Deep Dive Interview: Sharks, Seas and Sustainability with Dr. Chris Harvey-Clark

Unveiling Canada's Majestic Sharks: Insights from Marine Biologist Chris Harvey Clark

Dive into an enthralling episode of the 'What Are We Doing?' podcast with host David Evans and marine biologist Dr. Chris Harvey Clark. Discover the diverse shark species inhabiting Canadian waters, including elusive Greenland and great white sharks. Explore intriguing topics such as the sharks' unusual diets, including moose and caribou, and cultural delicacies like 'Haukark' made from Greenland shark. Chris shares captivating anecdotes and insights from his extensive marine research, revealing the effects of climate change, noise pollution, and the importance of marine protected areas. With a spotlight on consumer responsibility and sustainable practices, this episode also previews Chris's upcoming book, promising thrilling adventures beneath the waves.

 Check out his book "In Search of the Great Canadian Shark".

To learn more about sharks in Canada check out these resources:
Sharks In Canada
St. Lawrence Shark Observatory

00:00 Deep Dive Interview: Sharks, Seas and Sustainability with Dr. Chris Harvey-Clark

00:35 Meet Chris Harvey Clark: Canada's Shark Expert

02:44 From Veterinary Science to Marine Biology: Chris's Journey

03:29 A Diverse Career: Elephants, Hummingbirds, and Aquatic Species

08:00 Innovative Conservation Efforts for Atlantic Whitefish

10:20 Shark Species in Canadian Waters: An Overview

13:42 The Fascinating World of Electric Rays

25:39 Shark Encounters and Attacks in Canadian History

36:55 Shark Encounters and Marine Life Observations

37:15 Shark Behavior and Seal Predation Patterns

38:33 A Diver's Close Encounter with a Great White Shark

44:27 Marine Conservation Efforts and Publishing Books

59:05 The Fascinating World of Greenland Sharks

01:05:13 Consumer Choices and Environmental Impact

01:13:55 Final Thoughts and Encouragement for Conservation

The Aquatic Bisophere Project
The ABP is establishing a conservation Aquarium in the Prairies to help tell the Story of Water.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

Dave Evans: 0:19

You may think that you have to go all the way down to the Caribbean to see some sharks if you want to go diving. But you'd be really surprised, I bet, to know that Canada has so many different species of sharks. You don't even have to go very far. You could dive in Halifax Harbour and come across a great white shark. Now, our guest today did exactly that. He's one of Canada's foremost shark experts and had an extremely close encounter with a great white shark right in Halifax Harbour. Today, we're going to be talking all about sharks in Canada. Where are they? What are they? And what is happening with climate change as we see more and more sharks sit back, relax, and get ready to learn a little bit more about sharks in Canada. Welcome to another deep dive episode of the, what are we doing podcast today? We're talking everything about sharks in Canada. We have one of our top experts and I'm so excited to, speak with you, Chris. So Chris, do you mind introducing yourself and telling us who you are and what you do?

Chris Harvey-Clark: 2:34

Sure. David, nice to be on your show. And you know, water is a common diluent for all of us. So with three oceans around us and more water on the ground here yeah. So Chris Harvey Clark, I'm a veterinarian and a marine biologist. I did marine biology at the University of Victoria. At that time, we were in the midst of a recession and there really weren't any jobs and I'd stayed in school. I went on and did veterinary school. I actually gone into med school at UBC and vet school at WCVM the same year, and I decided to break away from the rest of the family who were MDs. Or do veterinary medicine. And I must admit it, I've never regretted it because it really is a ticket to ride. It takes you a lot of places and you have a lot of useful transferable skills. So at the moment I'm the director of animal care at Dalhousie University and I was previously at UBC and I've been back and forth. between those two institutions pretty much since 1987. So that's been my history. And I practiced a bit before that in a couple of provinces as well. So I've worked with everything from elephants to hummingbirds. And I do a lot of work with aquatic species and was really one of the early vets in Canada to really become what we call an aqua that took extra training at Woods Hole and other places because nothing was really available in Canada back in the eighties. And I wound up doing an internship at a marine oceanarium in California that's long since defunct because I thought I really wanted to be a marine mammal vet. And unfortunately I really found working in that industry at that time very distressing. It was not a good time for the animals and it was certainly not the moral high ground. So went on and did a fellowship. Actually, I set up an exotic animal practice in Toronto at a time when nobody was doing birds. There are only a few clinics in Canada and I did a lot of birds and stuff in vet school. I was really interested in raptors. And nobody was taking those cases. It was all small animal and large and no bird stuff. So started this clinic, burned myself out over a year, was pretty much thinking about going back to school. And I had this epiphany. I was asked to speak at a national conference on the clinical approach to birds, which was a new thing at that time. Because they really are radically different from other animals in terms of how we approach them as a vet. And it turned out what I was secretly doing was a job interview. So I flew out to Edmonton, actually, your hometown. And a wonderful, wonderful guy named Dr. David Neal, who is director of health sciences, lab animal services Brought me on board and said at the end of the weekend, love the talk. And we'd like to offer you this fellowship. So I did it. I spent a year there and I split my time between the pathology lab the U. S. lawman building, and then the other 50 percent was clinical and clinical was everything from. We had a tilapia facility for fish. We had deer and, and all, there was a researcher there at that time who worked with deer and moose and things like that, whole variety of different species. So a really good place to begin to learn your, your profession for sure.

Dave Evans: 5:08

Wow, So you've really done it all you've got basically a foot in both oceans on either side how many elephant calls have you had in canada, I

Chris Harvey-Clark: 5:16

Well, not too many. I actually went over to Thailand and I worked at an elephant rehabilitation center for three months because I always wanted to work with these animals and it was up in the north, north part of the country. And it was fascinating at that time because what had happened was the Thai government had made the use of elephants and logging illegal because elephants are the ultimate stealth weapon for poaching. You can get them in and out where you can't get heavy equipment. steeper hills. They're quiet. Most of the time, and so they were being used extensively to poach teak and other hardwoods. And so the Thai government just said no more use of elephants anywhere logging, and that instantly produced a surplus of elephants that now no longer had any economic value. People were buying them as pets. People were using as begging tools, you know, train the elephant to beg and a lot of abuse and a lot of starving animals, a really sad situation. This was back in the early nineties, I guess. So there was an elephant rehab center up near Chiang Mai. And I went and worked there. A friend of mine had a Canadian immigrant who now runs the equestrian center in Bangkok. Linda Clark, she'd Got a hold of me and said, you really got to come and help out. So it was a real interesting experience. Also, because at that time in Thailand, it was you know, there were a few basic antibiotics available, but an awful lot of what was being done was sort of, you know, dig some herbs up out of the bush and pack them into that infected molar that elephant has. was pretty primitive bush medicine, you know, lots of Lansing abscesses and stuff like that. Anyway, fascinating experience. And I've also, at the other end of the extreme, I've worked with hummingbirds. So, here's a little four gram bird that, you know, heart beats about 1, 800 times a minute. And we had a colony of hummingbirds that developed fungal pneumonia. And trying to figure out how to treat these little guys, because you're not going near them with a needle, was very, very interesting and challenging. I actually written up more than 40 of these cases now, and that one was written up and it's in the journals.

Dave Evans: 6:58

trying to treat a hummingbird that's a hard thing to get across.

Chris Harvey-Clark: 7:01

Well, it's the same with aquatic species. I mean, although in some ways, you know, I've worked with everything. I was at Exxon Valdez treating sea otters for three months after the oil spill and got to know sea otters pretty well as a result of that. We were really on the learning curve there. But you know, the amazing thing about the marine environment is how permissive it is really. And, you know, we had an otter come in that had a completely severed spine. From the, basically the bottom of the ribcage down. So complete paralysis below there. She had a full term baby that she was successfully feeding and she was in really good shape. So, you know, living in a weightless environment, she could pull it And she did, and she survived the oil spill and toxicity from that and eventually was released. She'd been a terrestrial animal. She'd be dead in a day, you know, it's a different environment on land that other predators will get you. And you know, sort of I would flatter myself to say pioneering, but I've done a lot of first things with fish and sharks and things in the ocean in terms of translating what I know as a vet into what we're able to do in research. And even right now, we've got a project at DAL at the moment. Del housing, my home institution. There's a species that was thought to be extinct in the province. It's the Atlantic whitefish which is a cork on it like the lake whitefish, but a unique one and a few years back, somebody got some media out of a particular watershed here that showed that there were a few of them around. And subsequently we trapped, I think we got 18 little minnows in a screw trap. And from that start back in 2018, we now are producing thousands of whitefish a year. So We've started a reintroduction project in the petite Revere, which is landlocked watershed. So in fact, I just got an email today from my colleague, John Batt, who's running that program. And I do all of that work. I ultrasound the fish to see how far along they are. When we have infectious disease problems like saprolegnia, which is a fungal skin infection, you know, I set up the treatments and stuff. I necropsy any dead animals because we're on a Sarah permit. Every single animal has to be accounted for. And interestingly enough, you know, whitefish, unlike Atlantic salmon and trout, which we've cultured for the last. 50 to 100 years. Whitefish are absolutely wild. You know, there's no tame in their genes. And the biggest, biggest cause of death we have for the whitefish is basically the brown brain themselves. They're a real startled, burst, fast swimmer. And, you know, if the lights flick on or somebody slams a door or anything like that, boom, off they go, bang into the side of the tank and brain themselves. Basically, the single biggest cause of death we have, 50 percent of all the deaths we have are due to cranial trauma. So, we figured out some things to do with those guys. For instance, we put 3D complexity in the form of hung tarps and their tanks to slow them down. We were losing less now as a result of that, but it's an example of how you know, you have to sort of think out of the box when you're doing this type of work, because the things you never expect are the things that are your biggest problems, like wild fish that won't tame down

Dave Evans: 9:36

Yeah. That's incredible. Like literally hanging tarps in the tanks to just to slow them down so they don't just run into the sides.

Chris Harvey-Clark: 9:42

And light levels, you know, keep the light levels really low and then 1 of the things we're looking at is phased in and phased off lighting instead of light snapping on and off because that seems to be a startle. We have to be very careful. You know, the buildings are all concrete and they're all linked to each other. So we're on granite. So it's a big monolith. So, you know, you can have somebody, you know, breaking concrete a quarter mile away and the fish are hearing it in So, anything that happens in the building around concrete cutting or, you know, pile driving or excavation, because, you know, the guys like to bang their excavator shovel on the ground to clean it. All that has to be coordinated so that we don't lose more fish.

Dave Evans: 10:15

Wow. I'm excited to hear more, but I just thought I'd start in. And as I think many listeners. We'll be really shocked to learn that we do have sharks in Canadian waters. I know you've already mentioned it and I have as well. I was just hoping that you could give us a bit of an overview of what species do we have actually here? And where are they?

Chris Harvey-Clark: 10:33

Well, you know, we have actually more than 30 species commonly found. And then we also have species that are being seen more and more because the oceans are warming and especially the North Atlantic and other than the Arctic, we're in the 94th percentile of rapidity of warming. And so we're really starting to see tropicals up here a lot more, not just the sharks, but we get now we get seahorses up here every summer. We get tropical jackfish. We had a lionfish here last year. We even collect them and bring them in because they don't survive. You know, when the cold water labyrinth recurrent reestablishes itself, they all die from cold shock. So we have some seahorses in our marine facilities that collected locally. This year, we're seeing more and more. In fact, this year I successfully a green sea turtle. It went back to Bermuda and was released and it was cold stunned. So what happens is these guys come up and even in November, the sea surface temperatures this year were like 16, 17, which is Extraordinary. As a kid coming out here in the summer, in the height of summer, August, you'd go swimming at Crystal Crescent Beach and you'd be out of the water in three minutes. The water was like three or four degrees centigrade of summer. And that's true anymore. In fact,, you know, the seasons are lasting longer and longer, and the warm water is penetrating deeper and deeper. And I'll tell you about that when I tell you about my encounter with the white shark in open water here, because that was a case of knowing. Exactly why the thing would be there, but in denial because it was happening in November. But anyway, so we have extra liminal sharks coming up here we've had tiger sharks caught here. In fact, I helped to teach A class we call Shark School in the summer and the students get to go to sea and catch blue sharks and tag them and release them, which the tagging we do surgically. I've, it's either me or I have a grad student I've trained to do implants of these transmitters. And lo and behold, pulling a baby long. Yeah, and there are certainly old but the, you know, most of the species we see are cold adapted. They're either in the which are the, white shark, mako shark, poor beagle shark. These are all species that have some ability to thermoregulate to a level warmer than the water around them. And they do this with countercurrent heat exchange and, muscle pumps and, Storage of heat in various interesting ways and can run some of these species can run 12 degrees Centigrade warmer than ambient. So the porbeagle is particularly good at it they live and they all look kind of they're very sharky looking sharks. They look like a torpedo We also get blue sharks and the blues are, over the planet. They're everywhere. But the blues we have in the North Atlantic do this big circular clockwise migration where they come by every two years. fact, we even have a sort of resident blue shark stock off Halifax. year round. And they're mostly smaller female blues. We get, them in about the two meter range typically. And then down South we get bigger, much bigger. Then we have all the deep sea sharks, which are, an interesting bunch in themselves, which we don't tend to see because you have to go a long way offshore here to get to the continental shelf, which is 600 feet. So all those species tend to be shelf and off shelf and deep water, but Greenland shark. They're caught here in halibut fishing, and they're right up into the Arctic and right around, you know, till they run into their Pacific cousin, the Pacific sleeper shark. and they're also in very deep water, up to 10, 000 feet and deeper. And we have things like black dogfish, and a lot of these species are smaller, they're benthic, they're kind of long so those are kind of the deep water locals we, we have. And flat sharks, which are the, and rays, quite a lot of skate species up here. And they tend to be more boreal. They tend in the cold water. A lot of them are in bad shape population wise, because they're very slow reproducing, slow to grow. So when I lived here back in the 90s, about once a summer doing 100 dives a year, I would see an Atlantic torpedo ray, which is a giant electric fish, biggest of its clan, which there are about 70 torpedo rays worldwide. And these things look like a big flattened pancake with a tail and they kill their prey with electricity. They actually have these big muscle cells in the wings that are batteries. And most of them can give you a pretty good tingle, but torpedo is big enough it can kill you. It puts out about 200 volts, 30 amps. It's an interesting animal to study. I've been working on them since 2014. I started a tagging study actually because the thing that flabbergasted me, I've been away from Halifax since 2004. And you know, like I started to say, we'd see one or two a summer if we're lucky. And I went back to some of the sites I've been diving before and God, we were seeing six or eight at a time. At one site, we found 14 of the rays on site at one single time, males and females. And I thought something's really changed here. And the water was warmer and so on. So I started to study to look at, cause there's almost nothing known about these things other than they've been intensely studied at the cellular and molecular level and a ton of work done at the Woods Hole Biological Lab, to the extent that they actually wiped the local torpedo ray population out, study. So, they are again a slow growing long lived species. But what they were looking at, these things have giant muscle cells that you can actually, each cell is actually visible. Christmas navel oranges with gigantic cells. inside, except these are muscle cells. And the physiologists love this because they can spear those things and check ion levels inside and outside the cell and they can wire them up. And so the neurotransmitters, acetylcholine, all that stuff, a on nicotinic receptors, all kinds of neuroscience work was done using Torpedo as a model because it was before everything got miniaturized and before we had, you know the computer revolution and everything was kind of analog, sticking They were fantastically easy to study, but they're a really cool species. I mean, they've been known since biblical times and they were used medicinally. And in fact, because they generated electricity, and this is back at a time when electricity was actually thought to be an invisible, fluid. And so, early physicians, in the and Greek era, we're applying them directly. So if you had gouty feet, they'd put an electric ray on your feet zap you. For epilepsy, to the head. For childbirth, difficult childbirth, in fact, and a lot of interest, you know, Electricity was a red hot topic in the Renaissance and after, and of course Galvani with his frog experiments and that stuff. And finally the first early batteries and some sort of beginning of understanding, and a lot of that had to do with studying rays. In fact, there was a medieval abbot who was a keen scientist, and famously he got 300 monks to join hands in a circle, and then the last guy grabbed a ray and grabbed his buddy's hand, and it went all around. So, you know. Great stories the early sites with these things, and it wasn't really until South America and the electric eel was found sort of by the Spanish as they were starting, conquest of South America, that a little bit of the interest in the torpedo went away. But places like the Naples Marine Station Italy were built there because there's a huge local population of torpedo Marmorata, which is a little. torpedo that's found in that area. So anyway, really cool animal. And the crazy thing is we have no idea how long they live, where they reproduce, all the basic stuff that any kid would ask you. We have a clue. So my tagging studies have really been to look at movement and behavior. And what's interesting is I had a hypothesis that these things were moving up and down the coast because really they're mostly found Carolinas and South. And they're even there, they're not common. They're like once in a while. so the idea was maybe they were migrating on, onshore up and down the coastline following, cause they love mackerel and other forage fish. And the way they kill them is quite fascinating. They use their stealth and they sneak up and usually in the dark and they rear up and they, you bend their wingtips together and they put a jolt of electricity across those wingtips and it instantly shocks and kills the fish, which they eat head first. And they have a huge stomach. So they, you know, they've been found with, many, many pounds of fish in their stomachs. And the Atlantic torpedo gets up to across 90 kilos. Yeah. The bigger they are, the more juice. So anyway, I developed a technique to basically dive down there and stick them with a. Harpoon that has a little detachable head on it that's biocompatible plastic with an umbrella thing that opens up and this is attached to a little cable in the transmitter. It's a pinger. Basically, the pinger that has a unique ID is now in the animal. And as long as it's within a half kilometer of receiver, it'll pick up that animal's ID. So we start to get an idea of where the animals are moving and what they're doing. So those are, relatively inexpensive tags. They're about 800 each. And of course, economic restraints always there. The really cool ones that the O Search guys and others use for white sharks. I mean, those things up here in Canadian dollars are seven or 8, 000 plus another 1, 800 to download, the data. So, you know, it's a 10, 000 thing to put one of these tags out on, on an animal, managed to tag one, several ago. We had a donated, by Barbara block actually, who's the tag, a giant tuna lady in, on the West coast. And that was fascinating because that Ray didn't go up and down the coast. It went offshore. I'll have 100 kilometers past the shelf. It was in 14, 000 feet of water when the thing popped up. So they actually have a pelagic component to their migration and nobody's ever done this. And we've only ever had the money to do one. But this ray anyway went to sea. He did not. It was a male. He did not stay on the shelf. He went way out there. And the fascinating thing is the tag changed behavior before it, popped and was received. So all along the, the, the ray had been going down to about 100 meters. And then at night it would come up to 50 to 20 to 10. And it did this every day as it was moving out offshore. The last week before the thing uploaded, all of a sudden it started doing dives to as much as 600 meters several times a day. Well, guess what had happened? A shark got that ray and was doing big deep dives and probably it was a white shark. That's, they do so it must be like eating a really strong curry if you're a white shark. Can you jot down one

Dave Evans: 19:18

than normal

Chris Harvey-Clark: 19:19

for sure.

Dave Evans: 19:21

Yeah, that's It's a strong enough electricity to kill you, but then you're still diving down with a harpoon basically, and

Chris Harvey-Clark: 19:27

Well, you know, it's funny. I have until, I've had one set of attacks that I thought at the time were unprovoked and I figured out what had happened afterwards. But a lot of the time, you know, if you're careful in how you approach the animal and you're quite dexterous, they won't even leave the bottom. In fact, I've tagged them and then I've had to stir them up a little bit with the tagging pull. So the sequence is you find the ray. I have a tagging pole that has marks on it. I put that on the bottom beside the ray, I get up above it with my video system, and I videotape it. And now we can extrapolate and actually get the dimensions of the animal from the dimensions we can figure out the mass. The problem is the genitals are big. buried in the sand under the animal. So in order to sex it, figure out whether it's a male or a female, I have to get it up and swimming around a little bit. but we do that after we else. And I've, never had a ray come after me after tagging, but I have had a few weird happen. One was that, I was dying. I do a lot of this with a fellow, who's the, head of the ocean tracking network. On the, supervision and executive side, and he's a keen marine biologist and, Fred and I do most of this diving together. We've both been diving 40 plus years. We've got thousands of dives under our belt. This particular day I'd given Fred my big expensive, broadcast quality camera with big lights on it. And I'd gone down with a GoPro because I wanted to get really close, you know, right next to the head, kind of a shot. frame filling shot of the eye and the spherical. These things have holes in the back in the top head and they breathe. They can breathe down through that because, their mouth and their gills are ventral and they're mud. So I was down there and I had this GoPro and out of nowhere, this ray Not on the bottom, which where is the normal way up in the water came down like a fighter jet and started zapping me and I got a few tingles off it. It was a male. It wasn't very big. It was about a meter long, but it was really upset with me for some reason. I had not even seen it coming in. Fred saw it coming. He's going into his regulator. What? What? You know, zap, So, and it seemed to be really concentrating on the metal pole in the GoPro. So I dropped that and it went down with it, sort of zapped it a few times. Then it took off like a bullet. I had been filming it's buddy. So there was another one on the bottom and I had the pole out and so it's buddy got up and took off and it was a really murky day. The visibility was about 15 feet, dark green, brown water. And so, you know, I picked up my GoPro and I thought, well, let's go see where those guys went. So off we go. And again, right out of the blue, one of them comes right at me, does the same thing again, drop the pole again. And this all happened within about a three minute stretch So, The interesting thing was, I looked, I looked at it afterwards and I realized that I had left the little blue flashing Wi Fi light on. I had not turned off the Wi Fi feature on the GoPro and there's a little blue flashing light there. And interesting story, I should have known better because we took Rick Mercer out to do open, open ocean blue, blue shark diving for his show, which we used to do off Halifax here. We'd go out five miles and jump off the boat and blues would come in and we'd hang And We had given him a GoPro on the end of a pole, and he was like catnip, the sharks were all over him, and a lot of them were doing the Polaris thing, you know, straight up from the bottom, right at you, and he was very cool, he was pushing them off, and he was being very calm about it, and I looked, and I saw the blue flashing light, and as soon as I turned it off, this whole behavior stopped, so, you know, we think we know so much about these animals, but we know so little, really, it's, you know, I had no idea what, The other thing I can tell you is I have lasers on my camera. So I have the parallel set of lasers that are 30 centimeters apart. And when I see a shark or a ray, I can put those lasers on it. Providing it's perpendicular, I can extrapolate that from the image to get a pretty good idea of the total length of the animal in Well, A lot of things really love those little green dots and the fish just go crazy and chase them around like a cat laser toys. So it's, obviously they look like a little copepod or something to eat, but kind of, once you've done this for 40, well, I guess I started diving at 15 and I'm 63 now. So what is that 48 years, almost 50 years of diving.

Dave Evans: 23:08

those are some crazy adventures. And yeah, to turn off the blue light on your GoPros. Yeah. I mean, You, you have your, you have your book that's published as well, and I definitely wanna make sure that we have time to cover that and

Chris Harvey-Clark: 23:20

Well, I'm I'm, I'm, an oddball because I really, I'm a marine naturalist and it's no longer cool to be a naturalist. You know, you have to be into something a mile deep and a millimeter wide, you know, you have to be the, the world expert on the, genetic makeup of a particular obscure creature. Subject. And the other thing is cross cutting themes. So, you know, everybody wants to be doing research that, you know, we'll solve the world's problems. But you know, the thing is, a lot of the time we don't know the basics of what we're starting to look at. This happened with the otters. I'll tell you a quick story. When I went up to work with sea otters, I didn't know much about seen them on the west coast, of Vancouver Island. I thought they're animal. They're kind of a social animal. And they behave more like primates, at least the females do in terms of social behavior and altruism like that. Showed up at the Otter Rescue Center in Seward, Alaska. Which had just been set up and was filling up with otters noticed immediately that the otters were getting about 10 percent of their body weight as a ration a day. And I knew from reading Canyon's work and others that in the wild and not sick, their foraging rates 35 percent body weight a day or 40. And for a lactating female maybe 50 percent body weight a day. that's a 90 pound female eating 45 pounds of seafood a day. And it's all, you know, urchins and abalone and clams, pretty high value protein. you know, I looked around and, they were feeding them pollock fillets and everything was, everything had been processed, the mussels, everything had been shelled out and shucked and they weren't getting any whole food. And they all had diarrhea and they were all losing weight because A, they weren't getting enough and B, it wasn't whole food. So I pointed this out to the management and I I said, we really ought to try and source whole food for these guys. So we started getting urchins because there was an urchin harvest going up there and things that were being by divers and intact live crabs and stuff like that. I mean, these otters were eating a lot of very expensive seafood, but, you know, a lot of their problems disappeared. And it's an example of how a lot of the time there, the stuff is there. It's in the literature, but know that, you reinvent the wheel. And certainly that's, the case with a lot of, what we don't know about sharks

Dave Evans: 25:13

I think goes to point out with like I think a large part of there's so many people who are focused on such narrow topics and then you only are able to Like present papers that it reach a very narrow audience and things and I think Yeah, that's why I like talking to the people like yourself or other experts as well and being able to really Open up those topics a little bit more maybe but it sounds like you do a lot of that yourself as I like the naturalist approach as well. I think it's still cool. yeah It's true, okay, so I guess I have to ask this question. I know they're very rare, but they're people hear sharks and they think of attacks and you already told us about getting attacked by a torpedo, right? Yeah. But is there a

Chris Harvey-Clark: 25:52

Yeah.

Dave Evans: 25:53

of shark attacks in Canada?

Chris Harvey-Clark: 25:54

Oh, it goes way, way back. When Champlain came over in 1534 on his first trip, he stopped at the Bay de Chilure, which is, you know, just before you go around the tip of New Brunswick, there's a little bay there called the Bay de Chilure, Warm And, one of his men was swimming off the boat and had his legs taken by a shark. Undoubtedly a white. That's the only thing around that could do that. And, bled to death on the deck. So, you know, the First Nations people certainly knew there were white sharks around there. White, the shark is their legends and, white shark remains are found in their middens. Some of them stained with red ochre, which means they were some kind of a holy or ritual object. more laterally, I mean, you know, the thing was a lot of people died at sea in various ways and not very good records were kept, but we know for instance, there was a schooner approaching Halifax Harbor and a man fell off and was eaten by a shark immediately there was a famous episode in 1953, which by the way, 52 and 53 were very warm water summers. The water was super warm. A lot of sharks were seen. And up in Cape Breton at Foreshoe, there was a Dory actually attacked and sunk, partially One of the men fell in the water and drowned survived., But the shark was positively identified because it left teeth in the dory and the dory was the only dory in the village painted white, which is kind of interesting. So maybe mistaken identity or something like that. But apparently the shark had been following the boats in and out for a week Fast forward, I think probably the first attack I was involved in was back in 1990. And there was a, who was a sea urchin diver down around area. This was I think And a guy named Daniel McDonald and he was diving off, you know, they, they use their, the boats they use for lobster season. They're all these 40 foot Cape Islanders. He's diving in a channel off this thing and it was right at the start of lobster season. They, I think it was the dumping day was December 1st. So it was five days in. So I think the water was really full of juicy smells. And he was in this particular channel he was approached aggressively and repeatedly over a 15 minute period by, at the time when I interviewed him, it sounded like a poor beagle. It was, you know, torpedo shaped. It had big, he noticed it had really big eyes and they were sort of on the front of the head, which is pretty typical of a poor beagle. And he used his urchin basket to fend the thing off. And I think probably the Urchin Basket was what it was in. So he flipped over on his back and he fended it off and it would back off and come back and did this continually. And he kept his wits about him. He got in his back. This is a steep channel and he worked his way back up. And the last encounter was in six feet of water. Anyway he survived okay went back to work but that was a poor beagle. And they're kind of known for bumping people who work in the sea cages around salmon farms and stuff seem to encounter them fairly frequently. And, you know, most of these encounters until recent years, until sort of social media and the cell phone and stuff like that happened, they'd be local lore, but unless you were in the local community and you were fishermen in that community the guys might talk, but it wasn't ever anything that was reported so that was that encounter. And probably the first real shark bite encounter that likely happened on Friday the 13th of 2021, August. And a very athletic young woman, was swimming off a boat up near Marguerite, which is on the other side of Cape Breton. There's an island there called Marguerite Island, which they were right off of, which is a seal island. In fact, it used to be called Seawolf Island because it was an old term for seals And she was at the surface and there was one other person in the water and shark bit her across the legs and then released her and pretty severe injuries, like 120 stitches or something like that. And she was hospitalized. We've had a number of white shark strand. We've also had some unprecedented, well, we've had since my first, I believe my encounter with Michael Schwinghammer, we encountered the first, we had the first diver open water encounter. Since then, we've had seven more in the last two years. Nobody's been injured, but there've been a lot of close passes. A duck hunter was hunting. And put his dog in the water to go get the duck shark took it out. Undoubtedly, undoubtedly a white shark. Another shark was observed taking a deer that was swimming between two islands and that deer washed up later and I saw the photos of the carcass. There was no tissue missing. The shark had just bitten it. I guess it decided it wasn't a seal and let it go, but it bled out and washed it. These are unprecedented things that are going on, Dave. This has never happened And It's a sign that things have changed in a pretty serious way. And I think the story with white sharks coming into our waters is a really interesting one. And it's, and I talk about this in the book You know, a lot, the old cautious biological refrain is, oh, they were always here. They were always here, but not in these numbers, and certainly not with all these crazy encounters we're having recently with, you know, dogs being eaten and divers seeing them. Divers have never seen white sharks, really any here in shore ever in the time, you know, in the last 40 plus years I've been Nova Scotia. It's just not, doesn't happen. So this is quite unusual, and I think two things together. First of all, We have an unprecedented seal population in the Maritimes right now. Not a lot of sealing goes on anymore and most of it was directed at harp seals anyway. There's a little fishery for gray seals in the Magdalene Islands and, and Quebec. Small take of a few hundred animals for human So seals haven't been hunted. I did a lot of research work over on Sable and the population, when I started going out there in 1990, I think the greys were about 60, 000 out there. And the harbor seals are about 2000. Harbor seals are pretty well gone now. There might be two or three or five out there. the gray seals are numbering in their hundreds of thousands. And we don't know exactly how many the estimate for the whole maritime region is somewhere North of 500, 000 animals. And they produce about 87, 000 pups a year, which that's what a white shark wants. They want a nice, juicy predator, naive pop handle. So we got a lot of food, the banquets open. And the other thing that's happened is North and south of the border. There was a very active, aggressive headboat fishery in the especially in the northern particularly famous Long Island, that area and the fishery was targeting big white sharks. The idea was to catch the biggest one you could and take it back to the dock and get your picture with it. So this really selected for all the big fecund, large, sexually mature specimens because whites the females don't really mature until they're about 15 or 16 feet long, at which point they're about 25, 26, 27 years old. Males a little, A little smaller, but the same thing, they're about 25. So then they don't have huge litters. So very easy to wipe out, you know, it'd be the equivalent of going to the Serengeti and taking out all the lions. So, other interesting thing is that in the States there were very few gray seals. Their gray seal population almost disappeared. And in fact, I did a course at Woods Hole as a vet student, and they took us out to see these incredibly rare animals in 1983. There were only 300 of them And they they were on a beach, near the Cape. Well, now they have about something like 30, 000, but it's still nothing. So, you know, we got seals in Canada and the other interesting thing is doubling time for white sharks, which you know about as an ecologist, the principle of doubling time. But basically, it's a number of years that it takes a single individual to completely replace itself as a reproductively mature, active adult. So how many sharks does it take to make another? And how long does it take? It's about 26 years. What is 1997 plus 26? 2023. Yeah. So we're at the tailpipe of that. I think we're seeing the end results of that measure now are that we got white sharks up here. Quite a few of them. I can tell you, I've worked on a documentary with who's a producer here in town. He's the guy actually who initially created the Curse of Oak Island television series, if you know that series. History channel. Yeah. Edward Pile. Anyway, I'd been bugging Ed for years. Let's do a shark documentary.'cause the last one I did one in 2001 on sharks in Canada and then we did a bunch on the Greenland shark discovery we made in Quebec. But he was sort of hemming and hawing and then all this white shark start stuff started to happen and in 2020 we started, we went out and we did the first ever white cage dives, in Canada. About an hour south of Halifax, And we lucked out. We saw a lot of sharks and I got the first ever underwater images of sharks shot by a diver at that time. And so we kept going back. Edward was looking for a market for the show gone back down there. We have an expedition three to six every year. This an example we set up in one location. We had 140 encounters over a 40 period with at least 15 different sharks. The three biggest were in the 15, 16 foot range. Most of the sharks we see, though, are 10 footers. They're juveniles, and they're actually ones that scare me the most because at 10 feet, what happens with white sharks is they undergo what's called an ontogenetic shift, and they go from being, Primarily fish eaters to primarily mammal eaters. And none of this is exclusive. First white shark I ever saw in Canada. I documentary up in PEI on tuna. And we were diving to try and film bluefin tuna underwater. And at the end of the day, we got out and we're in the middle of this fleet of herring boats. And everything's there. There's minky whales feeding on the herring. There's all kinds of seabirds coming in and taking herring off the surface. There's seals everywhere. It's a total free for all because the herring is packed in there and bingo. What do you see? There's a boat back hauling a net and the fish are falling in the water right behind the boat, white shark picking them off. And it was about a 12 foot. So, you know they certainly won't turn down a free meal. They're not exclusively mammal eaters after 10 But what happens is their teeth actually change shape. So fish eating younger white sharks has sort of needle like teeth. And then when they hit this 10 foot stage, the teeth actually broaden and they become the classic white shark, you know, spade shaped serrated tooth. That's more suited like a, you know, carving knife for blubber So, the thing is, at that age, they sort of are trying everything on. They're kind of like adolescent boys. You know, see if this is edible. And I'll example. Again, this is related back to my friend Fred and Ocean Tracking Network. The OTN uses these devices. gizmos called Slocum gliders. They're really cool. They're autonomous underwater vehicles. They self power using buoyancy. They go out into the middle of the ocean on a pre programmed trip and they come right back and they're trackable, they're loaded with instruments things like current, tide, depth, chlorophyll levels in the water, pH, stuff like that. They're an instrument platform. They are an aluminum tube, Painted yellow. They don't look anything like a seal or a dolphin or a fish, you know, two of them have been taken out by white sharks in the last years. So we know that because they send an ROV in a vessel out and they retrieve them and they find shark bites, they find shark in them. And the shark and the sizes would tell us that these are the 10 footers this. So, you know pretty well try any, Pretty well, try anything. If you don't have hands and you think it might be edible. Well, you're going to give it a little nibble. Right? So that's, that's why 10 footers worry me the most because they're still trying to figure out what you are.

Dave Evans: 36:00

Yeah, having a lot of experiences with bears in the backcountry it's not the not the old bears. It's the young teenage bears that are trying to figure things out. They're the ones that scare me a lot. Yeah.

Chris Harvey-Clark: 36:11

Well, you know, it's funny. People, everybody's watched so many shark documentaries. Everybody's an expert now. And one of the things that has happened is we've gone full swing from the Jaws era where everybody was terrified to go near the water. And we've now swung the exact opposite direction, which is that, oh, the sharks are innocuous and they're not really interested in you. They're very prey specific and so on. They're not that very specific. This Disney like regard for sharks is sort of panda bears, you know, fish are friends, not food, et cetera. No, you know, you've got to exercise common sense, and especially in this neck of the woods where I am right now.

Dave Evans: 36:44

But I think that's exactly it too. I you're saying going out looking for great white just an hour from like Halifax Harbor kind of thing. And I think you'd mentioned, or maybe that was blue sharks,

Chris Harvey-Clark: 36:55

Oh, well, the blues are there every summer from July right through until October, November. We had one, I have a receiver in a particular bay where we see lots of torpedo rays. We had a female blue shark in there on Christmas day. She came in and had a look around and they don't usually come very close to shore. Like they're an offshore, they're usually several miles offshore. They don't really like inshore spaces. Now the whites, on the other hand, are not afraid to come right up into shallow water. We had a hurricane here in the fall. Somebody filmed a white. right off of basically near the Armdale Rotary, which is the end of the Northwest Arm that comes way up into the middle of Halifax. There was shark up there. Had them ping in the harbor. The encounter I had was in the harbor, right at the entrance so they're definitely around. And the big thing is we got a lot of seals in the harbor. So they come in here foraging. In fact, it's interesting, you can kind of tell when the sharks are here because the seals will change their haul out locations. And there used to be a big haul out. Right at the mouth of the harbor, there's some seal rocks out there and we get up to 200 grays out there and they don't do that anymore. The ones that have survived because you'd go out there and you'd see. Big chunks missing from many of those seals. We also saw a lot of dead seals with big pieces gone. And so some of them will move right up into the harbor. There's a cove called Purcell's Cove here. That's right at the mouth of the Northwest arm. Bunch of them go in there. A bunch of them go to an offshore island. away from where the main seal colony is and they to be doing what fur seals do in South Africa. They get a lot active nocturnally. They go in the water at night to forage because it's too dangerous during

Dave Evans: 38:23

Very interesting. And yeah, I know you've alluded to it a little bit. Would you be comfortable like either reading from your book that you have about your experience or sharing your

Chris Harvey-Clark: 38:31

Absolutely. Yeah. I'll tell you the encounter story because think you know so much, but you know so little. Anyway, let me just pull it up here. Okay. So this is this is actually the last chapter in my book and describing what happened. Myself and my buddy, who's a Navy diver had gone out and it was a very rough day, we couldn't find a place to safely anchor and I'd wanted to go out and try and hit our torpedo race site and we ended up going around the corner and we found a lee under Chibucto head, which is the head that protects the sort of the, I guess you'd say Southwest end of Halifax Harbor. We'd gone for quite a deep dive. We went down 110 feet. We found we're looking for shipwreck, which we missed, and we're coming back to where the boat is anchored. Did about 80 ft of water, and the top 30 ft of the water was a khaki colored muck that had about 10 ft visibility, and I'll pick up from there as we talk about what happened. A few minutes after we'd started our return, I looked up slope over my shoulder and above us saw a giant tuna like lunate tail about three feet across, disappearing in the opposite direction into the murk about 25 feet away. I was at 75 feet, Michael behind me, probably 10 to 15 feet back. I just caught a glimpse and immediately recognized it was a tail of a great white shark swimming right on the bottom above us at about 60 feet silhouetted against the surface. I immediately turned 90 degrees into shore to face the shark, looked uphill where she had disappeared, and began to signal Michael, waving my arms while not taking my eyes off the spot where she'd last been seen. A few seconds later, the shark reappeared now to my right, again upslope, about the same depth, but closer at about 20 feet. The shark had circled back out of sight, uphill from us, an excellent seal hunting strategy that cut off retreat. It was a great white shark, the head shape, the thick body tapering to a narrow waist, To the broad caudal peduncle, big symmetrical high aspect ratio tail, and the muted dark grey to white countershake coloration all separated it from the similar but smaller and azure colored mako or porbeagle. The mouth was slightly open. There was a big characteristic pointy dorsal fin as a shark about 11 feet long cruised slowly by. I could not see male sex organs and did not see any telemetry gear attached to her. She crossed slowly and deliberately this time. About a foot off the bottom and again disappeared. My heart was pounding. Part of my brain could not comprehend, could not believe this late in the season we were being buzzed by a great white in Halifax Harbour. I took a quick look around 360 but still had not gotten Michael's attention. I began banging on my tank with my light, trying to attract his attention while not letting my eyes stop moving. Or my head stopped swiveling in constant 360 degree scans. Something I learned long ago diving with Greenland sharks and bad visibility. Then the shark appeared a third time again upslope and now out at the edge of visibility about 30 feet away. She must have circled again a second time up into shallow water and then come back from the same direction a third time. Something surprising for a species known as a stealth predator that mixes approaching prey. She was sharply outlined, you could see every detail. She rolled past us and disappeared. Michael had finally seen her too. As he caught sight of her, he pointed and then his head swung back to watch the shark as she disappeared a third time. Now we were truly in the shit. Still at least 100 feet from our ascent line, 75 feet down on a deep dive requiring a decompression stop with a mammal eating species of shark that had come back and checked us out repeatedly. Not good. In dark murky water with a great white that had made three passes. We had no idea where she was. We were a mile from a seal colony. I kept seeing a mental image of the dead seal around the corner with a 20 pound piece of meat taken from its back the previous week. I knew we had to get out of the water as fast as we could. Michael turned to me with his hand and his head in the classic shark fin position. I could see his eyes inquiring, I had already seen it twice, and I knew exactly what we were up against. He was still in disbelief mode. A shark, multiple passes, a great white, an 11 footer. This size class of white shark scares me most. At this size, a great white shark is just shifting from fish to a marine mammal diet, and their teeth change shape from fish eating needle teeth to broad steak knives suitable for slicing seal skin and blubber. At 10 plus feet, they stopped taking fish as their primary food and are learning to kill seals. White sharks will test bite novel objects during this experimental phase. And just from the book. It goes on from there. Yeah, you know, this is not Ocean Ramsey swimming in crystal clear water off Maui with a giant shark and 200 ft visibility. This is a shark that's been making its living eating seals, checking you out to

Dave Evans: 42:56

Yeah,

Chris Harvey-Clark: 42:56

a seal. It's a whole

Dave Evans: 42:57

absolutely. And just for listeners as well, this is the chapter from your book that's coming out. You have a release date for the book and do you have a title for this book

Chris Harvey-Clark: 43:07

the book is called In Search of the Great Canadian Shark. Initially, I titled it Hunt for the Great Canadian Shark. And I like the word hunt because, it is, you are looking for these things. And I've spent a lot of my life and most of my fortune all over the world trying to find sharks and usually not finding them. You know, you go somewhere that was, used to be good last year fished out. You know it's been a worldwide campaign of, extermination everywhere for their fins but my publisher didn't like that word. So it became in search of the great and it's being printed now. It's pre sold about 20 percent already, which is great. It's on Amazon Yeah,, it was kind of a how it got written. I'd been locked down like everybody else and I finally busted loose last went to Bonaire to do some diving, a place I love dive and came back, got COVID on the plane after five needles in my arm. So I'm at home recuperating, bored out of my head and I started writing and you know, in 14 days I wrote 70, 000 words and that became the core of the book and then by now it's me. And I'm looking around and thinking, I wonder if this is publishable because I, you know, the other two books I've done were guidebooks and have a lot of data in a lot of information and oceanographic stuff and a lot of text as well as pictures, which I'd taken underwater of marine life here. The first one was a Canadian bestseller. It was called Eastern Tidepool and Reef, which is in Canada. That's actually 3000 is a bestseller here. 10, But I kind of lost my shirt on it. so the second time around, I decided that I'd recrudesce a bigger book and I'd start to incorporate some of the stuff that's happening the global warming the species changes we're seeing. And that book became Maritime Marine Life. And I self published that at the time. I found out great expense because mid COVID everything was getting pretty expensive. Paper was hard, paper was hard to find to print the right kind of paper. It was nuts, but I managed to get 2000 copies printed and it sold. I've got about 500 left. So that's been, that book's been pretty successful and I think we'll sell out end of the year. So here I have this, This nonfiction, which write normally it's a memoir. It's all the crazy stuff I've done underwater with sharks and beavers and all so the first thing I did, of course, I got Dr. Google at Canadian Publishers. So as I go through, I'm like, oh my God, it's like, Publisher after publisher, no unsolicited manuscripts, you know, it's like, go away, go away. We don't want you. And I found a handful who would take it. And the other thing is no memoirs. That's the last thing we want is a memoir, you know, cookbook, anything, but no memoirs, anything. So I finally found a handful and then I was Googling along and I found a company called Pottersfield Press. It's publisher. And they had just concluded their national non fiction competition. And it had just closed a few days before. So I, I emailed Editor and I said could I still submit and Leslie choice? Very nice, man. And he said, Sure, send it in. No problem. You know, we've got, I guess they had dozens, dozens of people, right? Sending him in manuscripts for nonfiction. And then I sent a bunch of other, cold call letters out. None of whichever. Got anything back from a year later, still haven't from them, but amazingly enough, about a month later, Pottersfield emails me a very nice email saying you won second prize in our competition. We will publish your book. You get a cash prize. You get a royalty free copy sold. And I thought, well, that's really surprising. And the other thing I thought, because I bang this thing out, and I think I went through it once after. I submitted it in a hurry and then I went back and started looking. It was like, Oh my God, this thing is full of typos and bad grammar and misspelling and bad pagination and just bad. It's bad. And so I revised it, I think probably 10 or 12 times every two or three days I'd go, I'd do another revision. And that was kind of fun too, because I started to remember things I hadn't remembered from the added to it. These other anecdotes and stories and things, and probably enriched it a bit by the time the publishers got back to me and I said, I'm so sorry about what I sent you, and they said, it's no problem. And I sent them the revised version. So we've been back and forth since then, doing the revisions and ready to go to press with it. And it's being printed so anyway. So it's fun, and it's given me a taste for writing nonfiction,

Dave Evans: 47:02

that is so cool. I'm going to be listening. There'll be a list links in the show notes for all of your books, that we can find. And and I would encourage listeners to go check them out. my copy of your second book hasn't arrived yet, but I'm definitely excited to open it up and parse through it. Cause it, yeah, from what I've seen, it looks really interesting.

Chris Harvey-Clark: 47:23

Yeah, you know, that book was write because you know, there's a section in there on the oceanography of the North Atlantic, which is not, a topic. Most people know much about and we actually have seasons in the sea here. Unlike the West Coast, where it's pretty much boil all year round here. We actually have a summer in the sea. We have a fall in the sea. We have a winter. We have the temperatures that go with that. The Labrador season. Current reestablishes itself and sets up this nutrient escalator. That's quite different from what you see on the Pacific with the Kuroshio Japanese current coming over and sort of permanent plankton there. So stuff about that. And then of course it's species accounts. So everything pretty much right up to fish and including sea turtles and stuff like that. The only thing I didn't put in the new book is marine mammals, because that's been so well covered And And I could have, but I did put all the sea turtles in and as well as a bunch of weird things we've seen like, you know, we had blue marlin here a couple of years ago. We actually had one watch up dead. I did a necropsy on it at Dell. I've done some necropsies on white sharks in couple of years with a marine animal response society here who go and they attend strandings when a whale up on shore. Or any other unusual marine life like leatherback turtles, anyway, Mars contacted me and asked me to come and help out with a couple of necropsies on these sharks. And that's been very interesting because I'd never, I mean, getting a chance to do a necropsy on an endangered species is pretty cool. And they're very different anatomically. They have some of their aspects mammalian than other sharks that I've talked to. I've done dissections on. In fact, if you want to see it, it's up on my, I have a Vimeo channel and just google my name, Chris Harvey Clark Vimeo White Shirt. It's open for anybody to have a look at. It's pretty crude. I have quite a lot of crazy stuff on the Vimeo channel. see there's video of shark seals in there. There's Vimeo of a blue whale that we did a complete necropsy on and then did the skeleton of, and it's about to go up in the steel oceanography building at Dell. That's been a big project of mine was rebuilding this along with Chris Nelson Price at the agricultural school who've been instrumental. We actually composted that well, which is crazy itself to bones. And it's been a fascinating project. And then we did a right whale. So we did a North Atlantic right whale by compost as well. And the compost is working really well. You know, the way people used to do big whale skeletons is they'd, you know, flesh them out, boil them up, do as much And usually if they went up at a museum there'd be a bucket under the thing collecting for the next hundred years, collecting all the oil coming out of the bones. So we actually developed a, a method to remove that's very, very nature friendly. There's really no, you know, no ethylene, ethylene chloride or anything like that. It's all basically warm water and liquid on detergent in circulation. And you can get most of the oil out

Dave Evans: 49:57

yeah. So if anyone's if anyone's has interest in composting a whale you're the guy to call for sure. Yeah.

Chris Harvey-Clark: 50:05

Yeah, I can certainly And that's been fun. number of them now. So yeah when I was a vet student, I worked in the anatomy lab and I was always into bones and skeletons and structure anatomy.

Dave Evans: 50:15

That's So. cool. I was really curious I know there, there's a big topic about underwater noise as an issue with large ocean mammals and that kind of thing. I was wondering if that is something that you've

Chris Harvey-Clark: 50:28

for whales.

Dave Evans: 50:28

or is that something with sharks what's your take on that?

Chris Harvey-Clark: 50:32

the crazy thing. My next door neighbor here, Dr. Lindy Wildgart, who's associated with DAL, is probably one of the top three people in the world on impacts of underwater noise and sound on particularly marine mammals, which is where a lot of the concern has been. It's been especially concerning because as we go into our new cold war, the diesel electric sub becomes a real secret stealth weapon because it's silent and hard to detect, unlike the boomers, which detect. These diesel electrics are the ones that are going to be, on your doorstep and you won't know they're there. And the way that you detect them is using this thing called LFAS, which is acoustic sound. It's a very low frequency, but extremely loud, basically sonic boom underwater. And it bounces off the sub in a way that's detectable. And it's so powerful that it will for instance, damage the inner ear bones in cetaceans that are nearby to the point where they you know, that's where all the navigation gear is. That's where your inner ear that allows you to balance is. And there've been many, many cases of animal stranding associated with alfas use of acoustic Survey for oil. Seismic is another big one using seismic air guns or explosives. So cetaceans particularly, and certainly a lot of the cetaceans that are the deep water guys that really rely on the use of echo to find their prey as opposed to vision and other, you know, Modalities are highly impacted the beaked whales that dive to thousands of feet and eat squid. And some of these other species are super impacted, but also, you know, pilot whales, many species now associated standings associated with things like military maneuvers, where they've been using these systems. Sharks are actually a little and they really hear mostly in the low frequency range. So, you know, we hear up to about 20, 000 sharks, they're like, 80 to 800 or something like that. And in fact, there are gadgets that pro shark fishermen use to lure them that are basically producing low frequency, you know, heavy metal kind of boom, boom, boom underwater. There's a gizmo called the Mako magnet that people who fish Mako in the States use, and they throw this hydrophone in the water and send this boom out and it There's also been associations with things like pile driving activities, having sharks come into the sites when they're piled driving, partly the low frequency and probably partly things getting crushed and smelling pretty good in the water, like shellfish and things like by and large you know, if anything, I would say Most of what we see is attractant factors. So, when I've been out shark diving in the Bahamas and the guy on the boat revs his motor a few times and sharks just come from everywhere, they're, you have to remember for a shark, the whole side of the animal is part of the ear, right? They have this acoustical lateral line that you can see it's a visible structure running down the middle of the animal on each side on the flank. And it's a canal that has little communication holes to the outside, and then it has little hair cells in That move when vibration and pulse things hit that and they set off nerves and the nerves basically talk back to the brain and the part of the brain that processes acoustic data and gives them very accurate means to identify things depending on the species. But some of them are really, really good at finding things in absolute zero conditions. So we discovered this populate, we being and Jeffrey Gallant who I've worked years on this. We found a population of Greenland sharks coming into shallow water in Bay Como. We'd looked for them for years in Quebec because there were records of them from the sag and they never found them, but we kind of became known as the crazy guys who were looking for these Greenland sharks. And lo and behold, Some commercial diver was setting a mooring and he had a big something go by him and he wasn't sure if it was a whale or shark, but he noticed it had a vertical tail, not a horizontal tail. So we were at that site, you know, instantly because we'd spent thousands of our own dollars and years of labor trying to find these things. And sure enough, there were Greenland sharks in this bay. We saw a whole bunch of them over the next week and they all disappeared and we didn't see them for the rest of the summer. We did actually did a show on it with Discovery Channel. And so the next year we went back, anniversaries of the same date, and we had a big team, elite team with us. We had divers from the biodome, we had scientific divers from the University of Quebec, we had multiple support. We put people on, on the sites in the three main coves where we'd seen the sharks the previous And it was nothing. We didn't see anything. The conditions were terrible. The wind had been blowing north and it blew all the fresh water runoff back up into the bays and the water was the color of coffee. So terrible. So after a week of that, and I don't know, a couple of hundred man on these sites, We realized that sharks aren't here. Maybe that that first year was the only year, maybe something unusual was happening. Maybe there was a well carcass nearby and they were all feeding on that. So they were coming up into shallow water. Don't know. And we still don't really know why we had about a nine year period where those sharks were around and then they disappeared. But at any rate, I'm giving the story away a little bit here because right now you're thinking, Oh, the sharks are gone forever. And that's what we were thinking. So the last day. Cars are packed. We're ready to jump on the from back over to Matan. From and, noticed a whole lot of Opilio crabs. These are the northern snow crabs just carpeting the bottom in one particular bay where we'd seen sharks previous year. So we thought, what the heck, let's go take some pictures of Opilio. So myself and splashed in right off a river mouth. Visibility is about 18 inches of coffee colored water hit the bottom. The bottom was only 15 feet under the boat. And I'm sitting there on my knees with my camera in front of me, starting to fold my arms out, and I sense something right out of the murk, right at my head, big, big nose, big eyes, went right past me, the tail hit me, it was about a 10 foot Greenland shark. And what was interesting after the encounter, and I'll continue the encounter, but after the encounter, I'd lost Jeffrey immediately. We were probably only 3 feet from each other, couldn't see each other. I could hear his regulator going, you know, Darth Vader underwater, but I couldn't see him. He couldn't see me, but he saw something big and dark go by, which he thought was me. It was a shark. It was going So I took off after this thing, because I didn't want to lose sight of it. And I also wanted to record it, and see what sex it was, and how big it was. All I could see was about this much of the flank, and I had my nose almost on it. And I swam along as hard as I could, just The shark wasn't moving fast, but It was hard work to keep up with it. And we went down, down, down, down, down. When finally we hit about 90 feet and we popped out of the brown stuff, which was murky, murky brackish water, crystal clear underneath, freezing cold, two degrees centigrade, the surface water was 14 and it was like walking into an ice box, but all of a sudden I could see the whole shark me and cranked up my lights and got pictures of it. Left, right, top, bottom, genital area. All the usually do. And then finally we were swimming, I'm swimming across this fjord and it's 300 meters deep here, right? So it's headed for the bottom and I don't know how deep I got, probably 130 or 140 feet. And then I looked at my pressure gauge and realized I was, you know, down to a thousand pounds or something. And I had to do a little decompression as well. So I said goodbye and went up to the surface. The whole interaction was probably seven or eight long and swam back to the boat. And as I got on the boat, my buddy Jean Euphorie pulled out a camera and filmed me and I told the story of what had happened. And I look at that video now and the hair still stands up on the back of my neck. But, you know, Dave, that moment was a total epiphany and I'll tell you why. You know, I necropsied a bunch of these sharks when they were stranded and, you know, there was one that was illegally caught and we ended up doing a necropsy thing. And they're packed full of marine mammal. I mean, when you find them, you know, their, their stomach contents, you know, a thousand pound shark can easily have a 250 pound stomach full of mostly seal of seal. And the question is, how is this lumbering thing that swims at 20 centimeters a second? I mean, literally they swim most of the time about that. quickly. How does something this big and slow on the bottom possibly catch a weary, nimble, large brain mammal prey like this? Dolphins and seals and things. And I realized I just had the seal's eye view of exactly how they do it. They can function very well in zero visibility. They can find you, no problem. You're making with your regulator you're splashing around. I'll tell ya, it it was a sobering moment. And fortunately, something, obviously the shark recognized something about me wasn't quite right. But it was coming, and it was right on me. And it's nose was about this far from mine. And it was a fascinating but scary, in retrospect it was, it's fascinating, but at the time it scared the hell

Dave Evans: 58:39

no kidding. That's an incredible story. Wow. And

Chris Harvey-Clark: 58:44

In the book, as well as the backstory in front, there's a lot behind that story and there's a lot that comes after it that's fascinating. Most people would be quite

Dave Evans: 58:54

yeah, no, I think it's yeah there's, so much. Still to be learned about these species. I'm just so fascinated by them.

Chris Harvey-Clark: 59:00

Although, you know, the white is charismatic, the Greenland shark is truly a mythical monster. I mean, this thing is a crazy shark. It's the second largest carnivorous shark after the white. They get up to, you know, a couple of tons weight, 18 feet long. They are the longest lived creature on the planet. They're known to live They live, on the extreme, they're the opposite of, you know the things that live in volcanoes. These things live in an abyss, 10, 000 feet of water where the water pressure would be, you know, 4, 000 pounds per square inch. The water temperature is minus one. I mean, these are conditions under which basic metabolic processes, Krebs cycle transmission of neurons. All the things cells do stop way before you hit this mark. And yet somehow these things survive that. How the hell do they do it? You know, they're really a living miracle and also the most extremophile animal I know of. I mean, they're one interesting and crazy They're out there, they're still out there in the St. Lawrence. I think they're just down in the bottom at a thousand feet doing their thing. And we actually tagged some with telemetry and track them. And one animal hung around the area. The other one went way up the river. to Tadoussac, which is not really surprising because that is, that's where you can see blue whales from shore. One of the few places you can blue whale watch from shore. It's marine mammal city there. There's belugas, blues, and some black sperm whales, super rich area for marine mammals. So if you're a marine mammal predator or scavenger, and we're still wondering about, you know, that's the question mark in your mind every time you swim with one of these things. How much of a predator are you? How much of a scavenger are you? And I, I like to think of the Greenland shark as kind of being the hyena of the depths. I think they can be both. Quite

Dave Evans: 1:00:33

that's a really cool analogy. Yeah. The hyenas of the depth of just that mix. I've also heard heard that they're like in, in some stomachs and maybe this is incorrect reporting, but that they're, they've found like caribou and moose and polar bear

Chris Harvey-Clark: 1:00:50

yeah, yeah,

Dave Evans: 1:00:51

a it's a truly Arctic.

Chris Harvey-Clark: 1:00:52

have, there's, there's a guy if you ever go to Iceland, they actually, so there's an Icelandic delicacy called Halkark. is fermented Greenland shark flesh. Now, the reason you have to ferment it is it's loaded with this neurotoxic chemical called trimethylamine oxide. If you don't get the TMAO out of there by boiling it for a couple of weeks or fermenting it make you. very sick. It can kill you. So, but there, and Greenland of course, famously is depopulated a number of times in the last thousands of years, because the, No food. People would settle there and then couldn't grow anything, couldn't catch anything and died of starvation. So I think the early ingestion of how carc was probably food of desperation is probably a dead shark that washed up on the beach. But it's become a part of their spring tradition there. They eat how carc and they drink this hooch that's flavored with Annie's called Brenevin. And this is part of what you do in Iceland in the spring to party down and tell you, I have tasted it and you know, it's, it sounds disgusting, like shark cheese, right? It actually tastes a bit like camembert, with a little bit of a kind of ammonia aftertaste to it, but it's not nearly as nauseating you'd think. And it's, you know, it's one of those things you gotta do. I certainly wouldn't be wanting to live on a steady diet of it. At any rate, the guy who runs the Haukark farm, A couple Reykjavik has got all these interesting things he's pulled out of the stomachs of Greenland. He has a little Greenland shark there and and, and the way they make the Haukark, they bury it in the beach, secret temperatures and stuff, and then they pull it out and they start out with a loin that's about the size of a human body. And they bury it, they bring it up to the shed and it dries out and it winds up being about the size of a Virginia ham after it's desiccated. It's about this big and it's brown and it's hanging in the air in this open air shed up at the end of their property. But at any rate, I had a look through their little museum and you wouldn't believe the polar bear polar bear limbs, All kinds of seal remains, of course, remains of various crazy deep sea fish, like some of these rat tails and other fish that are encountered in the deep sea, all this stuff they had that they pulled out of the stomachs of Greenland sharks. So a very, Catholic in terms of taste, like they've been found with their stomachs completely full of pelagic pteropods, which are these, you know, these new to bring sea angel things that you little sea angels completely packed with those. So they kind of anything out there they'll eat. And we often find decapod crustacean remains in them. Usually it's like toad crabs. We find wolf fish in there. They love flat fish, especially Greenland halibut. And some of the necropsies I've done, you open the stomach up and all the fish in there are absolutely perfect. they like they just came out of the came off the ice at the local supermarket. They're not a mark on them, their colors are still original. And this is because the Greenland sharks actually aspirate prey. So these fishes that use, camouflage and, and Stay still when you're near them are at a tremendous disadvantage because the Greenland sharks head is just studded with electro sensors and And they just swim along in the black abyss and they get a little electrical signal and just go Gone, inhaled hole not a mark on it and the nurse sharks do the same thing nurse sharks are able to get their Elasticy mouths underneath coral heads and suck things like our octopus right out of the hole and they do it with pharyngeal pressure. They can generate tremendous suction with when they pop, pop their pharynx. Greenland sharks do the same thing. And we know that because some researchers at Memorial had one of these baited remote underwater video stations and it had a bag hanging in the middle of a triangle and the shark couldn't get into the triangle. So it was trying to suck that. The bay go to the triangle to ingest it. And on video. This is a few years back now. So interesting animal. You up in Newfoundland one was found with an, with the hide of a moose stuck in its throat and somebody had probably been moose hunting and thrown a moose hide in the water and this thing washed up in shallow water, still alive. And a couple of local folks pulled a couple of men who I met up there. We did a show on this in 2015, And the they pulled the, pull the hide out and pretty I think these things are pretty primitive. I know film crews up in the Arctic who've gone out and caught them at the ice edge, you know, way offshore, put them on a cometic, driven them, you know, 60 miles back to the shoreline where they have a pool, throw them in there and film them. And they've survived that cometic ride in air. So they're they're tough creatures.

Dave Evans: 1:05:07

Yeah. No kidding. That's super fascinating. Super fascinating. Creator like creatures. Yeah, I guess in like a lot of these creatures they're either species at risk or not much is known about them. And it's a really important area for humans, for recreation for commerce, for resource extraction as well. Do you have any like thoughts about how we can coexist along these coastlines?

Chris Harvey-Clark: 1:05:40

Well, I think it opens to two things. One is the safety factors around the water, and there's lots of stuff. I actually I did a Public a PSA on shark safety in our waters and sort of things to avoid. And that's that's up there on the Internet. I did it with the Dow student who basically originated the idea, and there's lots out there. And it's common sense things like, you know, dawn, dust. Don't Dive near seal colonies, like that. No real rocket science in it. I think the other thing is how, you know, what do we do about And it's especially challenging because I've been a real advocate of marine protected areas my whole adult worked in the volunteer sector trying to encourage the MPAs when DFO and the government, when Wanted nothing to do with them. I helped convene the first national conference on MPAs in Vancouver in 1990. I did a paper on conservation of sixgill sharks at the time they were being fished commercially on the West coast and pretty much as a result. Where I looked at their ecotourism value, and this is back in the nineties way before thinking this way. And it turned out they had considerable ecotourism value. They had no value as food because they were with mercury. And also nobody knew anything about their longevity at that time. But I, I, I think if there's one thing we could do, it's, it's do what we say we're, we're doing with the Canada Ocean Act, which is, we've had since 1990, but we have not. done our coastal protection the way it should have happened. You know, the goal was to try and have 15 percent of the coastline by long ago. Now we've passed the best before. So the production of MPAs that are no take reserves, in other words, you can go there, you can look, but you can't drill for oil, you can't fish, you can't garbage there you can't run your sewage lines I think more of those in key areas that are actually biodiverse. I mean, there's been a tendency to build it to, for the government to put MPAs in places where A, they're inaccessible and therefore not relevant to most of the population, and B, where, frankly, the cookie jar is already busted. So, you know, don't do that. Protect areas that actually are super rich and biodiverse and, and, and hot zones in terms of diversity. So MPAs are one thing that everybody should get behind, I think. the other thing the problem with that is that a lot of the species we're talking about are highly migratory. And so the MPA doesn't really you know a shark that's going to be, you know, a white shark that's up here in Cape Breton in July and will be off a beach, as we know from some animals we We tagged a white two years ago, October, and in March it was off a swimming beach in Florida. A pinger picked it up down there. So these things are going through all kinds boundaries and from nation to nation and some nations do better jobs than others. I think being an educated consumer. You know, there still are a whole heck of a lot of products out there that be consuming. They're based on you know, watch out for anything with squalene in it. It's unusual for even now for plant squalene to be used in things like cosmetics. Now, the family, particularly his mom, Sandy, they've been very active in approaching some of the big powerhouse companies that produce cosmetics like Revlon and they're all agreeing to take shark squalene out of there. But we're still seeing, you know, if you, any product you look at, look carefully at the label. If it says marine oils on there as an ingredient that can be coming from sharks, from Spain it's a barrel full of oil. a lot of the time it's coming from, it's also in some cases, marine mammal. So there are places where marine oils are being extracted from whale, seal. And put back into, into your lap as a consumer product that's invisible. So educate yourself and Because you know, a lot of the that we buy are still non sustainable and certainly in the case of packaged seafood. I mean, that's a whole other story. The stuff, you know, the cheap fish sticks we're getting at Costco people are doing DNA work on this and finding out all kinds of interesting things. Some of them severely threatened. You know, there's a little sea lantern shark called that mop tourists. that is about, you know, they're about this big, they're about two feet long. They're found in super deep water. They have a great huge liver and they're commercially fished in the North Sea and English other fisheries for these things to catch these little lantern sharks that nobody knows anything about them biologically, but they're probably very old and slow to reproduce. Squalene So, you know stay away from squalene. where you can. You know that more than anything would probably help. I think also, you know, the last The last frontier is the ocean and we're still hunting in the ocean. It's like going to the plains and shooting bison, you know, but we're now at the point where the what's coming out of the ocean versus what's coming out of aquaculture. We pass the tipping point. We're producing more fish in aquaculture than we're taking out of the oceans. That's how ridiculous it's gotten. So yeah, so caution in, in, in what you purchase. And I think also this is true of goods. I you know There are other ways to solve carbon than putting yet another massive tax on humans our country. Once, you know, there are other, there are other measures, you know, there are ways to, to resolve things beyond taxation. We already pay plenty of tax and it's an, it's the sort of tax that would be, that will just disappear and it will go into general revenue and who knows what happen to it. But it will not, you know, the carbon tax that you're being asked to pay, Is a punitive tax that is supposed to encourage you to consume less carbon. Well, if it's actually about consuming less carbon, let's have a look at all the other junk we buy. So I don't know about you, but replaced all our our appliances in this house. And they were only eight, nine years old and they were all breaking down. And the choice you had was a repairman would come and look at your refrigerator and say, well, I can fix that for 900 bucks, but it's probably going to break again, or you can go just go buy a new one for 1300 bucks. And that's what everybody's doing. It's happening because consumer goods are being badly made with cheap materials, but there's still deep carbon carvers. I mean, the plastic and the metal that goes into this, the landfills, go to you know, my mom had, you know, eaten Viking washer and dryer. They're 45 years old. They worked for 45 years. They never even got repaired. Why is that no longer the case? I mean, you know, things should be made better, so they last longer. So we have to mine less metal, burn less fossil fuels, and you know. That's something I feel really strongly about. And if you came to my house, you'd see a whole lot of repaired and fixed things. I, if I can fix it, I will. Rather than buy a new one. I just, I, I am disgusted with consumer culture and I really and the fact that all this stuff is being made to wear out and throw away is to me is because the cost to the environment and making these durable So quit carbon taxing and start taxing bad manufacturers for making junk that needs to be replaced regularly. That's what I think.

Dave Evans: 1:12:25

I'm all about that too. It's yeah it's ridiculous where we've gotten to, in that sense

Chris Harvey-Clark: 1:12:32

Unfortunate. Mm

Dave Evans: 1:12:34

who's, who wants to know more about about yeah, fish fraud and that kind of repackaging of seafood mislabeling, we did a episodes a couple like a year or two ago with with interviews with Sea Choice, with Oceana Canada, Ocean Wise Seafood Program, and one of your colleagues at Dalhousie, actually, Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, yeah. So we got to, yeah it's just sad where that's gone and on the topic too of plastics, we did an episode about microplastics and the

Chris Harvey-Clark: 1:13:05

Yeah.

Dave Evans: 1:13:05

they've been found is just astounding. It's just wild.

Chris Harvey-Clark: 1:13:09

The problem is we are such a consumer culture. We're also a Northern culture. You know, we, we, you need to stay warm up here in the winter. It's not, it's not a pleasant place to be. So, you know, we do burn fossil fuels to do that. We do, we do. We're in some ways we're obligate consumers here because the environment we live in, but choices about, you know, how many air air air, how much air travel you do those, you know, every time you fly in a, in a jet, boy, are you ever putting out a whole chunk of CO2? Do you really need to go to Cuba three times this winter? You know, it's, it's crazy. Personal choices like that, that I think are as impactful and yeah, I'll leave it at that. Cause I'm going to try and not soapbox too much here. And I'm for sure I'm a consumer just like everybody else. We don't have a choice, so, I'm careful

Dave Evans: 1:13:52

And that's, the important thing. That's the important thing. And yeah, I, thank you so much Chris. It's that I've really enjoyed our conversation and yeah, I just wanted to, is there anything else that you wanted to share? I know you said that you are you've said there's so many like films and documentaries you've been a part of, you have your books. I'll leave show notes for that. Is there anything else you're hoping to share with our audience here today?

Chris Harvey-Clark: 1:14:17

No, I think we really covered a lot of a lot of the tracks. I really I hope people enjoy the book and I really wrote the book to be edutainment. So you'll see there's a lot of fun and a lot of anecdotes. There's a lot of humor, but there's a lot of meat in there. There's a lot you can glean from reading that book. You will know a lot when you finish reading it. Not only will you have been entertained, but you will have learned a lot about the planet sharks. ocean. And I didn't, you know, I figured a mono theme of shark, shark, shark would probably be too much. There's a chapter in there on beavers. I did a lot of underwater filming of beavers and beavers are most fascinating creature and very advanced and they have, they have family values. They have play time. They are really amazing animals. All I can say, and the trouble in Canada is, you know, they're a national symbol, but. Very few people know about them and and there's lots, there's lots know. But the most important thing is they're keeping water on a, on a desiccating, burning planet on the ground and not sea. And I in there about, a place in Quebec a beautiful river where there was a large beaver family and then the next year going back and they were gone. They were gone because the local management of the river, which is a fishing river, had trapped them all. And I had been in there with a camera filming all the brook trout, and rainbow trout, and salmon larvae, and salmon hatchlings, all living in the palisades of this beaver house. I mean, it was the best fish habitat you could imagine. And the local managers, they didn't care. They just didn't want beavers around because they, you know, and it was an impossible river to dam. It was a very fast flowing river. So it's stuff like that. I mean, I think these animals deserve better than we're giving them as a species and and understanding how important they are and the fact that they're of water on this planet where water is becoming very precious. To me, that was, you know, that was the bottom line of that

Dave Evans: 1:16:04

Yeah, Yeah, absolutely. And coming from being out West here, I, even out East, there's huge fires this year, like this last summer and

Chris Harvey-Clark: 1:16:14

yeah, we had, we had a bizarre start to the summer here with, you know, May giant forest fire that burned for three weeks here at the end of the winter.

Dave Evans: 1:16:23

yeah,

Chris Harvey-Clark: 1:16:24

no, it's things are not, not,

Dave Evans: 1:16:26

yeah,

Chris Harvey-Clark: 1:16:27

be.

Dave Evans: 1:16:28

no, and yeah. So I'll leave links in the show notes for all of that. And once again, thank you so much, Chris. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Chris Harvey-Clark: 1:16:35

Hey, my pleasure, Dave.

Dave Evans: 1:16:36

I love it. It's been a blast. Thanks for tuning in. Today's, what are we doing podcast episode? It was so great. Thank you so much. Dr. Chris Harvey Clark for speaking with us. Absolutely blew me away. So excited to go check out everything else that I can, and I'll leave links in the show notes so that you can follow along as well. Now I'm your host and producer of the, what are we doing podcasts, David Evans. And I'd just love to thank the rest of the team from the aquatic biosphere project, specifically Paula Pullman and Dr. Ross Shaw for being super helpful with getting these episodes together. I'd also really love to thank Leanna Bresson for editing these episodes. Thank you so much, Leanna. It's been wonderful. Now, I just want to say as well, if you're listening to this in an audio only version, check us out on YouTube. We've got a video now. Who knew? Thank you so much. And it's been a splash.