This is a Squiz Kids podcast, your fresh take on what's happening in the world around you.
They live in every ocean in the world.
They've been on our planet since before the dinosaurs and lots of people are absolutely terrified of them.
This is your Squiz Kids Shortcut to Sharks, the podcast where we dive into the who, what, when, where, why and how of the big news stories.
I'm Amanda Bower and because it's school holidays, Bryce is already at the beach. And I am very lucky to have with me here today, Dr Adrian Guttridge, who is a mad keen surfer from Brisbane, and he also happens to be a shark expert with the Marine Stewardship Council.
Adrian, welcome to Squiz Kids.
Adrian Guttridge Thanks for having me.
Dr Amanda Bower Absolute pleasure.
Now today, you are going help me understand how you went from being terrified of sharks to studying them.
What are some of the weirdest and coolest things you've learned and why so many shark species are endangered.
Yep no worries let's get cracking.
Listen carefully there's a squiz at the end.
How? Adrian many people are absolutely terrified of sharks and apparently were no different when you were younger?
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, I used to spend my holidays up at the Sunshine Coast, where I live now, luckily.
Yeah. Pretty much every time I went surfing, I fell off my board or I went underwater, duck diving out, I pretty much just thought I was going to be eaten by a shark.
You must have really loved surfing to keep heading out there.
How did you go from that level of fear to doing a PhD on sharks?
On the surfing thing, I was pushed into that from my brother.
I wanted to keep up with my dad also surfed.
So you know, you kind of get pushed into these things.
And if you're not keeping up, then you sort of getting teased.
That was one of the main reasons I kept going.
And plus it's the finest thing to do in the world.
So I guess from there, I kind of always had an interest in marine world like the oceans and I've always fished and surfed.
So when I went to university, I did a science degree and I got into marine biology just because that was sort of what I thought would be an easy pathway to a job that would let me pretty much just surf and go fishing all the time.
So one of the first field trips I did doing marine science was up to Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef and me and a mate were supposed to be kind of paying attention to parrotfish eating algae as part of this study we were doing but sharks swam past that right near where we were looking at these fish and I remember like it was yesterday and this was like 20 years ago I just kind of I locked on to it it swam past as it didn't care that we were there and it just looked amazing like it was so well adapted to its environment you know so streamlined so powerful and I just kind of forgot what I
was doing and just swam after this thing followed it for about 5 or 10 minutes and from there I was like I want to study those things that was amazing people have those moments in their life I suppose where they kind of get a moment of clarity or something like that and that was definitely one for me I just kind of knuckled down and focused just got my grades up paid attention in the last year of uni and got into honors and then ended up doing a PhD in that same lab as well which was yeah amazing.
It's kind of a good lesson really isn't it that if you find something you're passionate about it's easy to work hard and improve your grades and follow it yeah?
Yeah that's right yeah I mean I was kind of basically throughout my school and university while every report card I ever got at school was you know Adrian would do better if he wasn't so busy distracting himself and others so that was pretty much what I was like and I mean I did okay like I did well enough to get into uni to study science, and then I kind of just did the bare minimum to get me through until I found that.
And then, yeah, from there, I kind of loved it.
And I mean, the one thing I'll always take away from how well I want it, or how much I wanted it.
One of my mates that I went through school with, he was always getting better grades than me, and he always smashed me and everything.
And then the last moment in our sort of academic life, if you want to call that, where we competed against each other for a grade, I got a better honours score than him.
And that honours was like when I did my shark thing.
So it's always the one thing I have over him, is like no matter how many times he beat me in my life, the last time we went up against each other, I won.
And that was because I was so focused on getting like a research project done on sharks.
So yeah, it was pretty good.
You've got to thank the sharks for your good grades.
So what are some of the weirdest and coolest things you've learned about sharks?
What? The weirdest and coolest. I reckon the coolest thing, I mean you touched on in that intro, they've been around you know longer than the dinosaurs.
Like 200 million years in our oceans and in that time you know they really haven't changed that much in terms of how they appear they haven't really evolved beyond that so as soon as I started appearing in the fossil record way back in the day they've just kind of stuck to that so they're just so well evolved to live in the oceans most sharks species like if you think of a shark you're thinking probably something like a great white or bull shark or a tiger shark They give birth to live young so unlike, you know, reptiles and fish, bony fish that spawn eggs into the sea, or, you know, reptiles
lay eggs, a lot of sharks give birth to live young.
So they have a really amazing adaptation to survive.
Yeah, right. Because they put a lot of, I guess, effort into producing young that can have a high survivorship.
So that's incredible.
What is the weirdest shark out there that you've discovered?
The weirdest shark.
Well, I mean, I love hammerheads.
there an incredible animal like there's not many animals that have a head like that a flat long you know kind of eyes on the side of its head you know it kind of looks like something you draw in some sort of alien sci -fi movie so they're amazing and what the main reason for that adaptation is they kind of have a head like a metal detector so if you go down to the beach and you see one of those people sweeping left and right with the metal detector that's kind of what I mean all sharks have electroreceptors in their head.
So they kinda have a sixth sense where they can pick up on like electromagnetic pulses sort of thing.
So like heartbeats and stuff I remember about this, they can sort of sense the movement of their prey, the electrical energy in the water, right?
Yeah, yeah, so they can do that.
Like all sharks have that, but hammer heads are like, you know, super versions of that.
So what they'll do is they'll swim along the bottom and they'll sweep their head from side to side and what they're doing, They're trying to find like fish and stingrays that are buried under the sand And so as they're kind of doing that they'll find one They'll circle back and then eat it So, you know, it's really similar to what you'd see with someone on the on the beach the metal detector Going for kind of like, you know jewelry and that so yeah, they're incredible instead of jewelry.
They're getting their lunch Yeah, exactly.
That's it. Now. I Heard a rumor that sharks have inspired the design of swimmers.
Can you tell me through that?
Yeah, sharks have what's called dermal denticles.
Basically like skin.
So instead of having scales, like fish have, they've got kind of skin.
If you rub your hand from the nose to the tail of a shark it feels smooth.
But if you rub your hand from the tail to the nose it's really rough, like sandpaper, and it's sort of like these little ridges.
Why do they have that?
It actually makes them way more streamlined than if they had smooth skin, because those little kind of ridges and bumps that actually breaks the water tension of water molecules so it kind of reduces drag and friction, so what they did was back in the early 2000s when you see the footage of like Igan Thorpe winning golf for Australia.
Oh in the big long suit?
In the big long suit.
So like from, if you kind of rubbed your hand from his arm to his shoulder it would be kind of smooth but if he went the other way it'd be a bit rough.
The shark suit! Yeah they They use the same kind of principle as what sharks have had, and again, sharks have had that for 200 million years, so it's like it's insane.
They have all this stuff.
And we're kind of just tapping the surface of what it actually means in terms of like, you know, their survivorship and their adaptation to live in the ocean.
Amazing. It's so clear, talking to you, that you really love sharks.
But what would you say to kids who are like you once were, who are just really, really scared of them?
I don't want to take away how horrific it would be to be involved in the interaction a shark like that, but I mean your chances of having an interaction like that that end with you know a fatality or even an injury are so low like all the stats out there you've got more chance of getting killed by your toaster you've got more chance of being killed walking across the beach on the way to swimming than actually you know um getting killed by a shark encounter so it's pretty low.
And there are also you know more than 600 species of shark how many of those species are even is there even a remote possibility that they might take a chump out of you?
Yeah, so probably only about like a handful, like maybe five or six.
So sharks have way more to fear from humans than humans have from sharks for sure.
Apparently about half of all those 600 shark species are endangered, so why on earth is that?
Why? Sharks and rays, they're one of the most threatened vertebrate groups of all vertebrates in the world...
Is that because humans are killing them?
Yeah, pretty much. So there's like a really high fishing pressure on a lot of those kinds of species.
And I was talking before about how sharks give birth to live young, survivorship of sharks is really high and they also mature very late in their life, so they don't start breeding or giving birth until they're kind of, you know, some species kind of 10, 15 years old kind of thing, some beyond that.
So they sort of put a lot of investment into surviving and having fewer numbers, but a higher chance of survival.
And when you live in a world where there's no fishing, that's a really effective strategy that can be seen from the fact they've been around for 200 million years.
Yeah right. But when you put that in the context of fishing, it's actually really easy to drive those populations into a point that's very unsustainable because they can't replenish their populations as quickly as other species can cause they simply can't produce a number of young.
Right. So are people fishing sharks because they want to catch sharks or is it sort of an accidental thing that sharks are getting killed by fishing?
It's both. So there are fisheries around Australia and the world that go after sharks particularly.
So if you go to a seafood restaurant and you eat flake, that's actually the flesh of a shark.
Oh right. Most sharks are caught as what's called bycatch. So bycatch is a thing where if you're in a fishery and say you're going out and you want to catch tuna, you, the bycatch is pretty much anything that's not a tuna, so, particularly in like long line open ocean fisheries, sharks are caught in really high numbers in bycatch so they're not actually the target species of that fishery.
So why does it matter if we have fewer sharks in the oceans?
In terms of ocean health, sharks are, they're kind of like the lions of the sea.
they help to keep the populations below them in check.
Like, if you don't have sharks exerting like a top -down predation pressure on the populations of fish underneath them, those fish will then kind of, you know, their populations will expand, but then that will put the whole system out of whack because the things they eat will get depleted and the things that those fish would, you know, maybe keep in check, say like algae, that might start blooming.
And then the fish, the populations that the sharks were eating, they'd go away as well eventually.
And then the whole thing would just kind of fall over.
So what can regular people do about the fact that the sharks are in danger?
Like lots of things in sustainability, you can make the choice with your wallet.
So I work for an organization called the MSC Marine Stewardship Council, who we're all about sustainable fishing and we've got fisheries in our program that are tuna fisheries that are certified as sustainable.
and so if you're out there and you're a consumer if you're wanting to work out well what can I do the easiest thing to do is buy products from sustainable fisheries that are doing their best to either not catch sharks or reduce those numbers.
And how do you know if a fishery is sustainable?
Well the MSC has a little blue tick that we put on seafood so if you go into a supermarket and i'm not sure if i can name brands on this but there's a brand of tuna in the Isles, if it's carrying the MSC Blue label, that's the one to buy.
Nice one. And I know that Squizzy the news hand would want me to point out that the nonprofit behind the Blue tick, your Marine Stewardship Council has actually sponsored this podcast. Why are you working with them?
What's appealing about that?
Well, I mean, the MSC is all about maintaining healthy populations of animals in the ocean, but also safeguarding seafood supplies.
So it's sort of allowing fishing to happen, which I'm all for.
But as long as it's done in a sustainable manner, My background is research and science, and the MSc is really science -focused and will go to where the best science is available.
And so, you kind of know that as far as a program like ours, we're sort of the most credible and the most robust globally.
So, it's an organization that is very aligned to my own kind of personal ethos.
In this world we live in of misinformation and fake news.
That kind of drives me crazy because I'm a scientist. So, yeah, working for the MSC kind of really helps me, I guess, get the message across that science can win in the end.
And so that's what I'm hoping through my MSC career and through talking about sharks and talk on these kind of podcasts, I can really get across to people.
Love it. We're all about sniffing out misinformation and disinformation at Squiz Kids.
Time for the squiz.
This is the part of the podcast where you can test how well you've been listening.
Question number one, what kind of fish was Adrian supposed to be studying when he got distracted by a shark?
Oh, you'll have to have been listening really carefully there.
It was a parrot fish.
Question number two, how many shark species are there in the world today?
That's right – more than 600!
Question number 3 – and this is a tricky one, what is the name of a kind of fish at the fish and chip shop that's actually Shark?
Yeah, that's right, it's flake!
That's all we have time for today – thanks for joining us as we explore the who, what, how, where, when and why of sharks.
Adrian, thank you so much for joining us on Squiz Kids Shortcuts.
Will you do the honours?
Alright, now get out there and have a most excellent day.
Over and out. These episodes are edited and engineered by Carter Quinn.
