Dr. Christopher Lowe, professor of marine biology and director at Cal State Long Beach’s Shark Lab
While the thought of seeing a dorsal fin protruding out of the water during the next beach visit may bring some fear, Christopher Lowe said adult white sharks returning to Southern California is a sign of a healthy ecosystem.
Lowe, director of the CSULB Shark Lab, will star in an episode entitled “Sharks and the City: LA” on July 25 at 9pm during the Discovery Channel’s annual Shark Week programming.
To commemorate the broadcast, Cal State Long Beach (CSULB) hosted a premiere event on July 21 that included a tour of the school’s Shark Lab, a preview of the episode and a Q&A moderated by ABC correspondent Leanne Suter.
The show will explore why the great white shark population is increasing off the coastline in Los Angeles and hunting out of season. The synopsis of the episode showed that his findings eventually led him to Guadaulpe Island, off the coast of Mexico.
“Because white sharks are the very top of the food chain, I would argue that they are the canary in the coal mine,” Lowe said in a phone interview on Tuesday. “They tell us how well the ecosystem is doing. And if you have top predators like white sharks, to me, that’s a sign that our coastal ocean is getting healthier.”
Lowe explained that adult white-shark aggregations off of Central California have been studied for about 20 years, but, recently, the number of sharks in that specific area didn’t correlate with the number of baby sharks that were observed in Southern California.
In his search for answers, he approached fishermen who have been using the Channel Islands for quite some time, and they affirmed that adult white sharks have been more prevalent over the years.
“So, we began to think that maybe there is another part of the adult population that has never been studied,” he said, “and since the population is going up, maybe those other places are getting too crowded.”
In closely studying the white sharks in Southern California, Lowe’s team realized the genetic makeup of the fish closely related to females from Guadalupe Island.
“So that’s what led our expedition to Guadalupe,” he said, “to try to see what the sharks look like there, has the population built up there and is there competition that would encourage sharks to, basically, find other more promising, less crowded hunting grounds, like Southern California.”
Lowe proposed the main reason white-shark populations are increasing is protection. Prior to 1994, fishermen would catch them, kill them and sell them in fish markets.
“Chances are people ate white sharks back in the ’70s through early ’90s and didn’t even know it,” he said.
After that, he said people recognized that white sharks were being fished down too quickly, so an official protection had to be put in place for them.
He added that, to protect a species, there also needs to be a food supply, which, for white sharks, consists of marine mammals.
“You can’t just protect the species and have no food for them and expect the population to recover,” he said. “So, again, if we protected just them and didn’t protect marine mammals, they probably still wouldn’t come back as well as they have. So this is part of that ecosystem that I hope the public can begin to understand.”
Lowe admitted that whenever he announces white sharks are returning to the coastal ocean, he receives a lot of “odd looks.” He said people have been programmed to believe sharks are bad, but their purpose is to keep the marine-mammal population in check.
“And we need that, otherwise [marine mammals] are going to eat all the game fish that we like to catch and eat, too,” he said. “It’s all part of this food chain that we need to be healthy.”
Lowe said a concern people commonly have is that more sharks in the water could mean more danger in the ocean. But he said the answers harken back to the misconceptions people have about sharks.
“The reality is that things occur, and people are occasionally bitten,” Lowe said. “The shark population is recovering, not only in California, but throughout US waters. Yet, the rate of people being bitten by sharks isn’t jumping up. So, to me, as a biologist, that tells me something important about sharks— sharks do not consider people food.”
Lowe said researchers are still not sure why shark attacks occur, which makes it difficult to provide good information on how to be safe. However, he said more people are using the ocean for a variety of reasons than in any time in history. And Southern California is one of the few places in the United States where people have access to the ocean year-round. These two elements may be indicators related to the frequency of shark attacks. Invasion of a shark’s territory or proximity are also factors.
He concluded that if sharks were truly out to get people, there would be attacks every day.
“These are the misconceptions that we have to do a better job at educating the public about,” he said, “and hopefully that is something that will come out of this show.”
Christopher Lowe, director of Cal State Long Beach’s Shark Lab, is pictured here releasing a juvenile white shark after applying a smart tag to its dorsal fin to track its whereabouts off of Belmont Shore in spring 2017.
Don Nelson, considered a pioneer in the field of shark research and conservation, was a CSULB faculty member since 1965. Advancements during that time allowed Nelson to scuba-dive and observe shark behavior, but he found that the limitations— an hour time limit, no night-time accessibility and human presence changing shark behavior— were inefficient to truly understand the animals.
Lowe detailed that Nelson began talking to other researchers and learned about a new declassified military technology— acoustic telemetry— that can put beacons on sharks and follow them wherever they go.
In 1972, CSULB began developing similar technology— acoustic transmitters— which produce ultrasonic pulses that sharks can’t detect but receivers can.
Researchers have to first capture the sharks, place satellite tags on them to track their movements and then release them back into the ocean.
“The cool thing is that we can put these kinds of spy beacons on the sharks, and they don’t know they are being tracked,” Lowe said. “Additional advancements, like pressure sensors and heat sensors, allow the transmitters to determine how fast they are going, what water temperature they are swimming through and how deep they are. With that technology, we are practically putting Fitbits on sharks.”
The advancements completely changed the perception of white-shark behavior, which revealed early on that white sharks are more oceanic than they are coastal.
“This is something that the Shark Lab has been doing for decades and are very passionate about,” Lowe said. “We have the next generation of shark scientists who are going to lead the charge and keep us going. And we just have to raise the money to do it, and I think when we do that, people are going to be amazed what the next Shark Week story will be.”
Although Discovery approached Lowe and offered to fund the research associated with the “Sharks and the City: LA” episode that will air on Tuesday, he said the field of shark research has been underfunded on a federal and state level for years.
Lack of funds has made it difficult to achieve progress on shark research.
“I think the biggest misconception about sharks isn’t that sharks are dangerous, it’s that the public thinks we have lots of money to study them,” he said. “As a biologist, as a scientist, it is so frustrating. We finally have all these amazing tools and technology that we can finally use to answer all the burning questions that people have about sharks, but nobody wants to fund it. So it’s so frustrating to be at this point in time, in history, and to be held back by that.”
Lowe’s hope is that when people tune in on Tuesday, they will be more accepting of the importance sharks play in the ecosystem and that funding for research is crucial to better understand these animals.
“When people see the show and hear that shark populations are going up, I hope the take-home message is that it’s not a bad thing,” he said. “That’s actually a good thing. That’s actually something we should all be proud of. The fact that we can actually bring populations like that back, and we can learn that they are not as dangerous as they are made out to be. We need them in our coastal ocean, and the fact that they’re coming back means our coastal ocean is getting healthier.”
For more information, visit csulb.edu/shark-lab. For those interested in donating to the CSULB Shark Lab, visit the Give to CSULB website at bit.ly/2uCMhGR.
