4: and we've learned a lot more about sharks since then,
Speaker 4: so now it's getting a little harder to embellish the stories. Nonetheless,
Speaker 4: our brain is programmed to get a little squared happy
Speaker 4: juice when we're scared, So I think that's what makes
Speaker 4: it so hard to move away from sharks being these
Speaker 4: scary animals and convincing people that they're important and they're
Speaker 4: actually not as dangerous as they're made out to be.
Speaker 5: Hit me with some stats. We always hear that vending
Speaker 5: machines collect three hundred and eighty five people a year
Speaker 5: and sharks kill five.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, so that those stats, there's tons of them
Speaker 4: out there. You know, you're more likely to dive in
Speaker 4: a car accident driving on the four or five going
Speaker 4: to the beach. Obviously in the parking lot you're more
Speaker 4: likely to be run over by another driver than you
Speaker 4: ever would by encountering shark. So the thing is is
Speaker 4: it's an irrational fear, right, because the stats clearly tell
Speaker 4: us that the probability is crazy, crazy low. You have
Speaker 4: a better chance of winning the lottery than you do
Speaker 4: of being bitten by a shark.
Speaker 5: So side note, your odds of getting struck by lightning
Speaker 5: are just one in three thousand, getting injured by a
Speaker 5: toilet about one in ten thousand. Now, death by sharks
Speaker 5: one in three point seven million, and well one in fifteen.
Speaker 5: Lottery tickets will win something. The odds for winning the
Speaker 5: good stuff like the Mega Million's jackpots, You ready for this,
Speaker 5: one in three hundred and two million, So way less
Speaker 5: likely than a shark attack, because like, winning actual money
Speaker 5: in the lottery is like nah, pretty much like kind
Speaker 5: of never.
Speaker 4: And that's with millions of people going to the beach
Speaker 4: and shark populations coming back in some places. So you know,
Speaker 4: it's kind of frustrating sometimes to put out those stats
Speaker 4: and then still have people go, I'm afraid to go
Speaker 4: with my pool. Really really, I get.
Speaker 5: That people are afraid to go in their pool.
Speaker 4: Absolutely.
Speaker 5: Do they know there's no sharks in their pool? Or
Speaker 5: are those people who have sharks in their pool?
Speaker 4: No, I don't think they are sharks in their pool.
Speaker 4: It's that fear of water. It's the fear of being
Speaker 4: in water. And you know that adds another layer. We're
Speaker 4: a terrestrial animal, right, so when we go in the ocean,
Speaker 4: we're in a form place for many of us. And
Speaker 4: you know, it's interesting because many of the people water
Speaker 4: people I call them. These are surfers, divers, swimmers. They
Speaker 4: spend huge amounts of time in the ocean, and they
Speaker 4: feel very comfortable in the ocean. You know, very few
Speaker 4: of them ever tell me they're afraid of sharks.
Speaker 5: Do you think that the people who are innately or
Speaker 5: feel innately afraid of sharks just are like scuba diving,
Speaker 5: not for me miniature golf? Sure, do you know what
Speaker 5: I mean? Do they self select?
Speaker 4: I think so, okay, But I think we can change that.
Speaker 4: Those are aspects of our behavior that we kind of
Speaker 4: put on ourselves.
Speaker 5: So is part of your role as a sharks burt
Speaker 5: if you will to give out enough facts so it
Speaker 5: counterbalances the fear.
Speaker 4: Well, I think that's an important part of it. So
Speaker 4: the more we learn about sharks and the more people
Speaker 4: begin to see them in a different way like they
Speaker 4: would see any other animal like maybe a dog or
Speaker 4: a cat, or a mountain lion or anything like that.
Speaker 4: The more they know, the less they're going to fear.
Speaker 4: And we see that. I see it particularly in kids.
Speaker 4: I talk to thousands of kids every year because they're
Speaker 4: actually the best, so they quite often haven't developed that
Speaker 4: fear yet and sharks and the new dinosaurs. So kids
Speaker 4: are really into sharks really, Oh yeah.
Speaker 5: I just know that sharks are the new dinosaurs.
Speaker 4: That's new dinosaurs, and they're still here. Twenty years ago,
Speaker 4: I was really worried at the track we were taking
Speaker 4: that this there would be a generation of Americans that
Speaker 4: would enter our coastal ocean and never get to see
Speaker 4: a shark. And now I'm kind of excited that things
Speaker 4: are changing. There's a really good chance that this generation
Speaker 4: will be able to go in the ocean and actually
Speaker 4: see a shark in the wild.
Speaker 5: I love it. For you, that's like amazing good news.
Speaker 4: But that's true.
Speaker 5: But that's exciting.
Speaker 4: It really is. It really is because imagine here's well,
Speaker 4: we'll think of it like, you know, coming to LA
Speaker 4: and going down Hollywood and seeing a movie star, Right,
Speaker 4: that's what it will be like. People will be like
Speaker 4: I was in the ocean. I saw dolphin ho hum,
Speaker 4: But I also saw a white shark that was freaking awesome.
Speaker 5: I love that because if you go in Hollywood Boulevard,
Speaker 5: chances are you are not going to see your favorite celebrity.
Speaker 5: You're gonna see a lot of other shit. But you're
Speaker 5: not gonna see anyone fair.
Speaker 4: That was very true.
Speaker 5: But when you think of sharks, what kind of place
Speaker 5: do they hold in your heart? Like, when you think
Speaker 5: of a shark, what key words come to your mind?
Speaker 4: You know, they're just amazing. I mean they're amazing. They've
Speaker 4: been around for four hundred million years as a group, right,
Speaker 4: they've been They've seen the gnarly shit on the planet, right,
Speaker 4: I mean, asteroids hitting the planet. They they've been through
Speaker 4: all these mass extinctions and they come out the other
Speaker 4: end of the pipe and they're still around. That's amazing.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So you know, when you look at all the other
Speaker 4: life in the ocean, and during some of those mass extinctions,
Speaker 4: we lost over ninety percent of the marine life was gone.
Speaker 4: Really that much, huge, huge, huge extinction.
Speaker 5: Sharks are like, yeah, I'm still here. Are you like
Speaker 5: me now, bitch?
Speaker 4: So the question that I loved upon her is what
Speaker 4: is it about them that makes them so resilient? What
Speaker 4: makes them so adaptable? So, and those are the things
Speaker 4: they have, these characters, either part of their physiology or
Speaker 4: their morphology that just seem amazing. And they're different from
Speaker 4: many of the other animals on the planet. So I
Speaker 4: think that's one of the things that just puts me
Speaker 4: in awe.
Speaker 5: What are some of those characteristics?
Speaker 4: You know, sharks have an amazing immune system. It's very
Speaker 4: different from all over vertebrates. They have all these unique
Speaker 4: characters in their immune system, and I think that's one
Speaker 4: of their keys to their success. I mean, their ability
Speaker 4: to heal, their ability to deal with pathogens in the
Speaker 4: ocean is just simply amazing.
Speaker 5: How does that work? Do they just have better T cells?
Speaker 5: Do they what's happening in there?
Speaker 4: Well, you know, they're innate immune system, and other aspects
Speaker 4: of their immune system are very different. You know, there's
Speaker 4: still a lot of work being done right now. And
Speaker 4: you know just the way they heal. So when sharks mate,
Speaker 4: males have to bite females to get them in a position.
Speaker 5: Wow, to copulate, right, didn't know that the fuck dude?
Speaker 4: Okay, So now we're talking about teeth, right, a lot
Speaker 4: of biting and females, yes, And females aren't always willing to,
Speaker 4: you know, comply, and that's probably part of the sexual selection.
Speaker 4: So female get a choice. If the male can't hang on,
Speaker 4: then you're not going to get to may with me. So,
Speaker 4: but there's a lot of teeth involved, and therefore there's
Speaker 4: gonna be a lot of tearing and tissue damage and
Speaker 4: things like that.
Speaker 5: Oh my god.
Speaker 4: Okay, so female's skin is twice as thick as males,
Speaker 4: is it?
Speaker 5: Seriously? Oh?
Speaker 4: Yeah? So, and of course you need that, right if
Speaker 4: you're gonna mate, And a lot of females will mate
Speaker 4: with more than one male because we now know from
Speaker 4: litters that there's sperm from more than one male. So
Speaker 4: there's this polyandry going on, right, So there's multiple paternitiesy.
Speaker 4: But the other part is how fast they heal from
Speaker 4: those things. So females get completely torn up, and then
Speaker 4: the question is how do they heal so quickly? So
Speaker 4: there's been some really cool research being done by some
Speaker 4: colleagues in Florida.
Speaker 5: So I don't Sharks can recover from incisions super quick
Speaker 5: because of the anti viral and anti microbial properties of
Speaker 5: their skins slimy protective film. It is a substance that
Speaker 5: rhymes with fucus, and it's bleeped for decency every time
Speaker 5: you hear it. Feel free to do a tiny, imperceptible
Speaker 5: butt dance or take a swig of your petverage.
Speaker 4: So what happens is literally within minutes of that injury,
Speaker 4: that begins to pour into the wound and it acts
Speaker 4: like a band aid, what anibiotic band aid, and then
Speaker 4: the wound begins to heal outward. So I mean you
Speaker 4: can literally cut a shark into its body cavity. Seawater
Speaker 4: will get into its body cavity. It's not a sterile buzzy.
Speaker 4: But they but they have pores that lead into their
Speaker 4: body cavity, so their body cavity is not sterile.
Speaker 5: So wait, that's like having So they're just getting seawater
Speaker 5: coming in and out and their body cavity is like,
Speaker 5: it's all good, don't worry about it. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Also that makes me think of a sharkskin suit, and
Speaker 5: if you actually had a sharkskin suit, it was just
Speaker 5: covered in a layer that would be not good for
Speaker 5: formal wear.
Speaker 4: But man, you heal fast.
Speaker 5: You can tear on a fence and be like it's cool.
Speaker 5: Give a couple of minutes. Doctor Chris Lowe right now
Speaker 5: single handedly making sharks lovable and math cool. He is
Speaker 5: a thought magician.
Speaker 4: I just get so excited even about math. Whoa because
Speaker 4: there's math in sharks. Ooh, like what they're covered in math.
Speaker 4: They're teeth. You know, they're a math problem, right because
Speaker 4: they never they have a never ending rows of teeth
Speaker 4: and the teeth keep falling out. And of course how
Speaker 4: old the sharks live, well, we don't know. But now
Speaker 4: we're coming up with new techniques to figure out how
Speaker 4: long sharks live, like sleeper sharks, like greenland sharks that
Speaker 4: have been aged to four hundred and seventy years old.
Speaker 5: How do they find out that that's how old they are?
Speaker 4: Really? Cool from the dead ones, you can take their
Speaker 4: eyelands and then you can run a laser through that
Speaker 4: and you can measure when radioactive carbon was in the
Speaker 4: atmosphere from when we did bomb test back in the fifties.
Speaker 5: Oh my god.
Speaker 4: So it becomes a little chrometer, little old time keeper,
Speaker 4: and then you can count these bands the amount of
Speaker 4: carbon radioactive carbon to non radioactive carbon, and use that
Speaker 4: as a chronometer to go back. Oh my god, So
Speaker 4: four hundred and sevn years old. That's the oldest vertebrate
Speaker 4: on the planet.
Speaker 5: That's really that's super bananas right now. Are they doing
Speaker 5: this on deceased sharks or can they do it? Okay? Yeah,
Speaker 5: so they do find. If they find a deed one,
Speaker 5: they're like, okay, let's check it out well.
Speaker 4: And the other thing is some of these sharks are
Speaker 4: caught in fisheries, right, so they're being caught, they're being used,
Speaker 4: they're already dead. You may as well take their eyes
Speaker 4: out and look at their lenses. And when when researchers
Speaker 4: started to do that, they were like, whoa, you know,
Speaker 4: how can this animal live to be that old? Well?
Speaker 4: Sleeper sharks they're some found in the Atlantic, some found
Speaker 4: in the Pacific, some found off Amertica. Live in very
Speaker 4: cold deep water. Okay, and what we know about things
Speaker 4: that live in cold deep water is really cold, really dark,
Speaker 4: really old because everything slows down. Metabolism slows down, everything
Speaker 4: slows down. And when you do that, you have the
Speaker 4: ability to live a very long time because.
Speaker 5: You're just like slow slow motion. They take forever to
Speaker 5: return emails.
Speaker 4: Exactly exactly so, and there's even some evidence that they
Speaker 4: may not even reach maturity until they're one hundred and
Speaker 4: twenty years old.
Speaker 5: Can you imagine having a teenage son for one hundred
Speaker 5: and twenty years of your life? Like picking up someone's
Speaker 5: socks and dirty dishes for over a century or from
Speaker 5: the shark's perspective, can you imagine having xits until you're
Speaker 5: one hundred and twenty and mystery boners that you can't
Speaker 5: do anything about because you've a curfew, not getting a
Speaker 5: driver's license until you're older than any human on the planet.
Speaker 5: Just no wonder sharks are pissed. Maybe some of them
Speaker 5: are just cranky and horny and they're too young to
Speaker 5: get a job, but also old as shit.
Speaker 4: But again, four hundred million years of evolution, right, so
Speaker 4: they've got something wired and they've passed that on through
Speaker 4: those lineages. So I think those are the things that
Speaker 4: the more I learn about them, the more I just go,
Speaker 4: these are amazing animals. I understand why people are so
Speaker 4: interested in them. And then you know, what new thing
Speaker 4: can we figure out about them? And more importantly, how
Speaker 4: can they help us?
Speaker 5: Yeah? How can sharks help us?
Speaker 4: Well, you know that's the thing. You know, the more
Speaker 4: we learn about their immune system and their physiology, the
Speaker 4: more we learn that they've got some cool tricks that
Speaker 4: other animals don't.
Speaker 5: Yeah, like a million revolving knife teeth. They're punk is
Speaker 5: a mother.
Speaker 4: And as we begin to understand those tricks, there's ways
Speaker 4: that we can use those tricks ourselves for developing new
Speaker 4: treatments for infections and cancers and all sorts of things.
Speaker 5: Yeah, now, a few patrons assets and I add this
Speaker 5: question as well, sharks cancer, does it happen?
Speaker 4: It does? Of course, do get cancer. So there's this
Speaker 4: big thing out there. Sharks don't get cancer at all.
Speaker 4: That's not true. They do get cancers. They do get
Speaker 4: them at lower frequencies than many other types of vertebrates,
Speaker 4: and of course they have this amazing physiology that enables
Speaker 4: them to do that. But there's a lot of research
Speaker 4: being focused in that area right now, and a lot
Speaker 4: of it may come back to slow metabolisms. It may
Speaker 4: come back to, you know, their ability to deal with
Speaker 4: that antioxidants. Can't wait to see what the next twenty
Speaker 4: years is going to show.
Speaker 5: And now talk to me about their electric faces. Do
Speaker 5: they have magnets? What's going on?
Speaker 4: Well, it's not that they have magnets. They have the
Speaker 4: ability to detect electric fields. They have little voltmeters in
Speaker 4: their face.
Speaker 5: How does that even happen? Do other animals have that?
Speaker 4: There are some other critters that have it. Duckbill platypus
Speaker 4: have these things.
Speaker 5: God's up there in a bathrobe like good.
Speaker 4: So the bottom line is the ability to detect electric
Speaker 4: fields and water is easier, right because the fields conduct
Speaker 4: better in that media than they do in air, So
Speaker 4: in sea water they conduct even better. So the idea
Speaker 4: there is you can have a fish and that fish
Speaker 4: is full of ions positive ion negative ions, and they
Speaker 4: create basically a biological battery. So every time the fish
Speaker 4: breeze wall wall, the field expands, and of course sharks
Speaker 4: as they swim through the water can detect that electric
Speaker 4: field when they're close. So they have to be maybe
Speaker 4: a meter or two away to be able to detect that.
Speaker 4: So remember those eyelids you're talking about. Yeah, so right
Speaker 4: before a shark goes in to bite something, it closes
Speaker 4: its eyes, it rolls back its nic detaining membrane to
Speaker 4: protect its eye. So how does it find a prey
Speaker 4: that's trying to escape it with its eyes closed, Well,
Speaker 4: it's using these electroceptors to track its prey.
Speaker 5: WHOA.
Speaker 4: So it's you know, it's kind of like being in
Speaker 4: a cave. And you know, animals in a cave have
Speaker 4: either poor vision or no eyes at all, and yet
Speaker 4: they're able to survive and enhance their senses. In this case,
Speaker 4: they have an extra sense, and that's that electro sence.
Speaker 5: Sharks feeding with their eyes closed come on so cute.
Speaker 5: It's like rummaging in a cupboard with the lights off, Like, shoot,
Speaker 5: I know I shouldn't snack, but the bag of marshmallows
Speaker 5: is emitting electricity that helps you find it. And so
Speaker 5: in let's say, I've heard of surfers wearing like shark
Speaker 5: bands that have electro magnetic fields coming off of them.
Speaker 5: Is that a hocus focus or no?
Speaker 4: No, no, some of it it does work. But the
Speaker 4: bottom line is we've found and there's been some research
Speaker 4: done that shows that sharks can habituate to it. So
Speaker 4: imagine it's like being in a building and then you
Speaker 4: go to a concert. You walk through these soundproof doors
Speaker 4: and suddenly you're just nailed with a sound. So you're
Speaker 4: going to kind of be a little you know, irritated
Speaker 4: by it, maybe disoriented by it, and things like that.
Speaker 4: So that's how we think those fields are working in
Speaker 4: those cases. Now, but if you have a shark that's
Speaker 4: highly motivated, it will tolerate that. Now, we'll keep you
Speaker 4: safe some of the time, sure, but here's the danger
Speaker 4: in shark repellants. Quite often, when people feel like they
Speaker 4: have a superman's cloak, something that keeps makes them invincible,
Speaker 4: they do riskier things than they would do than if
Speaker 4: they had nothing at all oof. So this is where
Speaker 4: I have a kind of a problem with shark repellants.
Speaker 4: I think in most cases, if people just use good
Speaker 4: common sense, they'll be just as fine then if they
Speaker 4: use one of these devices.
Speaker 5: Is there a good common sense tactic if you were
Speaker 5: to say, if you had a friend who's like, I've
Speaker 5: started boogie boarding and surfing in cold waters where there
Speaker 5: may be sharks, is there something that you can do
Speaker 5: that's smarter.
Speaker 4: Well, I think, first of all, knowing that they're sharks
Speaker 4: in the water, right, so your brain is taking in information.
Speaker 4: You may look at the beach, You may look at
Speaker 4: the situation and go, you know what, just feels a
Speaker 4: little too creepy. I'm not going to go in today. Hey,
Speaker 4: you know what, you just made a decision.
Speaker 5: Okay.
Speaker 4: However, you may do that every single day. You know
Speaker 4: there are sharks there, and you go, I know they're here,
Speaker 4: I'm in the water. I'm trying not to do anything
Speaker 4: that would you know, piss them off, and as long
Speaker 4: as I do that, it's worth the risk. And I
Speaker 4: think that's how most of those water people feel.
Speaker 5: Oh they use an intuition.
Speaker 4: I think.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 4: I've had some come out. I know, I've been in
Speaker 4: the water a couple of times in the evening, in
Speaker 4: particular by myself, and those little hairs in the back
Speaker 4: of my neck start going up, and I'm going, Okay,
Speaker 4: this could be a Jaws flashback, right. I can hear
Speaker 4: the music in my head or my hind brain is
Speaker 4: telling me something, and then I think, I think I'm
Speaker 4: gonna get out of the water. Really, but that's a
Speaker 4: decision I make right now. Coming back to that concept
Speaker 4: of what should you do maybe to be safer, what
Speaker 4: we know, based on statistics is that your chances of
Speaker 4: being bitten at a crowded beach are very low.
Speaker 5: Oh why is that.
Speaker 4: Well, we think that sharks don't like people.
Speaker 5: They're just like they're just like misanthropes. They'd rather be
Speaker 5: like you know what, I'm more of an indoor kid.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, there's all that suntan lotion pouring off people,
Speaker 4: and you know we're smelly and loud. I mean, if
Speaker 4: you're a shark and you're a cruising by, you might go,
Speaker 4: I'm going to swing wide of this group, right.
Speaker 5: In the parties I hate they hate parties, So like,
Speaker 5: I'm not into.
Speaker 4: It exactly so, but the bottom line statistics tell us
Speaker 4: the crowded beaches it's really rare, Okay, So if you're
Speaker 4: worried about it, serve with a friend, Swarm with the buddy,
Speaker 4: Swim with ten. The more of the merrier, right. Most sharks,
Speaker 4: especially the predatory type that tend to target large prey,
Speaker 4: tend to isolate things, right. They're looking for something off
Speaker 4: by itself because it might be more vulnerable, might be
Speaker 4: easier to capture, whereas if they're in a group, it
Speaker 4: becomes a little harder. Oh so these are some things
Speaker 4: that people can do, and you know it should help
Speaker 4: keep them a little safer.
Speaker 5: I mean I had to ask this, and so did
Speaker 5: patron Ashley Perez. Now, should you ever become snacked on
Speaker 5: by a shark, should you try to administer like a
Speaker 5: well timed boop to the nose?
Speaker 4: Absolutely? So, you know, the bottom line is, I don't
Speaker 4: think you have to tell most people to.
Speaker 5: Do that when it's going to be reflexed.
Speaker 4: Yes, when something grabs you, your response is to hammer
Speaker 4: on it, and that's that's the best thing to do.
Speaker 4: And of course, if you're going to beat on that
Speaker 4: shark that's biting down on you, the best place to
Speaker 4: hit it or in its around its senses, right, so
Speaker 4: around the eyes, the nose, those are all very sensitive areas.
Speaker 4: And what has been kind of shown over and over
Speaker 4: again from people that have encountered these sorts of situations
Speaker 4: is that the sharks tend to release, So you know
Speaker 4: that that's generally the rule of thumb. If shark, you know,
Speaker 4: comes at you, gets really close, bumps you or bite you.
Speaker 5: Have you ever had an encounter in the wild that
Speaker 5: was like either in a shark cage or watching something like,
Speaker 5: what's been the most what's been the craziest memory you've had?
Speaker 4: I would say when my wife, who's also a biologist,
Speaker 4: and I discovered that shark's suntan, what yes, what, yeah?
Speaker 4: That was that was an accident. How do you know
Speaker 4: that they do?
Speaker 5: Are they just out there with like a Marie Claire
Speaker 5: magazine and like some Johoba oil.
Speaker 4: Well, actually I was studying hammerheads hamor red sharks, and
Speaker 4: I was studying how they swim, so I would go
Speaker 4: catch them. These are baby hamorrhrets, and I would put
Speaker 4: them in the shallow coral pond. Water's very clear and
Speaker 4: the sand's very white, you know, it's coral sand. And
Speaker 4: I would collect a bunch of hammerheads and i'd put
Speaker 4: them in this pond and then I would film them
Speaker 4: swimming so I could measure how fast their tails beat
Speaker 4: and things like that. And then I told my wife,
Speaker 4: I said, look, I need to go get more sharks
Speaker 4: so I can increase my sample size. She said, let's
Speaker 4: go fishing. So we go out, we catch new sharks.
Speaker 4: We bring them, we put them in the pond, and
Speaker 4: we're standing there together looking at the sharks, going, oh
Speaker 4: my god, they're like different animals. So kind of jokingly
Speaker 4: we're like, maybe they're sun tanning. So it just so
Speaker 4: happens that that summer, the group probably the world's experts
Speaker 4: on the effects of UV in the marine environment. We're
Speaker 4: at this marine lab we were working at. So we
Speaker 4: started bringing them out to this pond and saying, hey,
Speaker 4: you know, we think these sharks are suntanning. And they're like,
Speaker 4: what are you talking about? Oh my god. The only
Speaker 4: animals known to suntan are humans and a couple weird
Speaker 4: like naked guinea pigs.
Speaker 5: So, alongside fellow marine biologist doctor Gwen Goodmanlow, who was
Speaker 5: also his wife ps Adorable, he designed an experiment where
Speaker 5: they have fixed little pieces of plastic onto the pectoral
Speaker 5: fins of hammerheads. Some of them blocked jaesuve, some pieces
Speaker 5: of plastic blocked all the light, and then some that
Speaker 5: were clear, and then they kept the sharkis there for
Speaker 5: one to three months, kind of like summer camp.
Speaker 4: After that time, we take the sharks out, removed the
Speaker 4: filters and they had tan lines.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, that's so tacky and amazing. That must
Speaker 5: have boggled your mind.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, yeah, so we actually get the cover of
Speaker 4: Nature wear that paper.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, I'm looking above me, so directly over
Speaker 5: my head on the wall was a framed magazine cover
Speaker 5: showing two sharks next to each other, one looking like
Speaker 5: my legs in winter and the other looking like wet asphalt.
Speaker 5: The headline red Suntanned hammer Heads. That sounds like a
Speaker 5: band that's going to headline Coachella one year.
Speaker 4: It should be. It's a great name.
Speaker 5: Now you actually you got your PhD in zoology in
Speaker 5: Hawaii working with hammerhead sharks. Did you pick them because
Speaker 5: they are the weirdest things on the planet?
Speaker 4: Well sort of, but also they're kind of like a
Speaker 4: high performance athlete. Okay, I mean they really are. As
Speaker 4: sharks go, they're they're highly tuned. They can turn on
Speaker 4: a dime, you know, if they've got this big canard
Speaker 4: wing in the front that generates lyft.
Speaker 5: So just in case you ever black out and come
Speaker 5: to on the glossy stage of a game show and
Speaker 5: need to know what the broad head flap on a
Speaker 5: hammerhead shark is, I got you covered. It's a sphere
Speaker 5: nid cephalo foil from the Greek for hammer and headwing.
Speaker 5: And not to hammer too many facts into your head,
Speaker 5: but it may act like a canard wing canard wing
Speaker 5: canard which is a little four wing on a fighter
Speaker 5: jet that comes in front of the main wings to
Speaker 5: help it float and get lift. So now you know
Speaker 5: that information incredibly powerful.
Speaker 4: But there shark like like some of the groups that
Speaker 4: can never stop swimming. If they stop swimming, they suffocate.
Speaker 5: Oh my god.
Speaker 4: So from the time they're born to the time they die,
Speaker 4: they're constantly swimming in order to breathe. So I was
Speaker 4: really interested in, well what does that cost? What does
Speaker 4: that cost to shark?
Speaker 5: God? That sounds like workaholism? Uh yeah, never stop, never stop,
Speaker 5: never stop.
Speaker 4: So I figured, okay, how am I going to measure this?
Speaker 4: So I thought, well, what I'll do is I'll build
Speaker 4: a big water treadmill for these sharks, and I'll put
Speaker 4: them in this water treadmill, and then I'll make them
Speaker 4: swim at different speeds and I'll measure how much oxygen
Speaker 4: they take out the water. So if we know how
Speaker 4: much oxygen and animal consumes, you know how many calories
Speaker 4: are burning. Now they need to make a fit pit
Speaker 4: for them. So they built my own acoustic transmitter that
Speaker 4: measured every single tail beat, so every time their tails
Speaker 4: wag back and forth, it would produce a ping underwater ping.
Speaker 4: And then I follow the sharks around for forty eight
Speaker 4: hours and count how many times their tails were beating
Speaker 4: per minute. By doing that, I could calculate how many
Speaker 4: calories they burn per day.
Speaker 5: Oh my god.
Speaker 4: And so basically what I found out was these baby
Speaker 4: hammerheads were burning so many calories that they only had
Speaker 4: about a three week period to learn how to feed
Speaker 4: proficiently on their own, where they would starve to death.
Speaker 5: Now, what is that about some sharks where they have
Speaker 5: to stay moving all the time. Is that so that
Speaker 5: water continues to pass their gills like that seems like
Speaker 5: it would be an evolutionary disadvantage, like to the max.
Speaker 5: Why is that still in place? So?
Speaker 4: I think a lot of that has to do with
Speaker 4: Historically many places in the ocean, there's a lot of
Speaker 4: oxygen the ocean, and it's only recently that we're starting
Speaker 4: to see that change.
Speaker 5: So to keep water passing over their gills, sharks have
Speaker 5: to swim around with their mouths open, although some species
Speaker 5: just chill out and gulp in water. Now, in more
Speaker 5: oxygen rich regions of the ocean, sharks can take more
Speaker 5: pit stops. They can kind of booge around a little less.
Speaker 4: Their metabolic rates are much lower than that of us
Speaker 4: animals that constantly pay a price to keep our body warm,
Speaker 4: so their costs are lower, and that means that even
Speaker 4: though they're constantly moving, their costs are still substantially lower
Speaker 4: than ours.
Speaker 5: Does that mean that they're not sleeping or that they're
Speaker 5: moving while sleeping.
Speaker 4: Well, that's the big question. So there's good evidence that
Speaker 4: some of these sharks actually do kind of go quiescent
Speaker 4: even though they're moving. So, you know, you think of
Speaker 4: those people that are restless sleepers. Even while they're sleeping,
Speaker 4: they're rolling all over at one of those people, you know,
Speaker 4: So I could probably get more exercise sleeping than I
Speaker 4: do during the day sometimes. So it's not animals aren't moving.
Speaker 4: They are moving, it's just that they have to do
Speaker 4: that to breathe. But what we think is their brains
Speaker 4: are kind of slowing down and everything is slowing down.
Speaker 4: And we recently did a really cool experiment with these
Speaker 4: baby white shirts that were studying, and we built a
Speaker 4: custom fitbit for them that clamps in their dorsal fin
Speaker 4: and that fitbit measures every tail beat they make and
Speaker 4: also measures every motion they make. What we found was
Speaker 4: really cool. So two of the sharks that we tracked,
Speaker 4: we're doing these thirty foot circles, and they were swimming
Speaker 4: in a bank. So they'd bank swim a thirty foot
Speaker 4: circle and that circle was almost a perfect circle. Oh crazy,
Speaker 4: And they would do that for twenty minutes and then
Speaker 4: all of a sudden they would stop and reverse and
Speaker 4: go back the other way. And they'd do that for
Speaker 4: twenty minutes, and they'd stop, reverse and go back the
Speaker 4: other way, and they would do that for four hours.
Speaker 5: Oh my god.
Speaker 4: So we're scratching our heads, going what in the hell
Speaker 4: is that? So my students started looking through the literature,
Speaker 4: and it turns out that migratory birds that fly actually
Speaker 4: turn off half their brain. And when they do that,
Speaker 4: they'll fly in a circle in one direction, and then
Speaker 4: they'll turn off the other half of their brain and
Speaker 4: flying circle in the opposite direction.
Speaker 5: Oh my word.
Speaker 4: So physiologists believe that that's the way that these migratory birds,
Speaker 4: which are warm bodied, right, so they're spending a lot
Speaker 4: of energy keeping their bodies warm, are basically resting their
Speaker 4: brain and they kind of go on autopilot like that.
Speaker 5: Are sharks doing the same thing?
Speaker 4: Then it could be? Could be.
Speaker 5: And now when you say white sharks, is that a
Speaker 5: new term for great white sharks or white sharks little
Speaker 5: great white sharks?
Speaker 4: Really good question. We've gotten rid of the great part.
Speaker 4: So common common name now is white shark aka the
Speaker 4: great white, because great white has such a cachet for
Speaker 4: like watch out, it's a killer, right, you know, it's
Speaker 4: given them such a big head. So there's such dicks.
Speaker 4: Now we're trying to bring them back to reality. There's
Speaker 4: such a prima donna. They're just gonna be white.
Speaker 5: Sharks now, such complicated coffee orders, and so we just
Speaker 5: call the white sharks now. Yeah, okay, that's good to know.
Speaker 5: I wasn't sure if they were just like little ones.
Speaker 5: And then is there what is the biggest flim flam
Speaker 5: that you would like to debunk about sharks? If you
Speaker 5: could bust a myth, what would it be?
Speaker 4: Well, so there's actually a lot. Okay, probably the biggest
Speaker 4: one is if you're in the water you see a shark,
Speaker 4: it's going to attack you. That just simply is bullshit.
Speaker 4: That's just not true. I mean, we have millions of
Speaker 4: people in the water in southern California year round in
Speaker 4: and amount sharks every single day and nothing happens. Now,
Speaker 4: they may not see the shark, but those sharks are there.
Speaker 4: So this myth that if you're in the water, the
Speaker 4: sharks are going to buy you. The other one is
Speaker 4: if you're in the water and you're bleeding. Great example,
Speaker 4: and I get this every spring. If a woman is mentuating,
Speaker 4: is it safe for her to swim in the ocean.
Speaker 5: Yes. I got this question from patron and Mars expert
Speaker 5: Jennifer Booz, who was a guest on a previous episode.
Speaker 5: She said, ken, a shark smell my period in the
Speaker 5: water or.
Speaker 4: What probably if it's very close. But the reality of
Speaker 4: it is there are little kids out there on the
Speaker 4: beach that are all skinned up right, We're bleeding. So
Speaker 4: every little kid that goes to the beach that skins
Speaker 4: his knee or her knee on something is bleeding in
Speaker 4: the water. It's not like sharks are picking them off
Speaker 4: every day. It's just not true. So people have this
Speaker 4: vision that a drop of blood sends sharks into this craze.
Speaker 4: It's just not true.
Speaker 5: Okay.
Speaker 4: And the other examples I use is, man, I can't
Speaker 4: tell you how many hours I've spent putting hundreds of
Speaker 4: pounds of ground up fish and blood in the water
Speaker 4: to try to attract sharks and get absolutely nothing right.
Speaker 5: You're like, you must be the real chum master out there, Like,
Speaker 5: how much of your work involves hauling buckets of chum?
Speaker 4: Well, I used to do it a lot. I try
Speaker 4: to do it less now. Okay, So mainly because we're
Speaker 4: putting a lot of nutrients in the ocean that we
Speaker 4: don't need to use. They're better waste to attract sharks.
Speaker 4: So but but the bottom line is, here's the situation
Speaker 4: where we're trying to attract them using the same things
Speaker 4: and we can't. Right, so this whole fallacy. Oh my god,
Speaker 4: you know, if I'm bleeding in the water, you know
Speaker 4: sharks are going to, you know, form a frenzy. It's
Speaker 4: just not true.
Speaker 5: Now, where were you? Do you remember the moment you
Speaker 5: heard about sharknado? Do you remember the actual moment and
Speaker 5: what your reaction was.
Speaker 4: Actually, I got after the first one came out. I
Speaker 4: never saw any of them. After the first one came out,
Speaker 4: I got a call from a reporter who actually asked me,
Speaker 4: could that really happen?
Speaker 5: I mean the answer is yes, I'm sure all the time,
Speaker 5: very frequent.
Speaker 4: I mean, I was shocked, and I was trying to
Speaker 4: termin where they're serious. I think they were. I really
Speaker 4: I think they were. And I was like, well, you know,
Speaker 4: there are cases during hurricanes and things like that that
Speaker 4: shark's doing inland they actually get carried in by storm
Speaker 4: surge and things like that. But I don't I don't
Speaker 4: think I've ever heard of a swirling tornado of sharks
Speaker 4: swirling around off the ocean from a waterspout. That just
Speaker 4: doesn't happen. So I think those are the sorts of
Speaker 4: crazy things that every once in a while happen and
Speaker 4: you shake your head.
Speaker 5: Like what like, even though the world can seem like
Speaker 5: a dystopian simulation right now, like politically, like shark NATO's
Speaker 5: not going to happen.
Speaker 4: No, okay, it's not going to happen, as crazy as
Speaker 4: it may be. But the bottom line is, actually I
Speaker 4: think some of those movies are are They're fun. I
Speaker 4: get it, they're fun. They're kind of a cool twist,
Speaker 4: and they're so unrealistic that it actually helps. It helps
Speaker 4: get people over the fear of sharks because they think
Speaker 4: that's just utterly ridiculous. So in a way, the campy
Speaker 4: ones like that actually help sharks.
Speaker 5: I think, do you have a favorite shark movie, because
Speaker 5: I'm sure you have several unfavorite shark movies.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, people give me DVDs all the time.
Speaker 4: I have a stack up there. I try to give
Speaker 4: them away.
Speaker 5: You're like, get those out of my vase.
Speaker 4: Well, actually, Jaws is one of my favorites.
Speaker 5: Is that really really is?
Speaker 4: Well? For me, I was there. I grew up on
Speaker 4: Martha's vineyards, so I was there when they were filming it.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, and half my half my kids I
Speaker 4: went to school with or in the movie half the time.
Speaker 5: God, holy shit, that's crazy.
Speaker 4: So for me, watching Jaws is like family reunion.
Speaker 5: So do you think that influenced at all your work
Speaker 5: with Sharks or how do you grapple with the fact that,
Speaker 5: like that that movie is part of your childhood and
Speaker 5: it's part of so many people's fear of sharks. How
Speaker 5: do you merge the two?
Speaker 4: Well, you know that maybe being there and seeing how
Speaker 4: it was made, you know, so watching the sausage being made,
Speaker 4: you know, give her a different impression of what you're eating.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 4: So the idea there is, you know, we saw all
Speaker 4: the things. You know, a lot of my friends school
Speaker 4: friends were in the movie. They were either extras or
Speaker 4: things like that, and you know, they saw the mechanical
Speaker 4: shark and you know, sometimes it didn't work, and you know,
Speaker 4: so when you see all those things, then you realize
Speaker 4: it's just a movie.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 4: So I think being there when that was happening made
Speaker 4: it easier. But of course when you watch the movie,
Speaker 4: this is the brilliance of Steven Spielberg, right, you know,
Speaker 4: none of the things he wanted to actually shoot, like
Speaker 4: that real underwater footage they had a hard time getting.
Speaker 4: And then the mechanical shark really works. So he made
Speaker 4: that movie where you actually only see the shark in
Speaker 4: only minutes of the movie.
Speaker 5: Oh really, I didn't realize that.
Speaker 4: Watch it again. See how many times you actually see
Speaker 4: a shark, whether it be a mechanical one or a
Speaker 4: real one. So it's your brain that's doing that. Your
Speaker 4: brain is building the monster. And that was the brilliant
Speaker 4: part that in the soundtrack track is just amazing, right,
Speaker 4: I mean, John Williams is amazing. So it creates that
Speaker 4: whole scene in your head.
Speaker 5: This feels kind of like a shark based stop hitting
Speaker 5: yourself kind of a situation, do you know what I mean?
Speaker 5: Like the movie's doing it, but also we're doing it
Speaker 5: to ourselves. But it's more. And now, have you ever said,
Speaker 5: be honest with me in the field, we're going to
Speaker 5: need a bigger boat.
Speaker 3: Uh?
Speaker 4: Yes, has that happened, Yes, it has. It's happened a
Speaker 4: couple of times, not because of the size of the sharks,
Speaker 4: but usually because the ocean that we're so Last summer,
Speaker 4: my students were out tracking those baby hammerheads or baby
Speaker 4: white sharks that I was telling you about. We're doing
Speaker 4: this out of a small seventeen foot Boston whaler. Well,
Speaker 4: the third shark we did. At one o'clock in the afternoon,
Speaker 4: my students call me up and they go a pig poach.
Speaker 4: So I go, okay, I told my other students take
Speaker 4: out a bigger boat and we'll switch boats. So they
Speaker 4: switch out boats, and then I get another phone call
Speaker 4: at one o'clock in the morning and they're like, we're
Speaker 4: now off Newport Beach that's like twenty two miles away,
Speaker 4: and they go, we to.
Speaker 2: Need a pigo poach.
Speaker 5: They're going.
Speaker 4: Man, when they know when they're ready to leave a spot,
Speaker 4: it seems like they know exactly where to go, and
Speaker 4: they make a bee line.
Speaker 5: They're just like way out yep.
Speaker 4: So on, you know, I'm done with Long Beach. I'm
Speaker 4: going to Dana Point and I'm going to hang out
Speaker 4: there for a month.
Speaker 5: It reminds me of people used to know, like in
Speaker 5: club days that would like go to a club ten
Speaker 5: thirty bait arrive eleven fifteen, or at the next club,
Speaker 5: you're like, where are we going next?
Speaker 4: Exactly? This place is dead.
Speaker 5: Have you been in an underwater shark cage? Yes, yeah,
Speaker 5: you've been in those. Right. My thought on them is
Speaker 5: like they look scary, but also I'm like, they look
Speaker 5: like they're not going to They seem like they would
Speaker 5: be safer than other things because they're not going to buy.
Speaker 4: Through the bars, right, yes, exactly.
Speaker 5: Is it fun? Is it crazy?
Speaker 4: It's kind of cool? I mean you do. You do
Speaker 4: feel somewhat restricted, right, you know, because you can't move
Speaker 4: as well, and as a diver, I'm used to being
Speaker 4: in the open water. I feel more comfortable, you know,
Speaker 4: being able to move a little bit more freely. The
Speaker 4: other thing that is always a little uncomfortable is when
Speaker 4: the cage is hanging in the water and you're hanging
Speaker 4: by a rope, right, or a cable or something like that.
Speaker 4: You go, Okay, wait a minute, I'm in a box
Speaker 4: over two hundred feet of water. You know. It sounds
Speaker 4: like a plot to a movie, right, yeah, And you're going,
Speaker 4: how quickly can I get out of here? If I
Speaker 4: have to? But the biggest problem that has occurred with
Speaker 4: some of the cages is that the photographers want big windows.
Speaker 4: They have big cameras, and they want to get those
Speaker 4: big cameras out those windows. You don't get a beautiful
Speaker 4: shot of this awesome sharks when you buy with bars
Speaker 4: in it. Yeah, so they make the windows big. But
Speaker 4: what happens is the smaller sharks can swim through the
Speaker 4: windows and occasionally when they get in the cage with you,
Speaker 4: they don't like that. Yeah, and they start bouncing off
Speaker 4: the walls. And you're in the cage with a shark
Speaker 4: and the sharks not happy about being in the cage,
Speaker 4: and you're trying to get out of the cage. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Those aren't Those aren't good scenarios.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that sounds like having a bee in your car.
Speaker 4: It's kind of like that. So for me, I prefer
Speaker 4: not to use cages. And in good clear water, when
Speaker 4: you can see the sharks coming and the sharks know
Speaker 4: you can see them coming, you feel a lot more comfortable.
Speaker 5: Have you ever gotten a little love nibble from a shark?
Speaker 4: The little ones because they don't like being held, right,
Speaker 4: There are a lot of animals that don't like being held.
Speaker 4: So those are the ones that are there's some forgiveness
Speaker 4: there right, this little teeth, little wounds. I've been bumped
Speaker 4: a couple of times. I've been come close to getting bit.
Speaker 4: But there's one rule in my lab. One rule, really
Speaker 4: important rule do not get bitten. As the number one rule.
Speaker 4: I always tell my students. If there's one thing you
Speaker 4: leave the lab with rule number one. I'm not taking
Speaker 4: to anybody the emergency room.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, how do you And so they know
Speaker 5: their precautions.
Speaker 4: Yes, we spend a lot of time training, we really do.
Speaker 4: We spend a lot of time on how to properly
Speaker 4: hold sharks. And it's not just for our safety, it's
Speaker 4: for theirs, because we want to make sure these animals
Speaker 4: are well taken care of. But the other part is,
Speaker 4: you know, when you're in the water, what do you
Speaker 4: do when you see these sharks? And can we begin
Speaker 4: to interpret their behavior and generally what you find. And
Speaker 4: most water people know this already. You know. It's like
Speaker 4: having dogs. So people that have dogs are around dogs
Speaker 4: all the time. You can tell when a dog's upset,
Speaker 4: you can tell when a dog's afraid, you can tell
Speaker 4: when a dog's angry, and you know what to do
Speaker 4: in those in response to those recognitions, sharks are no different.
Speaker 4: They really aren't. So once you start to interpret body language,
Speaker 4: you can start to go, Okay, that shark is not
Speaker 4: in a good state. I'm just going to back up.
Speaker 5: Also, I asked later it happened to be off Mike
Speaker 5: if sharks have individual personalities, and Chris stopped and looked
Speaker 5: at me like I had asked the same question about
Speaker 5: his children, and rightfully so he was like, oh, you,
Speaker 5: dear woman, Yes, of course they do. So my job
Speaker 5: in life is now to wear spiked shoes and to
Speaker 5: climb the nearest, tallest tree and scream to as many
Speaker 5: people in earshot that each shark has a unique personality.
Speaker 5: They're like dogs or people in the real world. Maybe
Speaker 5: some of them are really sweet and would help you move,
Speaker 5: and then others would like not even RSVP for your birthday.
Speaker 4: Party, or you know, it's coming really closed, it's just
Speaker 4: checking me out. If I give it a good swat
Speaker 4: in the nose, you know' that'll be good enough. So
Speaker 4: these are the sorts of things that we're learning. We're
Speaker 4: trying to interpret their body language so that we can
Speaker 4: better give that information of the public. So that if
Speaker 4: you see a shark, you can do the same thing
Speaker 4: like you would if you're walking down the street and
Speaker 4: you encounter a dog.
Speaker 5: So it's back up, maybe maybe nose boop, Maybe trust
Speaker 5: your intuition and don't be a bucket of chump.
Speaker 4: Pretty much, Okay, that's pretty much it. Okay, Yeah, So
Speaker 4: and then you know, being aware of your situations. So
Speaker 4: you know, I hear really funny stories some surfers who
Speaker 4: they're like, I love going out in the surf and
Speaker 4: communing with nature. It's great.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 4: There are times them out there and there's this huge
Speaker 4: school of fish around me and they're underneath my board.
Speaker 4: I'm in the middle of it, and I'm thinking that's great.
Speaker 4: I'm like, yeah, that's probably not the best place to be,
Speaker 4: you know, because you're in the middle of a bait ball,
Speaker 4: and what a sharks do? They charge you those bait balls,
Speaker 4: and you don't want to have your foot mistaken as
Speaker 4: a piece of bait.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 5: I've never heard of the term baitball, but it's now
Speaker 5: my favorite.
Speaker 4: Yep, yep. So the other one is they're out there
Speaker 4: and it's beautiful evening and a baby seal or sea
Speaker 4: lion climbs on their board and they're thinking, Oh, what
Speaker 4: a touching moment. It's it's wanting to bond with me. Actually,
Speaker 4: it's trying to hide from what's in the water that's
Speaker 4: trying to get it.
Speaker 5: Oh, man, I just went so deep down a rabbit hole.
Speaker 5: Watching clips of seals on surfboards, and they also flop
Speaker 5: into fishing boats. Take a reat feud from orcas like
Speaker 5: scared little aqua dogs. And if you're grumpy or in
Speaker 5: a bad mood, just consider our species so lucky that
Speaker 5: the thing that kills us the most, especially as a nation,
Speaker 5: is like eating too many appetizer platters at TGI Fridays.
Speaker 5: Other animals are constantly watching their backs because they might
Speaker 5: get eaten, And we likely have more ability than we're
Speaker 5: aware of to sense that, but we just probably chalk
Speaker 5: those perceptions up to spidy sense or whatever because we're
Speaker 5: just not used to using them. Now it's time to
Speaker 5: use your questions and get into the rapid fire round.
Speaker 5: But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners,
Speaker 5: we're going to take a quick break for sponsors of
Speaker 5: the show. Sponsors. Why sponsors, you know what they do?
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Speaker 5: Okay, your questions, there were so many good ones. I
Speaker 5: jammed in as many as I could. But let's start
Speaker 5: with Tofer, who asked this innocent, kind of breezy casual
Speaker 5: question that I love. Is it true that sharks eat
Speaker 5: each other in the womb?
Speaker 4: Okay? So the answer is yes.
Speaker 5: Okay.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So it's called a delfha phaiji and it's common
Speaker 4: in santaiger sharks. Okay, so they're kind of like they
Speaker 4: should have been called highlander shark because there can only
Speaker 4: be one one PERI really. Yeah, So they eat all
Speaker 4: their lower, lower, slower growing siblings.
Speaker 5: Okay, man, that's the one way to have the survival
Speaker 5: of the fittest. Start them off young. They're all only children, Like, really,
Speaker 5: me too, that's so weird. I'm an only tod. That's
Speaker 5: so weird how we're all only too Huh. Jamie Drew
Speaker 5: wants to know my nine year old Chelsea would like
Speaker 5: to know if sharks fart.
Speaker 4: Thinks ooh, good question. A lot of other fishes do, Okays,
Speaker 4: there are other reasons for that. They probably do because
Speaker 4: they probably build up a little methane gas in there.
Speaker 5: So for more on this topic, you may want to
Speaker 5: add to your library. The reference book Does It Fart?
Speaker 5: The Definitive Field Guide to Animal Flatulence, written by a
Speaker 5: zoologist alongside a salamander expert and fun side note, doctor
Speaker 5: David Stein of the Herpetology episode is thanked in the
Speaker 5: forward of this book for helping inspire it once again
Speaker 5: it's called does It Fart?
Speaker 4: But by and large, sharks digestive systems are amazing.
Speaker 5: Are they so efficient?
Speaker 4: They're unbelievably efficient and considering what they eat. So First
Speaker 4: of all, sharks are unique in that they can evert
Speaker 4: their stomach. So like when we get sick, we have
Speaker 4: to have what's called reverse peristalsis. So suddenly muscles that
Speaker 4: normally go in one direction from your mouth to your
Speaker 4: stomach go that's not good in our stomach, and they
Speaker 4: start moving the other direction. That's why you vomit. Sharks
Speaker 4: actually don't do that. They actually turn their stomach inside out.
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh, So they evert it out their mouth.
Speaker 4: They can rinse it out and then pull it back in.
Speaker 5: God, that's so handy. It really is on their twenty
Speaker 5: first birthday. I mean, they do live to be four
Speaker 5: hundred and whatever. But I don't know what the equivalent
Speaker 5: is of legal drinking age, but that would be handy.
Speaker 4: But when you're eating whole fish with spines and scales
Speaker 4: and things that are really hard to digest, why pass
Speaker 4: those through your sensitive inner bits? Why not just get
Speaker 4: rid of them flush amount.
Speaker 5: It's just like shaking crumbs and bobby pins out of
Speaker 5: your purse.
Speaker 4: And then once that meal passes and it starts going
Speaker 4: through their intestine, their intestinees this great space saving device
Speaker 4: that's a spiral staircase where food kind of winds its
Speaker 4: way through a kind of looks like a football with
Speaker 4: a spiral staircase, and it's very efficient at pulling out
Speaker 4: all the good nutrients. But some sharks actually have a
Speaker 4: different kind of what's called a scrolling valve, so basically
Speaker 4: they can actually rinse out their intestine out their anus.
Speaker 4: What yeah, yeah, Now this is something you typically want
Speaker 4: to do in private.
Speaker 5: No, really, shake out your rectum in private. You'll see.
Speaker 4: The way we know this works is in aquaria public
Speaker 4: aquaria where they have some of these sharks. They will
Speaker 4: have their sharks out during the day and at night,
Speaker 4: and they look great and the next morning, they command
Speaker 4: the shark's dead on the bottom of the tank. So
Speaker 4: the researchers of the Acquerus will take them out and
Speaker 4: they'll do any cropsy, and what they'll find is that
Speaker 4: their intestine, the lower part of their intestine, has perforations,
Speaker 4: and they internally hemorrhage, and nobody can figure out how
Speaker 4: this was happening. Well, it turns out at wiki Ki Aquarium,
Speaker 4: one of the grad students who is in charge of
Speaker 4: sweeping up the foyer at night, saw this happen. Saw
Speaker 4: this black tip brief shark swinging around, flush this thing
Speaker 4: out its butt, and a jack came over and bit it.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, rude, rude.
Speaker 4: So the great thing is they have the ability to
Speaker 4: completely flush their body their digestive track out to get
Speaker 4: rid of all sorts of debris and parasites and all
Speaker 4: sorts of things. The bad thing is you don't want
Speaker 4: to do that in the presence of other predators.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, this is like triple lock on the
Speaker 5: bathroom here exactly. Oh my god, that's so tragic. But
Speaker 5: who knew that. Whoever was sweeping the lobby was like,
Speaker 5: you just figured out a whole new thing about the
Speaker 5: bowels of a shark exactly. Oh, that's amazing. Both hal
Speaker 5: Science and justin so want to know essentially, how aggressive
Speaker 5: are sharks really.
Speaker 4: Not? Well, they're not any more aggressive than I would
Speaker 4: say most of the other animals that we're familiar with.
Speaker 4: Like all animals, they will protect themselves. Everybody has a
Speaker 4: personal space and when something starts getting into a personal space,
Speaker 4: you will have a breaking point where you will protect yourself,
Speaker 4: push somebody else away, throw at somebody, do whatever you
Speaker 4: have to do to protect that personal space. And we
Speaker 4: know sharks have that, and they have a body language
Speaker 4: that they warn other animals that you're in my space.
Speaker 4: And my predecessor Don Nelson did some really cool research
Speaker 4: on that.
Speaker 5: Do they flick their tails like sassy, No, they.
Speaker 4: Arch their back, they drop their petrol fins. You know,
Speaker 4: like when you chase a cat down an alley and
Speaker 4: you corner them and they arch their back and their
Speaker 4: first stands up and they bare their teeth. That process
Speaker 4: is known as an agonistic display.
Speaker 5: Oh, it's like mad dogging someone mad dogging.
Speaker 4: It's like back off jack. So we know that sharks
Speaker 4: exhibit that behavior, and that behavior is an agonistic display
Speaker 4: because my predecessor would chase them around underwater sub to
Speaker 4: piss them off, and then he would get them to
Speaker 4: the point where they would break out of it and
Speaker 4: they would attack the sub and take off.
Speaker 5: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 4: So he could actually induce that behavior and then get
Speaker 4: them to, you know, basically do what a cat would do.
Speaker 4: And then of course when animals feed, that's not aggressive,
Speaker 4: that's just feeding.
Speaker 5: Right, gotta eat, gotta eat, you gotta eat. You're a shark.
Speaker 5: Sara Naishall wants to know, I've seen a few videos
Speaker 5: recently of sharks enjoying scretches. Do sharks have a type
Speaker 5: of pleasure center in their brains? Do they like?
Speaker 4: Well, screeches, scratches, So they do have a lot itchies,
Speaker 4: I'll give them that. So there are a lot of
Speaker 4: ectoparasites that get on sharks, and they have little claws
Speaker 4: and they move around the body and they probably itch
Speaker 4: so quite often it's not a common sea sharks rub
Speaker 4: on the seafloor, or they'll rub on coral reefs, so
Speaker 4: they'll rub on rocks trying to rub these things off.
Speaker 4: In fact, one of the reasons why we think some
Speaker 4: sharks jump is to try to dislodge those things.
Speaker 5: They'll like literally get off my back exactly. Neil Williams
Speaker 5: wants to know what's with the fish that tags along
Speaker 5: with sharks like an annoying little brother. So the ones that, like,
Speaker 5: I mean, are those lamp breeze? What are they?
Speaker 4: So those are remorra. So there's remorra and shark suckers,
Speaker 4: And basically they're hitchhikers, but they're hitchhikers with a purpose.
Speaker 4: So their goal is to not only catch a ride.
Speaker 4: So sharks are like uber basically for them, but also
Speaker 4: uber eats, right, so as the shark's feeding, it's releasing
Speaker 4: little bits and pieces that they can actually snack on.
Speaker 5: This sounds like the fish version of being a stowaway
Speaker 5: on a gelato truck. And I am into it.
Speaker 4: You know, they're kind of getting a ride and a
Speaker 4: meal at the same time.
Speaker 5: Oh that's so cute.
Speaker 4: Not to mention. Now you're with big brother, and big
Speaker 4: brother nothing's going to come try to eat you because
Speaker 4: you're a hatched to a big shark.
Speaker 5: But they might be like, ugh, get on, yeah.
Speaker 4: They'll do that. They'll do that, and all the all
Speaker 4: the remorse do switch to the other side.
Speaker 5: What a professional pasture. Aki wants to know. Do sharks
Speaker 5: communicate with each other and if so, what do they
Speaker 5: talk about?
Speaker 4: Well, probably the same things we do, like, Hey, how's
Speaker 4: your day going. Have you seen any seals lately?
Speaker 5: Do I have a remorra on my butt right now?
Speaker 4: Just more of the week, my butt look big, stuff
Speaker 4: like that. Yeah. So, you know, that's the part that
Speaker 4: I think is really interesting. That's the part we're trying
Speaker 4: to figure out. A lot of fish use chemicals as
Speaker 4: a means of communication. They use pheromones to communicate with
Speaker 4: individuals of the opposite sex to say, you know, hey, baby,
Speaker 4: I'm are you looking for a mate? Or you know,
Speaker 4: maybe I just saw something really scary and there's there's
Speaker 4: a predator around here, And those chemicals alarm them, so
Speaker 4: they're meant to scare other sharks. So so we don't fully
Speaker 4: understand how that system works. In addition to the body
Speaker 4: language parts and some of the body lane, which may
Speaker 4: be very subtle, big ones tend to show the little
Speaker 4: ones you're in my space. So they'll do things like
Speaker 4: jaw gaping, they'll flap their gums basically, oh my god,
Speaker 4: and that is meant you're pissing me off, You better
Speaker 4: back off, damn.
Speaker 5: So they do to communicate, they do.
Speaker 4: They do. Our job right now is try to figure
Speaker 4: out what those messages mean. Mm hmm.
Speaker 5: And when you say, if there's a predator around for sharks,
Speaker 5: what would be a predator to sharks, what eat sharks?
Speaker 5: Because aren't they an apex predator?
Speaker 4: Sure, well, sharks eat other sharks. Okay, so that they'll
Speaker 4: they'll eat other sharks, no problem. But probably the king
Speaker 4: of the hill, a king of the ocean is really orca.
Speaker 4: I mean, they're the true badasses of the ocean because
Speaker 4: they're the only thing that's known to take down adult
Speaker 4: white sharks.
Speaker 5: Oh, I didn't know that. You know what now that
Speaker 5: you say, it's they're kind of like a an SUV
Speaker 5: cop car.
Speaker 4: They really are. They are true badasses. And what makes
Speaker 4: them the true badasses is that they're warm bodied, they're
Speaker 4: fast swimmers, super smart, and they're very social. So they
Speaker 4: work as a team.
Speaker 5: Oh so they can surround one white shark.
Speaker 4: They're basically like a gang the worst gang of wolves
Speaker 4: you can imagine.
Speaker 5: But it's so funny because no one's afraid of orcas
Speaker 5: like they are sharks.
Speaker 4: H I wonder who did the pr for those whales?
Speaker 5: Damn see world, Here we go. Okay, a couple more questions,
Speaker 5: then I know you gotta go. Here's Karl wants to
Speaker 5: know and Alicia Perrott wants to know how do their
Speaker 5: teeth grow so quickly? And what determines how many rows
Speaker 5: of teeth a shark has.
Speaker 4: Okay, so some of that's genetic. So the number of
Speaker 4: teeth they have perroh is genetic. In fact, we can
Speaker 4: use that as a way of identifying certain species. The
Speaker 4: tooth shape actually changes, which is really cool. What so
Speaker 4: if you're the type of person that hates going to
Speaker 4: a dentist, you should have been a shark absolutely, because
Speaker 4: the cool thing is when they're small, their teeth will
Speaker 4: be a different shape because they're designed for eating different things.
Speaker 4: Usually they when they're small, but as they get bigger,
Speaker 4: their teeth morphology can change so they can eat different things.
Speaker 4: So the cool thing about that is their teeth change
Speaker 4: as they mature, which enables them to feed on different things.
Speaker 5: And they just keep growing.
Speaker 4: I just keep growing. So here you can see behind
Speaker 4: the gum would be another five or six rows of
Speaker 4: teeth that are developed, so the entire front row is
Speaker 4: programmed to it's like literally a conveyor belt. Their front
Speaker 4: row fall out about every thirty.
Speaker 5: Days, Oh my god.
Speaker 4: And a new row of teeth is constantly rotating in.
Speaker 5: And that's why we can find sometimes people find shark
Speaker 5: teeth on the beach like they're just disposable pretty much. Yeah,
Speaker 5: that's amazing. I have never seen a shark skull like
Speaker 5: this up close. And to look and to see them
Speaker 5: all nested in there, it's crazy. It's like it's almost
Speaker 5: like if you were to take a part of rosebud
Speaker 5: and it's just a layer after layer of teeth. Oh
Speaker 5: my god, Oh my god. Okay, last two questions. What
Speaker 5: is the worst thing about your job is it? Is
Speaker 5: it scraping tanks? Is it scheduling press?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 5: What's the shittiest thing about your job?
Speaker 4: What do you hate as a university professor? The worst
Speaker 4: thing about my job is grading? Oh really, oh my god?
Speaker 4: Do I hate grading? Oh it's the worst.
Speaker 5: I love that. This is a person who has been
Speaker 5: in a suspended in a shark take in the ocean.
Speaker 5: And the worst thing about your life is grady.
Speaker 4: I would clean a tank before before our grade. Oh man,
Speaker 4: I hate gred.
Speaker 5: So grading sucks the most.
Speaker 4: Grading sucks the most, you know. I love being in
Speaker 4: the field. I love being out working with my students.
Speaker 4: I love working with sharks. But I have paperwork that
Speaker 4: I have to do and somebody's going to do it,
Speaker 4: and it always falls on me. So that's another really
Speaker 4: crappy job, you know. Even dealing with the press, I
Speaker 4: don't mind doing that because I feel as though the
Speaker 4: more I do it, the more reporters I educate. We
Speaker 4: got we gotta change the dynamic. We got to change
Speaker 4: the way people think about sharks. And to get a
Speaker 4: reporter say that that on that to me is a win, right.
Speaker 5: It's a chance to get people to love sharks as
Speaker 5: much as you do.
Speaker 4: And I think it's working. I think we're slowly making progress.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 5: What's the best thing about what you do?
Speaker 4: Jeez, there's so much I know. I mean, I love
Speaker 4: working with students. I love talking to the public about sharks.
Speaker 4: People have so many interesting questions and observations. I love
Speaker 4: working with kids. Kids are like, they have no fear, none,
Speaker 4: they are just like that is the coolest thing ever.
Speaker 4: I love technology.
Speaker 5: Because you use a lot of it in your telemetry.
Speaker 4: I'm a total tech junkie. If I had to go
Speaker 4: back to school, I do it for engineering. Really, Oh
Speaker 4: my god, I love it.
Speaker 5: But we need you in the shark world.
Speaker 4: No, no, we need we need engineer, computer scientists, shark biologists.
Speaker 4: That's what we need.
Speaker 5: So calling all people who have interest in all those things,
Speaker 5: go do that.
Speaker 4: Come see me please. So and it's changing the way
Speaker 4: we look at sharks. Technology is literally revolutionizing our understanding
Speaker 4: of the ocean. So what held us back was the
Speaker 4: lack of tools.
Speaker 5: You can do so much more now than you could
Speaker 5: twenty years ago in terms of collecting data.
Speaker 4: Right, absolutely, And it's because the technology has got us
Speaker 4: to that point. And the great thing is it's getting
Speaker 4: like minded engineers and like minded commuter scientists to say, Okay, hey,
Speaker 4: I can work with you. That's really cool idea. I
Speaker 4: can build that for you. I can work with you
Speaker 4: to build that. And then when that technology comes along,
Speaker 4: we're suddenly buried in data. Biologists who aren't used to
Speaker 4: having that much data are suddenly going, oh my god,
Speaker 4: what do I do with all this? And now we're
Speaker 4: working with data scientists to go, hey, I know how
Speaker 4: to help you with that, and what it's doing is
Speaker 4: it's showing people how we use the technology, how we're
Speaker 4: using it to understand sharks, how they can use that
Speaker 4: to use the beaches safer. And then it's motivating the
Speaker 4: next generation of student who is interested in science or math,
Speaker 4: or technology or sharks.
Speaker 5: Do you think that there is a world five ten
Speaker 5: years down the line where we look at sharks with
Speaker 5: the same warmth and reverence that we do whales and
Speaker 5: cougars and other maybe predators who are really astounding biologically.
Speaker 4: I think a lot of people are getting there. And
Speaker 4: the tough part is, you know, if you look at
Speaker 4: predators in general, land predators, ocean predators, we got rid
Speaker 4: of them all fifty to two one hundred years. We
Speaker 4: eliminated those things because we perceived them as a potential threat.
Speaker 4: And what's happened since then is humans have now used
Speaker 4: the woods and the mountains and the ocean for all
Speaker 4: sorts of recreation, and we did so without those predators.
Speaker 4: And about twenty five years ago we recognized the importance
Speaker 4: of those predators and we started putting in place protections
Speaker 4: for them. And now that they're coming back, we don't
Speaker 4: know how to act around them. So there's a big
Speaker 4: need to teach people how to be predators savvy again.
Speaker 4: So I give an example seals and sea lions. They've
Speaker 4: come back tremendously. I mean since marinemail were protection Act
Speaker 4: in nineteen seventy three, they went from being on the
Speaker 4: verge of extinction to being fully recovered. So now it's
Speaker 4: not uncommon to be at the beach and I have
Speaker 4: a sea lion. Now, in some cases, the poor animals
Speaker 4: are sick. I've seen people go place their toddler next
Speaker 4: to them to take a picture of that. Now, at
Speaker 4: what point did we think that that was a good idea.
Speaker 4: That animal laying on the beach looks so cute is
Speaker 4: actually an ocean wolf. It's got canines about three inches long.
Speaker 5: Oh god.
Speaker 4: So these are the sorts of things we have to fix.
Speaker 4: Like the family driving a Yellowstone and they see a
Speaker 4: bear eating out of garbage bag on the side of
Speaker 4: the road, and they pull over their car and they
Speaker 4: roll down the window and they give their kid a
Speaker 4: cracker to feed to the bear. Oh God, and they
Speaker 4: take a picture of that. When did we think that
Speaker 4: was okay? Oh no. So these are the things that
Speaker 4: we got to work on.
Speaker 5: So don't be fearless, but be smart.
Speaker 4: Be predator smart. Right, it's so cool to be able
Speaker 4: to see these animals, but we got to give them
Speaker 4: their space and we have to remember their job. They're
Speaker 4: a predator so that we don't become part of the
Speaker 4: food chain. As long as we're smart, we should be
Speaker 4: able to do that. We did it before in our
Speaker 4: ancient history. We can do it again.
Speaker 5: But of course, being predator savvy isn't the same thing
Speaker 5: as being terrified of an extinct megaloton and now watching
Speaker 5: shark week, just take it with a big, big fat
Speaker 5: grain of salt.
Speaker 4: Entertainment wise, enjoy the entertainment. That's just be aware that
Speaker 4: the educational value may not quite be of the same
Speaker 4: CLOrk content.
Speaker 5: Sure, thank you so much for debunking so much fun flame.
Speaker 5: You are amazing in your field. Thank you so much
Speaker 5: for doing this.
Speaker 4: Thank you.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this world. So remember, if you have a stupid question,
Speaker 5: ask a smart people, because seriously, they love talking about
Speaker 5: it and that's how they got smart, and just asking
Speaker 5: you a question as smart as it is. Now. To
Speaker 5: learn more about doctor Lowe's work, you can google shark
Speaker 5: Lab Long Beach. It'll pop right up. He's also on
Speaker 5: Twitter and Facebook at CSULB Shark Lab. That's cal State
Speaker 5: University Long Beach Shark Lab. You can watch the telemetry
Speaker 5: trackers of white sharks, shovel headed guitar fish, sea turtles.
Speaker 5: It's kind of like find my friends. That's at SCA
Speaker 5: tt N dot org. And I'm gonna throw a link
Speaker 5: in the show notes to all this stuff. Don't worry.
Speaker 5: Please do not write this down if you're driving now.
Speaker 5: Ologies is at patreon dot com slash Ologies if you
Speaker 5: want to join the question club, I include as many
Speaker 5: as time allows, and we're also at Ologies on Instagram
Speaker 5: and Twitter. I'm at Ali Ward with one L on
Speaker 5: both the Ologies podcast Facebook group is Poppin' off. Thank
Speaker 5: you Aaron Talbert and Hannah Lippo for admining. You're both
Speaker 5: wonderful and I love you. Ologiesmarch dot com has your
Speaker 5: body actually covered. And again the code for the ten
Speaker 5: percent off sale through July is camp Ologies. Thank you
Speaker 5: Shannon Feltis and Bonnie Dutch for being such rockstars. Thank
Speaker 5: you Stephen Ray Morris who's been under the weather and
Speaker 5: when I expressed I was afraid that editing this on
Speaker 5: a tight turnaround would kill him. He texted me, You're
Speaker 5: not going to kill me with a lot of E
Speaker 5: like me, and I hope he's okay, Stephen, please sleep.
Speaker 5: The music was written and performed by Nick Thorburn of
Speaker 5: the band Islands. And you know, each episode, I tell
Speaker 5: you a secret at the end. Usually it's one of
Speaker 5: my secrets, usually slightly shameful. But I'm gonna tell you
Speaker 5: a cool, happy secret that's not mine. Okay. So if
Speaker 5: you watch the super Bowl performance a few years ago
Speaker 5: with Katy Perry dancing two upholstered seven foot tall sharks,
Speaker 5: one on either side of her, the left shark fucked up,
Speaker 5: could not dance and became this mascot for doing your
Speaker 5: best and just not nailing it. For years, the person
Speaker 5: inside the left shark costume would not speak publicly, and
Speaker 5: finally he did earlier this year. His name is Brian gow.
Speaker 5: He was a dancer with Katy Perry for five years now.
Speaker 5: He's a hairstylist in West Hollywood, and he said he
Speaker 5: knew what he was doing. He was like, I'm a
Speaker 5: good dancer, but I just figured, you know what, I'm
Speaker 5: gonna miss this one up. It'll be more interesting. So
Speaker 5: we got up there, screwed up to choreography. He look
Speaker 5: like an idiot. Everyone's like, yes, left Shark, you are
Speaker 5: giving me life. It is okay to be myself. In
Speaker 5: this episode about accepting sharks, I think the left Shark
Speaker 5: will usher us into a new era of sharks are
Speaker 5: people too. They are individuals. They are imperfect, and that
Speaker 5: is what makes them lovable. We are each our own
Speaker 5: little shark with our own little personalities. Okay, that's my secret. Byebye, pacadermatology, hobbiology,
Speaker 5: ydo zoology, lithology, andology, meteorology, paology, nathology, seriology, selenology.
Speaker 4: That moment right here one of the most viral.
Speaker 5: And super bold history Left Shark stoles. Half Fine Show,