Shark expert Chris Lowe drove down to Del Mar in San Diego on a recent day to talk to a group of nervous swimmers.
One of their own, a 46-year-old man, had been bit by a shark during an ocean swim a few weeks ago, an incident that made international news and one of a handful of attacks off Southern California’s coast the past decade.
Lowe’s talk was aimed at sharing what experts know – and what they don’t know – about the ocean predator that has been showing up in greater numbers off local beaches in recent years.
“There’s a lot of misinformation and concern, and rightfully so,” said Lowe, director of Cal State Long Beach’s Shark Lab. “All I can do is tell them, ‘This is what we know,’ and after that, they have to make their own risk assessment.”
Lowe’s team at the Shark Lab has made great strides in recent years learning about great white sharks’ behaviors and upward populations trends, advancing methods such as the use of acoustic receivers to track tagged sharks and DNA testing of sea water that shows when great whites are near.
But the program is in danger. The Shark Lab in 2018 was granted $3.75 million in state funding to advance its research, educate the public and partner with lifeguards to keep beachgoers safe.
That funding source, which the lab stretched to last six years, has expired and the Shark Lab hasn’t been included in future state budget plans, which means advancements Lowe and his team have made could come to a halt if they can’t find private funding or grants to sustain the program, he said.
“I think we’ve learned a lot, we’ve come a long way in the last six years, thanks to the state funding,” he said. “It really took some vision to do that. With those funds, we were able to accomplish amazing things, things that haven’t ever been done before.”
California is looked at as a model because of the rebounding shark populations, an influx the Shark Lab has been able to document and study through its advanced program.
Some of the research has changed the perception of how sharks co-exist in nature with humans, with the Shark Lab last year publishing a two-year study using drone footage showing great whites are frequently closer to humans than previously thought, often meandering nearby with little interest in surfers and swimmers.
But much is still unknown, like why sharks are showing up in unlikely places or why they aggregate at certain “hotspots” for periods of time, and why they do decide to take the occasional bite out of humans.
Another uncertainty Lowe hopes to explore: How climate change may change sharks’ patterns and behaviors.
“Sharks are moving to places they haven’t been before because of climate change,” he said. “We just don’t know how their behavior will change. That’s why we need to keep doing what we’re doing.”
It was during an El Nino weather season about a decade ago that lifeguards, researchers and the public started noticing great white sharks showing up in bigger numbers off the local coast. Juveniles were gathering in groups for months at a time just a few feet from shore in areas of Huntington Beach, Long Beach, San Clemente and the South Bay.
The theory was the young sharks were enjoying Southern California’s warmer-than-normal waters, and their food sources – fish, stingrays and sea lions – were plentiful, giving them no reason to leave the region.
A few near-fatal shark bites – first a swimmer off Manhattan Beach in 2014, and then a swimmer off Newport Beach in 2016 and another off of San Onofre a year later – had ocean enthusiasts on edge.
Lowe worked with lifeguards to develop metrics to know when it is best to shut down beaches and for how long after shark sightings and encounters. He also meets with swim clubs and other ocean groups to share what he knows about the species.
The Shark Lab also developed public awareness programs, including a Shark Shack that pops up at local beaches each summer to educate people on what to do if they come across a shark and to teach about various species that live off the coast.
The team created a comic book for kids and put out PSA videos.
While Lowe is the public face for the Shark Lab, a team was formed to help learn more about the sharks, jumping into the sea to tag the creatures in the wild, other times spending countless hours in the lab analyzing data from the acoustic devices that ping when a shark passes and coming up with new techniques like testing water to show whether shark DNA is present.
Ryan Freedman, research ecologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, has collaborated with the Shark Lab on several different projects to understand where juvenile white sharks go when they get older, as well as their predation and habitat uses.
The data collected over the years from the Shark Lab’s tagging program, combined with NOAA’s own research, has helped fill in a previous “black box,” or void, of information on white shark behavior in the Central Coast, he said.
“We know they have an important role in these ecosystems and understanding where they go has been an important tool we as ecosystem managers want to understand,” Freedman said. “Understanding the dynamics of these resources we protect, the habitat and the food sources, are a function of that research.”
The long-term data set the Shark Lab has developed is “foundational” to understanding the species, Freedman said. “When these tags are implanted, they are good for 10 years, so it gives us a really important window into 10 years of life for this species.”
That valuable data set will be important in coming years, as climate shifts can change the way sea species move and migrate, he said. “Having that data set continue would be very beneficial to understanding the way these animals use the ocean.”
Shark Lab researchers are working on new ways to figure out if they can match DNA to specific sharks, or tell how many sharks are in nearby waters based on the amount of DNA detected.
“That’s where we need to go, that would be a valuable monitoring tool,” Lowe said. “It’s like a 23andMe for white sharks.”
If successful, it would be a quick way for lifeguards to know whether they should close beaches. Following a shark bumping a surfer at T-Street in San Clemente a few weeks ago, beaches were closed for 24 hours during the busy Memorial Day holiday weekend, having an impact on the economy as people went elsewhere for their beach visit.
If lifeguards had DNA testing capabilities, they could detect whether a shark has left the area and reopen the ocean water based on that information, Lowe said.
“We don’t know how many are out there, or are they just passing through,” he said. “The better the tagging, drone and DNA techniques are in the future, we may be able to answer those questions.”
That’s what the program is all about: how can information be used to keep people, and sharks, safe.
In just a few months, the advancements the Shark Lab has made in the past few years could dissolve without the $1 million a year it takes to keep the program afloat. Lowe and his team have been seeking out grants and other fundraising ideas, but so far have come up short.
“If we can’t find state money, we are looking for private foundation sources just to keep us alive,” Lowe said.
The program currently has five full-time staff, as well as a handful of part-timers and student assistants.
If it can’t find funding, the Shark Lab would end up working with a “major skeleton operation,” would have to pull most of its receivers out of the ocean, and there would be no more funds to do shark-tagging operations, Lowe said.
Newport Beach Marine Safety Chief Brian O’Rourke called the Shark Lab program “extremely important.”
The longtime lifeguard said it’s really only in the past decade that there has been such a large number of shark sightings, and it’s important to work with the Shark Lab to educate the public and keep them safe if there’s an aggressive shark in the water near beachgoers.
Prior to the Shark Lab teaming with lifeguards, there was no set protocol or policy when it came to beachgoers encountering sharks, O’Rourke said.
“It’s really helped out lifeguards, with our knowledge regarding sharks out in our ocean,” he said of the Shark Lab. “It’s extremely valuable information and everything starts with education, and that’s what they are bringing for all of California. It’s valuable for us.”
While the lifeguard’s job is to educate the public about rip currents and the dangers of big swells, their out of their depth with sharks, O’Rourke said, calling Lowe and his team the “go-to resource.”
“We don’t have that expertise knowledge to collect data to go out and do research. There’s so many things we benefit from that we’re going to lose,” he said. “There’s a lot of unknowns about sharks.”
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