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

Episode Transcript
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Dave Evans (00:19):
You may think that you have to go all the way down
to the Caribbean to see somesharks if you want to go diving.
But you'd be really surprised, Ibet, to know that Canada has so
many different species ofsharks.
You don't even have to go veryfar.
You could dive in HalifaxHarbour and come across a great
white shark.
Now, our guest today did exactlythat.
He's one of Canada's foremostshark experts and had an

(00:40):
extremely close encounter with agreat white shark right in
Halifax Harbour.
Today, we're going to be talkingall about sharks in Canada.
Where are they?
What are they?
And what is happening withclimate change as we see more
and more sharks sit back, relax,and get ready to learn a little
bit more about sharks in Canada.

(02:15):
Welcome to another deep diveepisode of the, what are we
doing podcast today?
We're talking everything aboutsharks in Canada.
We have one of our top expertsand I'm so excited to, speak
with you, Chris.
So Chris, do you mindintroducing yourself and telling
us who you are and what you do?

Chris Harvey-Clark (02:34):
Sure.
David, nice to be on your show.
And you know, water is a commondiluent for all of us.
So with three oceans around usand more water on the ground
here yeah.
So Chris Harvey Clark, I'm aveterinarian and a marine
biologist.
I did marine biology at theUniversity of Victoria.
At that time, we were in themidst of a recession and there
really weren't any jobs and I'dstayed in school.

(02:55):
I went on and did veterinaryschool.
I actually gone into med schoolat UBC and vet school at WCVM
the same year, and I decided tobreak away from the rest of the
family who were MDs.
Or do veterinary medicine.
And I must admit it, I've neverregretted it because it really
is a ticket to ride.
It takes you a lot of places andyou have a lot of useful
transferable skills.
So at the moment I'm thedirector of animal care at

(03:17):
Dalhousie University and I waspreviously at UBC and I've been
back and forth.
between those two institutionspretty much since 1987.
So that's been my history.
And I practiced a bit beforethat in a couple of provinces as
well.
So I've worked with everythingfrom elephants to hummingbirds.
And I do a lot of work withaquatic species and was really
one of the early vets in Canadato really become what we call an

(03:37):
aqua that took extra training atWoods Hole and other places
because nothing was reallyavailable in Canada back in the
eighties.
And I wound up doing aninternship at a marine
oceanarium in California that'slong since defunct because I
thought I really wanted to be amarine mammal vet.
And unfortunately I really foundworking in that industry at that
time very distressing.
It was not a good time for theanimals and it was certainly not
the moral high ground.

(03:58):
So went on and did a fellowship.
Actually, I set up an exoticanimal practice in Toronto at a
time when nobody was doingbirds.
There are only a few clinics inCanada and I did a lot of birds
and stuff in vet school.
I was really interested inraptors.
And nobody was taking thosecases.
It was all small animal andlarge and no bird stuff.
So started this clinic, burnedmyself out over a year, was
pretty much thinking about goingback to school.

(04:19):
And I had this epiphany.
I was asked to speak at anational conference on the
clinical approach to birds,which was a new thing at that
time.
Because they really areradically different from other
animals in terms of how weapproach them as a vet.
And it turned out what I wassecretly doing was a job
interview.
So I flew out to Edmonton,actually, your hometown.
And a wonderful, wonderful guynamed Dr.
David Neal, who is director ofhealth sciences, lab animal

(04:41):
services Brought me on board andsaid at the end of the weekend,
love the talk.
And we'd like to offer you thisfellowship.
So I did it.
I spent a year there and I splitmy time between the pathology
lab the U.
S.
lawman building, and then theother 50 percent was clinical
and clinical was everythingfrom.
We had a tilapia facility forfish.
We had deer and, and all, therewas a researcher there at that
time who worked with deer andmoose and things like that,

(05:02):
whole variety of differentspecies.
So a really good place to beginto learn your, your profession
for sure.

Dave Evans (05:08):
Wow, So you've really done it all you've got
basically a foot in both oceanson either side how many elephant
calls have you had in canada, I

Well, not too many.
I actually went over to Thailandand I worked at an elephant
rehabilitation center for threemonths because I always wanted
to work with these animals andit was up in the north, north
part of the country.
And it was fascinating at thattime because what had happened
was the Thai government had madethe use of elephants and logging
illegal because elephants arethe ultimate stealth weapon for
poaching.
You can get them in and outwhere you can't get heavy

(05:37):
equipment.
steeper hills.
They're quiet.
Most of the time, and so theywere being used extensively to
poach teak and other hardwoods.
And so the Thai government justsaid no more use of elephants
anywhere logging, and thatinstantly produced a surplus of
elephants that now no longer hadany economic value.
People were buying them as pets.
People were using as beggingtools, you know, train the

(05:57):
elephant to beg and a lot ofabuse and a lot of starving
animals, a really sad situation.
This was back in the earlynineties, I guess.
So there was an elephant rehabcenter up near Chiang Mai.
And I went and worked there.
A friend of mine had a Canadianimmigrant who now runs the
equestrian center in Bangkok.
Linda Clark, she'd Got a hold ofme and said, you really got to
come and help out.
So it was a real interestingexperience.

(06:18):
Also, because at that time inThailand, it was you know, there
were a few basic antibioticsavailable, 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 intothat infected molar that
elephant has.
was pretty primitive bushmedicine, you know, lots of
Lansing abscesses and stuff likethat.
Anyway, fascinating experience.
And I've also, at the other endof the extreme, I've worked with

(06:38):
hummingbirds.
So, here's a little four grambird that, you know, heart beats
about 1, 800 times a minute.
And we had a colony ofhummingbirds that developed
fungal pneumonia.
And trying to figure out how totreat these little guys, because
you're not going near them witha needle, was very, very
interesting and challenging.
I actually written up more than40 of these cases now, and that
one was written up and it's inthe journals.

Dave Evans (06:58):
trying to treat a hummingbird that's a hard thing
to get across.

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 treatingsea otters for three months
after the oil spill and got toknow sea otters pretty well as a
result of that.
We were really on the learningcurve there.
But you know, the amazing thingabout the marine environment is
how permissive it is really.
And, you know, we had an ottercome in that had a completely
severed spine.

(07:21):
From the, basically the bottomof the ribcage down.
So complete paralysis belowthere.
She had a full term baby thatshe was successfully feeding and
she was in really good shape.
So, you know, living in aweightless environment, she
could pull it And she did, andshe survived the oil spill and
toxicity from that andeventually was released.
She'd been a terrestrial animal.
She'd be dead in a day, youknow, it's a different
environment on land that otherpredators will get you.

(07:43):
And you know, sort of I wouldflatter myself to say
pioneering, but I've done a lotof first things with fish and
sharks and things in the oceanin terms of translating what I
know as a vet into what we'reable to do in research.
And even right now, we've got aproject at DAL at the moment.
Del housing, my homeinstitution.
There's a species that wasthought to be extinct in the
province.

(08:03):
It's the Atlantic whitefishwhich is a cork on it like the
lake whitefish, but a unique oneand a few years back, somebody
got some media out of aparticular watershed here that
showed that there were a few ofthem around.
And subsequently we trapped, Ithink we got 18 little minnows
in a screw trap.
And from that start back in2018, we now are producing
thousands of whitefish a year.
So We've started areintroduction project in the

(08:25):
petite Revere, which islandlocked watershed.
So in fact, I just got an emailtoday from my colleague, John
Batt, who's running thatprogram.
And I do all of that work.
I ultrasound the fish to see howfar along they are.
When we have infectious diseaseproblems like saprolegnia, which
is a fungal skin infection, youknow, I set up the treatments
and stuff.
I necropsy any dead animalsbecause we're on a Sarah permit.
Every single animal has to beaccounted for.

(08:46):
And interestingly enough, youknow, whitefish, unlike Atlantic
salmon and trout, which we'vecultured for the last.
50 to 100 years.
Whitefish are absolutely wild.
You know, there's no tame intheir genes.
And the biggest, biggest causeof death we have for the
whitefish is basically the brownbrain themselves.
They're a real startled, burst,fast swimmer.
And, you know, if the lightsflick on or somebody slams a
door or anything like that,boom, off they go, bang into the

(09:09):
side of the tank and brainthemselves.
Basically, the single biggestcause of death we have, 50
percent of all the deaths wehave are due to cranial trauma.
So, we figured out some thingsto do with those guys.
For instance, we put 3Dcomplexity in the form of hung
tarps and their tanks to slowthem down.
We were losing less now as aresult of that, but it's an
example of how you know, youhave to sort of think out of the

(09:29):
box when you're doing this typeof work, because the things you
never expect are the things thatare your biggest problems, like
wild fish that won't tame down

Dave Evans (09:36):
Yeah.
That's incredible.
Like literally hanging tarps inthe tanks to just to slow them
down so they don't just run intothe sides.

And light levels, you know, keep the light
levels really low and then 1 ofthe things we're looking at is
phased in and phased offlighting instead of light
snapping on and off because thatseems to be a startle.
We have to be very careful.
You know, the buildings are allconcrete and they're all linked
to each other.
So we're on granite.
So it's a big monolith.
So, you know, you can havesomebody, you know, breaking
concrete a quarter mile away andthe fish are hearing it in So,

(10:02):
anything that happens in thebuilding around concrete cutting
or, you know, pile driving orexcavation, because, you know,
the guys like to bang theirexcavator shovel on the ground
to clean it.
All that has to be coordinatedso that we don't lose more fish.

Dave Evans (10:15):
Wow.
I'm excited to hear more, but Ijust thought I'd start in.
And as I think many listeners.
We'll be really shocked to learnthat we do have sharks in
Canadian waters.
I know you've already mentionedit and I have as well.
I was just hoping that you couldgive us a bit of an overview of
what species do we have actuallyhere?
And where are they?

Well, you know, we have actually more than
30 species commonly found.
And then we also have speciesthat are being seen more and
more because the oceans arewarming and especially the North
Atlantic and other than theArctic, we're in the 94th
percentile of rapidity ofwarming.
And so we're really starting tosee tropicals up here a lot
more, not just the sharks, butwe get now we get seahorses up
here every summer.
We get tropical jackfish.

(10:54):
We had a lionfish here lastyear.
We even collect them and bringthem in because they don't
survive.
You know, when the cold waterlabyrinth recurrent
reestablishes itself, they alldie from cold shock.
So we have some seahorses in ourmarine facilities that collected
locally.
This year, we're seeing more andmore.
In fact, this year Isuccessfully a green sea turtle.
It went back to Bermuda and wasreleased and it was cold
stunned.
So what happens is these guyscome up and even in November,

(11:17):
the sea surface temperaturesthis year were like 16, 17,
which is Extraordinary.
As a kid coming out here in thesummer, in the height of summer,
August, you'd go swimming atCrystal Crescent Beach and you'd
be out of the water in threeminutes.
The water was like three or fourdegrees centigrade of summer.
And that's true anymore.
In fact,, you know, the seasonsare lasting longer and longer,
and the warm water ispenetrating deeper and deeper.

(11:38):
And I'll tell you about thatwhen I tell you about my
encounter with the white sharkin open water here, because that
was a case of knowing.
Exactly why the thing would bethere, but in denial because it
was happening in November.
But anyway, so we have extraliminal sharks coming up here
we've had tiger sharks caughthere.
In fact, I helped to teach Aclass we call Shark School in
the summer and the students getto go to sea and catch blue
sharks and tag them and releasethem, which the tagging we do

(12:00):
surgically.
I've, it's either me or I have agrad student I've trained to do
implants of these transmitters.
And lo and behold, pulling ababy long.
Yeah, and there are certainlyold but the, you know, most of
the species we see are coldadapted.
They're either in the which arethe, white shark, mako shark,
poor beagle shark.
These are all species that havesome ability to thermoregulate

(12:20):
to a level warmer than the wateraround them.
And they do this withcountercurrent heat exchange
and, muscle pumps and, Storageof heat in various interesting
ways and can run some of thesespecies can run 12 degrees
Centigrade warmer than ambient.
So the porbeagle is particularlygood at it they live and they
all look kind of they're verysharky looking sharks.
They look like a torpedo We alsoget blue sharks and the blues

(12:41):
are, over the planet.
They're everywhere.
But the blues we have in theNorth Atlantic do this big
circular clockwise migrationwhere they come by every two
years.
fact, we even have a sort ofresident blue shark stock off
Halifax.
year round.
And they're mostly smallerfemale blues.
We get, them in about the twometer range typically.
And then down South we getbigger, much bigger.
Then we have all the deep seasharks, which are, an
interesting bunch in themselves,which we don't tend to see

(13:03):
because you have to go a longway offshore here to get to the
continental shelf, which is 600feet.
So all those species tend to beshelf and off shelf and deep
water, but Greenland shark.
They're caught here in halibutfishing, and they're right up
into the Arctic and rightaround, you know, till they run
into their Pacific cousin, thePacific sleeper shark.
and they're also in very deepwater, up to 10, 000 feet and
deeper.
And we have things like blackdogfish, and a lot of these

(13:25):
species are smaller, they'rebenthic, they're kind of long so
those are kind of the deep waterlocals 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 shapepopulation wise, because they're
very slow reproducing, slow togrow.
So when I lived here back in the90s, about once a summer doing

(13:46):
100 dives a year, I would see anAtlantic torpedo ray, which is a
giant electric fish, biggest ofits clan, which there are about
70 torpedo rays worldwide.
And these things look like a bigflattened pancake with a tail
and they kill their prey withelectricity.
They actually have these bigmuscle cells in the wings that
are batteries.
And most of them can give you apretty good tingle, but torpedo
is big enough it can kill you.

(14:06):
It puts out about 200 volts, 30amps.
It's an interesting animal tostudy.
I've been working on them since2014.
I started a tagging studyactually because the thing that
flabbergasted me, I've been awayfrom Halifax since 2004.
And you know, like I started tosay, we'd see one or two a
summer if we're lucky.
And I went back to some of thesites I've been diving before
and God, we were seeing six oreight at a time.

(14:26):
At one site, we found 14 of therays on site at one single time,
males and females.
And I thought something's reallychanged here.
And the water was warmer and soon.
So I started to study to lookat, cause there's almost nothing
known about these things otherthan they've been intensely
studied at the cellular andmolecular level and a ton of
work done at the Woods HoleBiological Lab, to the extent
that they actually wiped thelocal torpedo ray population

(14:48):
out, study.
So, they are again a slowgrowing 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 withgigantic cells.
inside, except these are musclecells.
And the physiologists love thisbecause they can spear those
things and check ion levelsinside and outside the cell and

(15:09):
they can wire them up.
And so the neurotransmitters,acetylcholine, all that stuff, a
on nicotinic receptors, allkinds of neuroscience work was
done using Torpedo as a modelbecause it was before everything
got miniaturized and before wehad, you know the computer
revolution and everything waskind of analog, sticking They
were fantastically easy tostudy, but they're a really cool
species.

(15:29):
I mean, they've been known sincebiblical times and they were
used medicinally.
And in fact, because theygenerated electricity, and this
is back at a time whenelectricity was actually thought
to be an invisible, fluid.
And so, early physicians, in theand Greek era, we're applying
them directly.
So if you had gouty feet, they'dput an electric ray on your feet
zap you.
For epilepsy, to the head.
For childbirth, difficultchildbirth, in fact, and a lot

(15:52):
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 earlybatteries and some sort of
beginning of understanding, anda lot of that had to do with
studying rays.
In fact, there was a medievalabbot who was a keen scientist,
and famously he got 300 monks tojoin hands in a circle, and then

(16:12):
the last guy grabbed a ray andgrabbed his buddy's hand, and it
went all around.
So, you know.
Great stories the early siteswith these things, and it wasn't
really until South America andthe electric eel was found sort
of by the Spanish as they werestarting, conquest of South
America, that a little bit ofthe interest in the torpedo went
away.
But places like the NaplesMarine Station Italy were built

(16:33):
there because there's a hugelocal population of torpedo
Marmorata, which is a little.
torpedo that's found in thatarea.
So anyway, really cool animal.
And the crazy thing is we haveno idea how long they live,
where they reproduce, all thebasic stuff that any kid would
ask you.
We have a clue.
So my tagging studies havereally been to look at movement
and behavior.
And what's interesting is I hada hypothesis that these things

(16:53):
were moving up and down thecoast because really they're
mostly found Carolinas andSouth.
And they're even there, they'renot common.
They're like once in a while.
so the idea was maybe they weremigrating on, onshore up and
down the coastline following,cause they love mackerel and
other forage fish.
And the way they kill them isquite fascinating.
They use their stealth and theysneak up and usually in the dark
and they rear up and they, youbend their wingtips together and

(17:14):
they put a jolt of electricityacross those wingtips and it
instantly shocks and kills thefish, which they eat head first.
And they have a huge stomach.
So they, you know, they've beenfound with, many, many pounds of
fish in their stomachs.
And the Atlantic torpedo gets upto across 90 kilos.
Yeah.
The bigger they are, the morejuice.
So anyway, I developed atechnique to basically dive down
there and stick them with a.
Harpoon that has a littledetachable head on it that's

(17:35):
biocompatible plastic with anumbrella thing that opens up and
this is attached to a littlecable in the transmitter.
It's a pinger.
Basically, the pinger that has aunique ID is now in the animal.
And as long as it's within ahalf kilometer of receiver,
it'll pick up that animal's ID.
So we start to get an idea ofwhere the animals are moving and
what they're doing.
So those are, relativelyinexpensive tags.
They're about 800 each.

(17:56):
And of course, economicrestraints always there.
The really cool ones that the OSearch guys and others use for
white sharks.
I mean, those things up here inCanadian dollars are seven or 8,
000 plus another 1, 800 todownload, the data.
So, you know, it's a 10, 000thing to put one of these tags
out on, on an animal, managed totag one, several ago.
We had a donated, by Barbarablock actually, who's the tag, a

(18:20):
giant tuna lady in, on the Westcoast.
And that was fascinating becausethat Ray didn't go up and down
the coast.
It went offshore.
I'll have 100 kilometers pastthe shelf.
It was in 14, 000 feet of waterwhen the thing popped up.
So they actually have a pelagiccomponent to their migration and
nobody's ever done this.
And we've only ever had themoney to do one.
But this ray anyway went to sea.
He did not.

(18:40):
It was a male.
He did not stay on the shelf.
He went way out there.
And the fascinating thing is thetag changed behavior before it,
popped and was received.
So all along the, the, the rayhad been going down to about 100
meters.
And then at night it would comeup to 50 to 20 to 10.
And it did this every day as itwas moving out offshore.
The last week before the thinguploaded, all of a sudden it

(19:01):
started doing dives to as muchas 600 meters several times a
day.
Well, guess what had happened?
A shark got that ray and wasdoing big deep dives and
probably it was a white shark.
That's, they do so it must belike eating a really strong
curry if you're a white shark.
Can you jot down one

Dave Evans (19:18):
than normal

for sure.

Dave Evans (19:21):
Yeah, that's It's a strong enough electricity to
kill you, but then you're stilldiving down with a harpoon
basically, and

Well, you know, it's funny.
I have until, I've had one setof attacks that I thought at the
time were unprovoked and Ifigured 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'requite dexterous, they won't even
leave the bottom.
In fact, I've tagged them andthen I've had to stir them up a
little bit with the taggingpull.
So the sequence is you find theray.

(19:47):
I have a tagging pole that hasmarks on it.
I put that on the bottom besidethe ray, I get up above it with
my video system, and I videotapeit.
And now we can extrapolate andactually get the dimensions of
the animal from the dimensionswe can figure out the mass.
The problem is the genitals arebig.
buried in the sand under theanimal.
So in order to sex it, figureout whether it's a male or a
female, I have to get it up andswimming around a little bit.
but we do that after we else.

(20:07):
And I've, never had a ray comeafter me after tagging, but I
have had a few weird happen.
One was that, I was dying.
I do a lot of this with afellow, who's the, head of the
ocean tracking network.
On the, supervision andexecutive side, and he's a keen
marine biologist and, Fred and Ido most of this diving together.
We've both been diving 40 plusyears.
We've got thousands of divesunder our belt.

(20:28):
This particular day I'd givenFred my big expensive, broadcast
quality camera with big lightson it.
And I'd gone down with a GoProbecause I wanted to get really
close, you know, right next tothe head, kind of a shot.
frame filling shot of the eyeand the spherical.
These things have holes in theback in the top head and they
breathe.
They can breathe down throughthat because, their mouth and
their gills are ventral andthey're mud.
So I was down there and I hadthis GoPro and out of nowhere,

(20:50):
this ray Not on the bottom,which where is the normal way up
in the water came down like afighter jet and started zapping
me and I got a few tingles offit.
It was a male.
It wasn't very big.
It was about a meter long, butit was really upset with me for
some reason.
I had not even seen it comingin.
Fred saw it coming.
He's going into his regulator.
What?
What?

(21:11):
You know, zap, So, and it seemedto be really concentrating on
the metal pole in the GoPro.
So I dropped that and it wentdown 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 thebottom and I had the pole out
and so it's buddy got up andtook off and it was a really
murky day.
The visibility was about 15feet, dark green, brown water.

(21:31):
And so, you know, I picked up myGoPro and I thought, well, let's
go see where those guys went.
So off we go.
And again, right out of theblue, one of them comes right at
me, does the same thing again,drop the pole again.
And this all happened withinabout a three minute stretch So,
The interesting thing was, Ilooked, I looked at it
afterwards and I realized that Ihad left the little blue
flashing Wi Fi light on.
I had not turned off the Wi Fifeature on the GoPro and there's

(21:54):
a little blue flashing lightthere.
And interesting story, I shouldhave known better because we
took Rick Mercer out to do open,open ocean blue, blue shark
diving for his show, which weused to do off Halifax here.
We'd go out five miles and jumpoff the boat and blues would
come in and we'd hang And We hadgiven him a GoPro on the end of
a pole, and he was like catnip,the sharks were all over him,

(22:16):
and a lot of them were doing thePolaris 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 theblue flashing light, and as soon
as I turned it off, this wholebehavior stopped, so, you know,
we think we know so much aboutthese 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 havelasers on my camera.

(22:37):
So I have the parallel set oflasers 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, Ican extrapolate that from the
image to get a pretty good ideaof the total length of the
animal in Well, A lot of thingsreally love those little green
dots and the fish just go crazyand chase them around like a cat
laser toys.
So it's, obviously they looklike a little copepod or

(22:59):
something to eat, but kind of,once you've done this for 40,
well, I guess I started divingat 15 and I'm 63 now.
So what is that 48 years, almost50 years of diving.

Dave Evans (23:08):
those are some crazy adventures.
And yeah, to turn off the bluelight on your GoPros.
Yeah.
I mean, You, you have your, youhave your book that's published
as well, and I definitely wannamake sure that we have time to
cover that and

Well, I'm I'm, I'm, an oddball because I
really, I'm a marine naturalistand it's no longer cool to be a
naturalist.
You know, you have to be intosomething a mile deep and a
millimeter wide, you know, youhave to be the, the world expert
on the, genetic makeup of aparticular obscure creature.
Subject.
And the other thing is crosscutting themes.
So, you know, everybody wants tobe doing research that, you

(23:40):
know, we'll solve the world'sproblems.
But you know, the thing is, alot of the time we don't know
the basics of what we'restarting to look at.
This happened with the otters.
I'll tell you a quick story.
When I went up to work with seaotters, I didn't know much about
seen them on the west coast, ofVancouver Island.
I thought they're animal.
They're kind of a social animal.
And they behave more likeprimates, at least the females
do in terms of social behaviorand altruism like that.

(24:02):
Showed up at the Otter RescueCenter in Seward, Alaska.
Which had just been set up andwas filling up with otters
noticed immediately that theotters were getting about 10
percent of their body weight asa ration a day.
And I knew from reading Canyon'swork and others that in the wild
and not sick, their foragingrates 35 percent body weight a
day or 40.
And for a lactating female maybe50 percent body weight a day.

(24:24):
that's a 90 pound female eating45 pounds of seafood a day.
And it's all, you know, urchinsand 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 beenshelled out and shucked and they
weren't getting any whole food.
And they all had diarrhea andthey were all losing weight
because A, they weren't gettingenough and B, it wasn't whole

(24:46):
food.
So I pointed this out to themanagement and I I said, we
really ought to try and sourcewhole food for these guys.
So we started getting urchinsbecause there was an urchin
harvest going up there andthings that were being by divers
and intact live crabs and stufflike that.
I mean, these otters were eatinga lot of very expensive seafood,
but, you know, a lot of theirproblems disappeared.
And it's an example of how a lotof the time there, the stuff is

(25:07):
there.
It's in the literature, but knowthat, you reinvent the wheel.
And certainly that's, the casewith 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 manypeople who are focused on such
narrow topics and then you onlyare able to Like present papers
that it reach a very narrowaudience and things and I think
Yeah, that's why I like talkingto the people like yourself or
other experts as well and beingable to really Open up those
topics a little bit more maybebut it sounds like you do a lot

(25:35):
of that yourself as I like thenaturalist approach as well.
I think it's still cool.
yeah It's true, okay, so I guessI have to ask this question.
I know they're very rare, butthey're people hear sharks and
they think of attacks and youalready told us about getting
attacked by a torpedo, right?
Yeah.
But is there a

Yeah.

Dave Evans (25:53):
of shark attacks in Canada?

Oh, it goes way, way back.
When Champlain came over in 1534on 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, WarmAnd, one of his men was swimming
off the boat and had his legstaken by a shark.
Undoubtedly a white.
That's the only thing aroundthat could do that.
And, bled to death on the deck.
So, you know, the First Nationspeople certainly knew there were

(26:17):
white sharks around there.
White, the shark is theirlegends and, white shark remains
are found in their middens.
Some of them stained with redochre, which means they were
some kind of a holy or ritualobject.
more laterally, I mean, youknow, the thing was a lot of
people died at sea in variousways and not very good records
were kept, but we know forinstance, there was a schooner
approaching Halifax Harbor and aman fell off and was eaten by a

(26:38):
shark immediately there was afamous episode in 1953, which by
the way, 52 and 53 were verywarm water summers.
The water was super warm.
A lot of sharks were seen.
And up in Cape Breton atForeshoe, 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 teethin the dory and the dory was the

(27:00):
only dory in the village paintedwhite, which is kind of
interesting.
So maybe mistaken identity orsomething like that.
But apparently the shark hadbeen following the boats in and
out for a week Fast forward, Ithink probably the first attack
I was involved in was back in1990.
And there was a, who was a seaurchin diver down around area.
This was I think And a guy namedDaniel McDonald and he was

(27:21):
diving off, you know, they, theyuse their, the boats they use
for lobster season.
They're all these 40 foot CapeIslanders.
He's diving in a channel offthis thing and it was right at
the start of lobster season.
They, I think it was the dumpingday was December 1st.
So it was five days in.
So I think the water was reallyfull of juicy smells.
And he was in this particularchannel he was approached

(27:43):
aggressively and repeatedly overa 15 minute period by, at the
time when I interviewed him, itsounded like a poor beagle.
It was, you know, torpedoshaped.
It had big, he noticed it hadreally big eyes and they were
sort of on the front of thehead, which is pretty typical of
a poor beagle.
And he used his urchin basket tofend the thing off.
And I think probably the UrchinBasket was what it was in.
So he flipped over on his backand he fended it off and it

(28:07):
would back off and come back anddid this continually.
And he kept his wits about him.
He got in his back.
This is a steep channel and heworked his way back up.
And the last encounter was insix feet of water.
Anyway he survived okay wentback to work but that was a poor
beagle.
And they're kind of known forbumping people who work in the
sea cages around salmon farmsand stuff seem to encounter them
fairly frequently.

(28:27):
And, you know, most of theseencounters until recent years,
until sort of social media andthe cell phone and stuff like
that happened, they'd be locallore, but unless you were in the
local community and you werefishermen in that community the
guys might talk, but it wasn'tever anything that was reported
so that was that encounter.
And probably the first realshark bite encounter that likely
happened on Friday the 13th of2021, August.

(28:50):
And a very athletic young woman,was swimming off a boat up near
Marguerite, which is on theother side of Cape Breton.
There's an island there calledMarguerite Island, which they
were right off of, which is aseal island.
In fact, it used to be calledSeawolf Island because it was an
old term for seals And she wasat the surface and there was one
other person in the water andshark bit her across the legs
and then released her and prettysevere injuries, like 120

(29:12):
stitches or something like that.
And she was hospitalized.
We've had a number of whiteshark strand.
We've also had someunprecedented, well, we've had
since my first, I believe myencounter with Michael
Schwinghammer, we encounteredthe first, we had the first
diver open water encounter.
Since then, we've had seven morein the last two years.
Nobody's been injured, butthere've been a lot of close
passes.
A duck hunter was hunting.

(29:33):
And put his dog in the water togo get the duck shark took it
out.
Undoubtedly, undoubtedly a whiteshark.
Another shark was observedtaking a deer that was swimming
between two islands and thatdeer 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 aseal and let it go, but it bled
out and washed it.
These are unprecedented thingsthat are going on, Dave.
This has never happened And It'sa sign that things have changed

(29:55):
in a pretty serious way.
And I think the story with whitesharks coming into our waters is
a really interesting one.
And it's, and I talk about thisin the book You know, a lot, the
old cautious biological refrainis, oh, they were always here.
They were always here, but notin these numbers, and certainly
not with all these crazyencounters we're having recently
with, you know, dogs being eatenand divers seeing them.

(30:15):
Divers have never seen whitesharks, really any here in shore
ever in the time, you know, inthe last 40 plus years I've been
Nova Scotia.
It's just not, doesn't happen.
So this is quite unusual, and Ithink two things together.
First of all, We have anunprecedented seal population in
the Maritimes right now.
Not a lot of sealing goes onanymore and most of it was
directed at harp seals anyway.

(30:36):
There's a little fishery forgray seals in the Magdalene
Islands and, and Quebec.
Small take of a few hundredanimals for human So seals
haven't been hunted.
I did a lot of research workover on Sable and the
population, when I started goingout there in 1990, I think the
greys were about 60, 000 outthere.
And the harbor seals are about2000.
Harbor seals are pretty wellgone now.

(30:57):
There might be two or three orfive out there.
the gray seals are numbering intheir hundreds of thousands.
And we don't know exactly howmany the estimate for the whole
maritime region is somewhereNorth of 500, 000 animals.
And they produce about 87, 000pups a year, which that's what a
white shark wants.
They want a nice, juicypredator, naive pop handle.
So we got a lot of food, thebanquets open.

(31:17):
And the other thing that'shappened is North and south of
the border.
There was a very active,aggressive headboat fishery in
the especially in the northernparticularly famous Long Island,
that area and the fishery wastargeting big white sharks.
The idea was to catch thebiggest one you could and take
it back to the dock and get yourpicture with it.
So this really selected for allthe big fecund, large, sexually

(31:39):
mature specimens because whitesthe females don't really mature
until they're about 15 or 16feet long, at which point
they're about 25, 26, 27 yearsold.
Males a little, A littlesmaller, but the same thing,
they're about 25.
So then they don't have hugelitters.
So very easy to wipe out, youknow, it'd be the equivalent of
going to the Serengeti andtaking out all the lions.
So, other interesting thing isthat in the States there were

(32:00):
very few gray seals.
Their gray seal populationalmost disappeared.
And in fact, I did a course atWoods Hole as a vet student, and
they took us out to see theseincredibly rare animals in 1983.
There were only 300 of them Andthey they were on a beach, near
the Cape.
Well, now they have aboutsomething like 30, 000, but it's
still nothing.
So, you know, we got seals inCanada and the other interesting

(32:20):
thing is doubling time for whitesharks, which you know about as
an ecologist, the principle ofdoubling time.
But basically, it's a number ofyears that it takes a single
individual to completely replaceitself as a reproductively
mature, active adult.
So how many sharks does it taketo make another?
And how long does it take?
It's about 26 years.
What is 1997 plus 26?

(32:41):
2023.
Yeah.
So we're at the tailpipe ofthat.
I think we're seeing the endresults of that measure now are
that we got white sharks uphere.
Quite a few of them.
I can tell you, I've worked on adocumentary with who's a
producer here in town.
He's the guy actually whoinitially created the Curse of
Oak Island television series, ifyou know that series.
History channel.
Yeah.
Edward Pile.
Anyway, I'd been bugging Ed foryears.
Let's do a shark documentary.

(33:02):
'cause the last one I did one in2001 on sharks in Canada and
then we did a bunch on theGreenland shark discovery we
made in Quebec.
But he was sort of hemming andhawing and then all this white
shark start stuff started tohappen and in 2020 we started,
we went out and we did the firstever white cage dives, in
Canada.
About an hour south of Halifax,And we lucked out.
We saw a lot of sharks and I gotthe first ever underwater images

(33:25):
of sharks shot by a diver atthat time.
And so we kept going back.
Edward was looking for a marketfor the show gone back down
there.
We have an expedition three tosix every year.
This an example we set up in onelocation.
We had 140 encounters over a 40period with at least 15
different sharks.
The three biggest were in the15, 16 foot range.

(33:45):
Most of the sharks we see,though, are 10 footers.
They're juveniles, and they'reactually ones that scare me the
most because at 10 feet, whathappens with white sharks is
they undergo what's called anontogenetic shift, and they go
from being, Primarily fisheaters to primarily mammal
eaters.
And none of this is exclusive.
First white shark I ever saw inCanada.
I documentary up in PEI on tuna.

(34:07):
And we were diving to try andfilm bluefin tuna underwater.
And at the end of the day, wegot out and we're in the middle
of this fleet of herring boats.
And everything's there.
There's minky whales feeding onthe herring.
There's all kinds of seabirdscoming in and taking herring off
the surface.
There's seals everywhere.
It's a total free for allbecause the herring is packed in
there and bingo.
What do you see?
There's a boat back hauling anet and the fish are falling in

(34:28):
the water right behind the boat,white shark picking them off.
And it was about a 12 foot.
So, you know they certainlywon't turn down a free meal.
They're not exclusively mammaleaters after 10 But what happens
is their teeth actually changeshape.
So fish eating younger whitesharks has sort of needle like
teeth.
And then when they hit this 10foot stage, the teeth actually
broaden and they become theclassic white shark, you know,

(34:50):
spade shaped serrated tooth.
That's more suited like a, youknow, carving knife for blubber
So, the thing is, at that age,they sort of are trying
everything on.
They're kind of like adolescentboys.
You know, see if this is edible.
And I'll example.
Again, this is related back tomy friend Fred and Ocean
Tracking Network.
The OTN uses these devices.
gizmos called Slocum gliders.
They're really cool.
They're autonomous underwatervehicles.

(35:12):
They self power using buoyancy.
They go out into the middle ofthe ocean on a pre programmed
trip and they come right backand they're trackable, they're
loaded with instruments thingslike 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 aseal or a dolphin or a fish, you

(35:34):
know, two of them have beentaken out by white sharks in the
last years.
So we know that because theysend an ROV in a vessel out and
they retrieve them and they findshark bites, they find shark in
them.
And the shark and the sizeswould tell us that these are the
10 footers this.
So, you know pretty well tryany, Pretty well, try anything.
If you don't have hands and youthink it might be edible.
Well, you're going to give it alittle nibble.

(35:54):
Right?
So that's, that's why 10 footersworry me the most because
they're still trying to figureout what you are.

Dave Evans (36:00):
Yeah, having a lot of experiences with bears in the
backcountry it's not the not theold bears.
It's the young teenage bearsthat are trying to figure things
out.
They're the ones that scare me alot.
Yeah.

Well, you know, it's funny.
People, everybody's watched somany shark documentaries.
Everybody's an expert now.
And one of the things that hashappened is we've gone full
swing from the Jaws era whereeverybody was terrified to go
near the water.
And we've now swung the exactopposite direction, which is
that, oh, the sharks areinnocuous and they're not really
interested in you.
They're very prey specific andso on.
They're not that very specific.

(36:32):
This Disney like regard forsharks is sort of panda bears,
you know, fish are friends, notfood, et cetera.
No, you know, you've got toexercise common sense, and
especially in this neck of thewoods where I am right now.

Dave Evans (36:44):
But I think that's exactly it too.
I you're saying going outlooking for great white just an
hour from like Halifax Harborkind of thing.
And I think you'd mentioned, ormaybe that was blue sharks,

Oh, well, the blues are there every summer
from July right through untilOctober, November.
We had one, I have a receiver ina particular bay where we see
lots of torpedo rays.
We had a female blue shark inthere on Christmas day.
She came in and had a lookaround 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 inshorespaces.

(37:15):
Now the whites, on the otherhand, are not afraid to come
right up into shallow water.
We had a hurricane here in thefall.
Somebody filmed a white.
right off of basically near theArmdale Rotary, which is the end
of the Northwest Arm that comesway up into the middle of
Halifax.
There was shark up there.
Had them ping in the harbor.
The encounter I had was in theharbor, right at the entrance so

(37:35):
they're definitely around.
And the big thing is we got alot of seals in the harbor.
So they come in here foraging.
In fact, it's interesting, youcan kind of tell when the sharks
are here because the seals willchange their haul out locations.
And there used to be a big haulout.
Right at the mouth of theharbor, there's some seal rocks
out there and we get up to 200grays out there and they don't
do that anymore.

(37:56):
The ones that have survivedbecause you'd go out there and
you'd see.
Big chunks missing from many ofthose seals.
We also saw a lot of dead sealswith big pieces gone.
And so some of them will moveright up into the harbor.
There's a cove called Purcell'sCove here.
That's right at the mouth of theNorthwest arm.
Bunch of them go in there.
A bunch of them go to anoffshore island.
away from where the main sealcolony is and they to be doing

(38:17):
what fur seals do in SouthAfrica.
They get a lot activenocturnally.
They go in the water at night toforage because it's too
dangerous during

Dave Evans (38:23):
Very interesting.
And yeah, I know you've alludedto it a little bit.
Would you be comfortable likeeither reading from your book
that you have about yourexperience or sharing your

Absolutely.
Yeah.
I'll tell you the encounterstory because think you know so
much, but you know so little.
Anyway, let me just pull it uphere.
Okay.
So this is this is actually thelast chapter in my book and
describing what happened.
Myself and my buddy, who's aNavy diver had gone out and it
was a very rough day, wecouldn't find a place to safely
anchor and I'd wanted to go outand try and hit our torpedo race
site and we ended up goingaround the corner and we found a

(38:54):
lee under Chibucto head, whichis the head that protects the
sort of the, I guess you'd saySouthwest end of Halifax Harbor.
We'd gone for quite a deep dive.
We went down 110 feet.
We found we're looking forshipwreck, which we missed, and
we're coming back to where theboat is anchored.
Did about 80 ft of water, andthe top 30 ft of the water was a

(39:15):
khaki colored muck that hadabout 10 ft visibility, and I'll
pick up from there as we talkabout what happened.
A few minutes after we'd startedour return, I looked up slope
over my shoulder and above ussaw a giant tuna like lunate
tail about three feet across,disappearing in the opposite
direction into the murk about 25feet away.
I was at 75 feet, Michael behindme, probably 10 to 15 feet back.

(39:37):
I just caught a glimpse andimmediately recognized it was a
tail of a great white sharkswimming right on the bottom
above us at about 60 feetsilhouetted against the surface.
I immediately turned 90 degreesinto shore to face the shark,
looked uphill where she haddisappeared, and began to signal
Michael, waving my arms whilenot taking my eyes off the spot
where she'd last been seen.
A few seconds later, the sharkreappeared now to my right,

(39:58):
again upslope, about the samedepth, but closer at about 20
feet.
The shark had circled back outof sight, uphill from us, an
excellent seal hunting strategythat cut off retreat.
It was a great white shark, thehead shape, the thick body
tapering to a narrow waist, Tothe broad caudal peduncle, big
symmetrical high aspect ratiotail, and the muted dark grey to

(40:19):
white countershake colorationall separated it from the
similar but smaller and azurecolored mako or porbeagle.
The mouth was slightly open.
There was a big characteristicpointy dorsal fin as a shark
about 11 feet long cruisedslowly by.
I could not see male sex organsand did not see any telemetry
gear attached to her.
She crossed slowly anddeliberately this time.

(40:40):
About a foot off the bottom andagain disappeared.
My heart was pounding.
Part of my brain could notcomprehend, could not believe
this late in the season we werebeing buzzed by a great white in
Halifax Harbour.
I took a quick look around 360but still had not gotten
Michael's attention.
I began banging on my tank withmy light, trying to attract his
attention while not letting myeyes stop moving.

(41:00):
Or my head stopped swiveling inconstant 360 degree scans.
Something I learned long agodiving with Greenland sharks and
bad visibility.
Then the shark appeared a thirdtime again upslope and now out
at the edge of visibility about30 feet away.
She must have circled again asecond time up into shallow
water and then come back fromthe same direction a third time.
Something surprising for aspecies known as a stealth

(41:22):
predator that mixes approachingprey.
She was sharply outlined, youcould see every detail.
She rolled past us anddisappeared.
Michael had finally seen hertoo.
As he caught sight of her, hepointed and then his head swung
back to watch the shark as shedisappeared a third time.
Now we were truly in the shit.
Still at least 100 feet from ourascent line, 75 feet down on a
deep dive requiring adecompression stop with a mammal

(41:45):
eating species of shark that hadcome back and checked us out
repeatedly.
Not good.
In dark murky water with a greatwhite that had made three
passes.
We had no idea where she was.
We were a mile from a sealcolony.
I kept seeing a mental image ofthe dead seal around the corner
with a 20 pound piece of meattaken from its back the previous
week.
I knew we had to get out of thewater as fast as we could.
Michael turned to me with hishand and his head in the classic

(42:07):
shark fin position.
I could see his eyes inquiring,I had already seen it twice, and
I knew exactly what we were upagainst.
He was still in disbelief mode.
A shark, multiple passes, agreat white, an 11 footer.
This size class of white sharkscares me most.
At this size, a great whiteshark is just shifting from fish
to a marine mammal diet, andtheir teeth change shape from

(42:28):
fish eating needle teeth tobroad steak knives suitable for
slicing seal skin and blubber.
At 10 plus feet, they stoppedtaking fish as their primary
food and are learning to killseals.
White sharks will test bitenovel objects during this
experimental phase.
And just from the book.
It goes on from there.
Yeah, you know, this is notOcean Ramsey swimming in crystal
clear water off Maui with agiant shark and 200 ft

(42:52):
visibility.
This is a shark that's beenmaking its living eating seals,
checking you out to

Dave Evans (42:56):
Yeah,

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 thebook and do you have a title for
this book

the book is called In Search of the Great
Canadian Shark.
Initially, I titled it Hunt forthe Great Canadian Shark.
And I like the word huntbecause, it is, you are looking
for these things.
And I've spent a lot of my lifeand most of my fortune all over
the world trying to find sharksand usually not finding them.
You know, you go somewhere thatwas, used to be good last year
fished out.
You know it's been a worldwidecampaign of, extermination

(43:28):
everywhere for their fins but mypublisher didn't like that word.
So it became in search of thegreat and it's being printed
now.
It's pre sold about 20 percentalready, which is great.
It's on Amazon Yeah,, it waskind of a how it got written.
I'd been locked down likeeverybody else and I finally
busted loose last went toBonaire to do some diving, a
place I love dive and came back,got COVID on the plane after

(43:52):
five needles in my arm.
So I'm at home recuperating,bored out of my head and I
started writing and you know, in14 days I wrote 70, 000 words
and that became the core of thebook and then by now it's me.
And I'm looking around andthinking, I wonder if this is
publishable because I, you know,the other two books I've done
were guidebooks and have a lotof data in a lot of information

(44:12):
and oceanographic stuff and alot of text as well as pictures,
which I'd taken underwater ofmarine life here.
The first one was a Canadianbestseller.
It was called Eastern Tidepooland Reef, which is in Canada.
That's actually 3000 is abestseller here.
10, But I kind of lost my shirton it.
so the second time around, Idecided that I'd recrudesce a
bigger book and I'd start toincorporate some of the stuff

(44:33):
that's happening the globalwarming the species changes
we're seeing.
And that book became MaritimeMarine Life.
And I self published that at thetime.
I found out great expensebecause mid COVID everything was
getting pretty expensive.
Paper was hard, paper was hardto find to print the right kind
of paper.
It was nuts, but I managed toget 2000 copies printed and it
sold.
I've got about 500 left.

(44:53):
So that's been, that book's beenpretty successful and I think
we'll sell out end of the year.
So here I have this, Thisnonfiction, which write normally
it's a memoir.
It's all the crazy stuff I'vedone underwater with sharks and
beavers and all so the firstthing I did, of course, I got
Dr.
Google at Canadian Publishers.
So as I go through, I'm like, ohmy God, it's like, Publisher
after publisher, no unsolicitedmanuscripts, you know, it's

(45:15):
like, go away, go away.
We don't want you.
And I found a handful who wouldtake it.
And the other thing is nomemoirs.
That's the last thing we want isa memoir, you know, cookbook,
anything, but no memoirs,anything.
So I finally found a handful andthen I was Googling along and I
found a company calledPottersfield Press.
It's publisher.
And they had just concludedtheir national non fiction

(45:35):
competition.
And it had just closed a fewdays before.
So I, I emailed Editor and Isaid 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 guessthey had dozens, dozens of
people, right?
Sending him in manuscripts fornonfiction.
And then I sent a bunch ofother, cold call letters out.

(45:55):
None of whichever.
Got anything back from a yearlater, still haven't from them,
but amazingly enough, about amonth later, Pottersfield emails
me a very nice email saying youwon second prize in our
competition.
We will publish your book.
You get a cash prize.
You get a royalty free copysold.
And I thought, well, that'sreally surprising.
And the other thing I thought,because I bang this thing out,

(46:17):
and I think I went through itonce after.
I submitted it in a hurry andthen I went back and started
looking.
It was like, Oh my God, thisthing is full of typos and bad
grammar and misspelling and badpagination and just bad.
It's bad.
And so I revised it, I thinkprobably 10 or 12 times every
two or three days I'd go, I'd doanother revision.
And that was kind of fun too,because I started to remember

(46:40):
things I hadn't remembered fromthe added to it.
These other anecdotes andstories and things, and probably
enriched it a bit by the timethe publishers got back to me
and I said, I'm so sorry aboutwhat I sent you, and they said,
it's no problem.
And I sent them the revisedversion.
So we've been back and forthsince then, doing the revisions
and ready to go to press withit.
And it's being printed soanyway.
So it's fun, and it's given me ataste for writing nonfiction,

Dave Evans (47:02):
that is so cool.
I'm going to be listening.
There'll be a list links in theshow notes for all of your
books, that we can find.
And and I would encouragelisteners to go check them out.
my copy of your second bookhasn't arrived yet, but I'm
definitely excited to open it upand parse through it.
Cause it, yeah, from what I'veseen, it looks really
interesting.

Yeah, you know, that book was write
because you know, there's asection in there on the
oceanography of the NorthAtlantic, which is not, a topic.
Most people know much about andwe actually have seasons in the
sea here.
Unlike the West Coast, whereit's pretty much boil all year
round here.
We actually have a summer in thesea.
We have a fall in the sea.
We have a winter.
We have the temperatures that gowith that.
The Labrador season.
Current reestablishes itself andsets up this nutrient escalator.

(47:46):
That's quite different from whatyou see on the Pacific with the
Kuroshio Japanese current comingover and sort of permanent
plankton there.
So stuff about that.
And then of course it's speciesaccounts.
So everything pretty much rightup to fish and including sea
turtles and stuff like that.
The only thing I didn't put inthe new book is marine mammals,
because that's been so wellcovered And And I could have,
but I did put all the seaturtles in and as well as a

(48:09):
bunch of weird things we've seenlike, you know, we had blue
marlin here a couple of yearsago.
We actually had one watch updead.
I did a necropsy on it at Dell.
I've done some necropsies onwhite sharks in couple of years
with a marine animal responsesociety here who go and they
attend strandings when a whaleup on shore.
Or any other unusual marine lifelike leatherback turtles,
anyway, Mars contacted me andasked me to come and help out

(48:30):
with a couple of necropsies onthese sharks.
And that's been very interestingbecause I'd never, I mean,
getting a chance to do anecropsy on an endangered
species is pretty cool.
And they're very differentanatomically.
They have some of their aspectsmammalian 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

(48:52):
Shirt.
It's open for anybody to have alook at.
It's pretty crude.
I have quite a lot of crazystuff on the Vimeo channel.
see there's video of shark sealsin there.
There's Vimeo of a blue whalethat we did a complete necropsy
on and then did the skeleton of,and it's about to go up in the
steel oceanography building atDell.
That's been a big project ofmine was rebuilding this along

(49:12):
with Chris Nelson Price at theagricultural school who've been
instrumental.
We actually composted that well,which is crazy itself to bones.
And it's been a fascinatingproject.
And then we did a right whale.
So we did a North Atlantic rightwhale by compost as well.
And the compost is workingreally well.
You know, the way people used todo big whale skeletons is
they'd, you know, flesh themout, boil them up, do as much

(49:35):
And usually if they went up at amuseum there'd be a bucket under
the thing collecting for thenext hundred years, collecting
all the oil coming out of thebones.
So we actually developed a, amethod to remove that's very,
very nature friendly.
There's really no, you know, noethylene, ethylene chloride or
anything like that.
It's all basically warm waterand liquid on detergent in
circulation.

(49:56):
And you can get most of the oilout

Dave Evans (49:57):
yeah.
So if anyone's if anyone's hasinterest in composting a whale
you're the guy to call for sure.
Yeah.

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

Dave Evans (50:15):
That's So.
cool.
I was really curious I knowthere, there's a big topic about
underwater noise as an issuewith large ocean mammals and
that kind of thing.
I was wondering if that issomething that you've

for whales.

Dave Evans (50:28):
or is that something with sharks what's your take on
that?

the crazy thing.
My next door neighbor here, Dr.
Lindy Wildgart, who's associatedwith DAL, is probably one of the
top three people in the world onimpacts of underwater noise and
sound on particularly marinemammals, which is where a lot of
the concern has been.
It's been especially concerningbecause as we go into our new
cold war, the diesel electricsub becomes a real secret

(50:53):
stealth weapon because it'ssilent and hard to detect,
unlike the boomers, whichdetect.
These diesel electrics are theones that are going to be, on
your doorstep and you won't knowthey're there.
And the way that you detect themis using this thing called LFAS,
which is acoustic sound.
It's a very low frequency, butextremely loud, basically sonic
boom underwater.

(51:13):
And it bounces off the sub in away that's detectable.
And it's so powerful that itwill for instance, damage the
inner ear bones in cetaceansthat are nearby to the point
where they you know, that'swhere all the navigation gear
is.
That's where your inner ear thatallows you to balance is.
And there've been many, manycases of animal stranding
associated with alfas use ofacoustic Survey for oil.
Seismic is another big one usingseismic air guns or explosives.

(51:38):
So cetaceans particularly, andcertainly a lot of the cetaceans
that are the deep water guysthat really rely on the use of
echo to find their prey asopposed to vision and other, you
know, Modalities are highlyimpacted the beaked whales that
dive to thousands of feet andeat squid.
And some of these other speciesare super impacted, but also,
you know, pilot whales, manyspecies now associated standings

(52:01):
associated with things likemilitary maneuvers, where
they've been using thesesystems.
Sharks are actually a little andthey really hear mostly in the
low frequency range.
So, you know, we hear up toabout 20, 000 sharks, they're
like, 80 to 800 or somethinglike that.
And in fact, there are gadgetsthat pro shark fishermen use to
lure them that are basicallyproducing low frequency, you

(52:24):
know, heavy metal kind of boom,boom, boom underwater.
There's a gizmo called the Makomagnet that people who fish Mako
in the States use, and theythrow this hydrophone in the
water and send this boom out andit There's also been
associations with things likepile driving activities, having
sharks come into the sites whenthey're piled driving, partly
the low frequency and probablypartly things getting crushed
and smelling pretty good in thewater, like shellfish and things

(52:45):
like by and large you know, ifanything, I would say Most of
what we see is attractantfactors.
So, when I've been out sharkdiving in the Bahamas and the
guy on the boat revs his motor afew times and sharks just come
from everywhere, they're, youhave to remember for a shark,
the whole side of the animal ispart of the ear, right?
They have this acousticallateral line that you can see
it's a visible structure runningdown the middle of the animal on

(53:06):
each side on the flank.
And it's a canal that has littlecommunication holes to the
outside, and then it has littlehair cells in That move when
vibration and pulse things hitthat and they set off nerves and
the nerves basically talk backto the brain and the part of the
brain that processes acousticdata and gives them very
accurate means to identifythings depending on the species.

(53:28):
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 ofGreenland sharks coming into
shallow water in Bay Como.
We'd looked for them for yearsin Quebec because there were
records of them from the sag andthey never found them, but we
kind of became known as thecrazy guys who were looking for

(53:49):
these Greenland sharks.
And lo and behold, Somecommercial diver was setting a
mooring and he had a bigsomething go by him and he
wasn't sure if it was a whale orshark, but he noticed it had a
vertical tail, not a horizontaltail.
So we were at that site, youknow, instantly because we'd
spent thousands of our owndollars and years of labor
trying to find these things.
And sure enough, there wereGreenland sharks in this bay.
We saw a whole bunch of themover the next week and they all

(54:11):
disappeared and we didn't seethem for the rest of the summer.
We did actually did a show on itwith Discovery Channel.
And so the next year we wentback, 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 hadmultiple support.
We put people on, on the sitesin the three main coves where

(54:33):
we'd seen the sharks theprevious And it was nothing.
We didn't see anything.
The conditions were terrible.
The wind had been blowing northand it blew all the fresh water
runoff back up into the bays andthe water was the color of
coffee.
So terrible.
So after a week of that, and Idon't know, a couple of hundred
man on these sites, We realizedthat sharks aren't here.
Maybe that that first year wasthe only year, maybe something

(54:54):
unusual was happening.
Maybe there was a well carcassnearby and they were all feeding
on that.
So they were coming up intoshallow water.
Don't know.
And we still don't really knowwhy we had about a nine year
period where those sharks werearound and then they
disappeared.
But at any rate, I'm giving thestory away a little bit here
because right now you'rethinking, Oh, the sharks are
gone forever.
And that's what we werethinking.
So the last day.
Cars are packed.

(55:15):
We're ready to jump on the fromback over to Matan.
From and, noticed a whole lot ofOpilio crabs.
These are the northern snowcrabs just carpeting the bottom
in one particular bay where we'dseen sharks previous year.
So we thought, what the heck,let's go take some pictures of
Opilio.
So myself and splashed in rightoff a river mouth.

(55:35):
Visibility is about 18 inches ofcoffee colored water hit the
bottom.
The bottom was only 15 feetunder the boat.
And I'm sitting there on myknees with my camera in front of
me, starting to fold my armsout, and I sense something right
out of the murk, right at myhead, big, big nose, big eyes,
went right past me, the tail hitme, it was about a 10 foot
Greenland shark.
And what was interesting afterthe encounter, and I'll continue

(55:58):
the encounter, but after theencounter, I'd lost Jeffrey
immediately.
We were probably only 3 feetfrom each other, couldn't see
each other.
I could hear his regulatorgoing, you know, Darth Vader
underwater, but I couldn't seehim.
He couldn't see me, but he sawsomething big and dark go by,
which he thought was me.
It was a shark.
It was going So I took off afterthis 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

(56:20):
big it was.
All I could see was about thismuch of the flank, and I had my
nose almost on it.
And I swam along as hard as Icould, just The shark wasn't
moving fast, but It was hardwork to keep up with it.
And we went down, down, down,down, down.
When finally we hit about 90feet and we popped out of the
brown stuff, which was murky,murky brackish water, crystal
clear underneath, freezing cold,two degrees centigrade, the

(56:42):
surface water was 14 and it waslike walking into an ice box,
but all of a sudden I could seethe whole shark me and cranked
up my lights and got pictures ofit.
Left, right, top, bottom,genital area.
All the usually do.
And then finally we wereswimming, I'm swimming across
this fjord and it's 300 metersdeep here, right?
So it's headed for the bottomand I don't know how deep I got,

(57:02):
probably 130 or 140 feet.
And then I looked at my pressuregauge and realized I was, you
know, down to a thousand poundsor something.
And I had to do a littledecompression as well.
So I said goodbye and went up tothe surface.
The whole interaction wasprobably seven or eight long and
swam back to the boat.
And as I got on the boat, mybuddy Jean Euphorie pulled out a
camera and filmed me and I toldthe story of what had happened.

(57:24):
And I look at that video now andthe hair still stands up on the
back of my neck.
But, you know, Dave, that momentwas a total epiphany and I'll
tell you why.
You know, I necropsied a bunchof these sharks when they were
stranded and, you know, therewas one that was illegally
caught and we ended up doing anecropsy thing.
And they're packed full ofmarine mammal.
I mean, when you find them, youknow, their, their stomach

(57:45):
contents, you know, a thousandpound shark can easily have a
250 pound stomach full of mostlyseal of seal.
And the question is, how is thislumbering thing that swims at 20
centimeters a second?
I mean, literally they swim mostof the time about that.
quickly.
How does something this big andslow on the bottom possibly
catch a weary, nimble, largebrain mammal prey like this?

(58:08):
Dolphins and seals and things.
And I realized I just had theseal's eye view of exactly how
they do it.
They can function very well inzero visibility.
They can find you, no problem.
You're making with yourregulator you're splashing
around.
I'll tell ya, it it was asobering moment.
And fortunately, something,obviously the shark recognized
something about me wasn't quiteright.

(58:28):
But it was coming, and it wasright on me.
And it's nose was about this farfrom mine.
And it was a fascinating butscary, in retrospect it was,
it's fascinating, but at thetime it scared the hell

Dave Evans (58:39):
no kidding.
That's an incredible story.
Wow.
And

In the book, as well as the backstory in
front, there's a lot behind thatstory and there's a lot that
comes after it that'sfascinating.
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 thesespecies.
I'm just so fascinated by them.

Although, you know, the white is
charismatic, the Greenland sharkis truly a mythical monster.
I mean, this thing is a crazyshark.
It's the second largestcarnivorous shark after the
white.
They get up to, you know, acouple of tons weight, 18 feet
long.
They are the longest livedcreature on the planet.
They're known to live They live,on the extreme, they're the
opposite of, you know the thingsthat live in volcanoes.

(59:21):
These things live in an abyss,10, 000 feet of water where the
water pressure would be, youknow, 4, 000 pounds per square
inch.
The water temperature is minusone.
I mean, these are conditionsunder which basic metabolic
processes, Krebs cycletransmission of neurons.
All the things cells do stop waybefore you hit this mark.
And yet somehow these thingssurvive that.

(59:42):
How the hell do they do it?
You know, they're really aliving miracle and also the most
extremophile animal I know of.
I mean, they're one interestingand crazy They're out there,
they're still out there in theSt.
Lawrence.
I think they're just down in thebottom at a thousand feet doing
their thing.
And we actually tagged some withtelemetry and track them.
And one animal hung around thearea.
The other one went way up theriver.

(01:00:03):
to Tadoussac, which is notreally surprising because that
is, that's where you can seeblue whales from shore.
One of the few places you canblue whale watch from shore.
It's marine mammal city there.
There's belugas, blues, and someblack sperm whales, super rich
area for marine mammals.
So if you're a marine mammalpredator or scavenger, and we're
still wondering about, you know,that's the question mark in your
mind every time you swim withone of these things.

(01:00:24):
How much of a predator are you?
How much of a scavenger are you?
And I, I like to think of theGreenland shark as kind of being
the hyena of the depths.
I think they can be both.
Quite

Dave Evans (01:00:33):
that's a really cool analogy.
Yeah.
The hyenas of the depth of justthat mix.
I've also heard heard thatthey're like in, in some
stomachs and maybe this isincorrect reporting, but that
they're, they've found likecaribou and moose and polar bear

Chris Harvey-Clark (01:00:50):
yeah, yeah,

a it's a truly Arctic.

have, there's, there's a guy if you
ever go to Iceland, theyactually, so there's an
Icelandic delicacy calledHalkark.
is fermented Greenland sharkflesh.
Now, the reason you have toferment it is it's loaded with
this neurotoxic chemical calledtrimethylamine oxide.
If you don't get the TMAO out ofthere by boiling it for a couple
of weeks or fermenting it makeyou.

(01:01:13):
very sick.
It can kill you.
So, but there, and Greenland ofcourse, famously is depopulated
a number of times in the lastthousands of years, because the,
No food.
People would settle there andthen couldn't grow anything,
couldn't catch anything and diedof starvation.
So I think the early ingestionof how carc was probably food of
desperation is probably a deadshark that washed up on the
beach.
But it's become a part of theirspring tradition there.

(01:01:36):
They eat how carc and they drinkthis hooch that's flavored with
Annie's called Brenevin.
And this is part of what you doin Iceland in the spring to
party down and tell you, I havetasted it and you know, it's, it
sounds disgusting, like sharkcheese, right?
It actually tastes a bit likecamembert, with a little bit of
a kind of ammonia aftertaste toit, but it's not nearly as

(01:01:56):
nauseating you'd think.
And it's, you know, it's one ofthose things you gotta do.
I certainly wouldn't be wantingto live on a steady diet of it.
At any rate, the guy who runsthe Haukark farm, A couple
Reykjavik has got all theseinteresting things he's pulled
out of the stomachs ofGreenland.
He has a little Greenland sharkthere and and, and the way they
make the Haukark, they bury itin the beach, secret

(01:02:17):
temperatures and stuff, and thenthey pull it out and they start
out with a loin that's about thesize of a human body.
And they bury it, they bring itup to the shed and it dries out
and it winds up being about thesize of a Virginia ham after
it's desiccated.
It's about this big and it'sbrown and it's hanging in the
air in this open air shed up atthe end of their property.
But at any rate, I had a lookthrough their little museum and
you wouldn't believe the polarbear polar bear limbs, All kinds

(01:02:40):
of seal remains, of course,remains of various crazy deep
sea fish, like some of these rattails and other fish that are
encountered in the deep sea, allthis stuff they had that they
pulled out of the stomachs ofGreenland sharks.
So a very, Catholic in terms oftaste, like they've been found
with their stomachs completelyfull of pelagic pteropods, which
are these, you know, these newto bring sea angel things that

(01:03:02):
you little sea angels completelypacked with those.
So they kind of anything outthere they'll eat.
And we often find decapodcrustacean remains in them.
Usually it's like toad crabs.
We find wolf fish in there.
They love flat fish, especiallyGreenland halibut.
And some of the necropsies I'vedone, you open the stomach up
and all the fish in there areabsolutely perfect.

(01:03:23):
they like they just came out ofthe came off the ice at the
local supermarket.
They're not a mark on them,their colors are still original.
And this is because theGreenland sharks actually
aspirate prey.
So these fishes that use,camouflage and, and Stay still
when you're near them are at atremendous disadvantage because
the Greenland sharks head isjust studded with electro
sensors and And they just swimalong in the black abyss and

(01:03:45):
they get a little electricalsignal and just go Gone, inhaled
hole not a mark on it and thenurse sharks do the same thing
nurse sharks are able to gettheir Elasticy mouths underneath
coral heads and suck things likeour octopus right out of the
hole and they do it withpharyngeal pressure.
They can generate tremendoussuction with when they pop, pop
their pharynx.
Greenland sharks do the samething.

(01:04:06):
And we know that because someresearchers at Memorial had one
of these baited remoteunderwater video stations and it
had a bag hanging in the middleof a triangle and the shark
couldn't get into the triangle.
So it was trying to suck that.
The bay go to the triangle toingest it.
And on video.
This is a few years back now.
So interesting animal.
You up in Newfoundland one wasfound with an, with the hide of

(01:04:30):
a moose stuck in its throat andsomebody had probably been moose
hunting and thrown a moose hidein the water and this thing
washed up in shallow water,still alive.
And a couple of local folkspulled 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 thinkthese things are pretty
primitive.
I know film crews up in theArctic who've gone out and

(01:04:53):
caught them at the ice edge, youknow, way offshore, put them on
a cometic, driven them, youknow, 60 miles back to the
shoreline where they have apool, throw them in there and
film them.
And they've survived thatcometic ride in air.
So they're they're toughcreatures.

Yeah.
No kidding.
That's super fascinating.
Super fascinating.
Creator like creatures.
Yeah, I guess in like a lot ofthese creatures they're either
species at risk or not much isknown about them.
And it's a really important areafor humans, for recreation for

(01:05:28):
commerce, for resourceextraction as well.
Do you have any like thoughtsabout how we can coexist along
these coastlines?

Well, I think it opens to two things.
One is the safety factors aroundthe water, and there's lots of
stuff.
I actually I did a Public a PSAon shark safety in our waters
and sort of things to avoid.
And that's that's up there onthe Internet.
I did it with the Dow studentwho basically originated the

(01:06:03):
idea, and there's lots outthere.
And it's common sense thingslike, 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 challengingbecause I've been a real
advocate of marine protectedareas my whole adult worked in
the volunteer sector trying toencourage the MPAs when DFO and

(01:06:27):
the government, when Wantednothing to do with them.
I helped convene the firstnational conference on MPAs in
Vancouver in 1990.
I did a paper on conservation ofsixgill sharks at the time they
were being fished commerciallyon the West coast and pretty
much as a result.
Where I looked at theirecotourism value, and this is
back in the nineties way beforethinking this way.
And it turned out they hadconsiderable ecotourism value.

(01:06:50):
They had no value as foodbecause they were with mercury.
And also nobody knew anythingabout their longevity at that
time.
But I, I, I think if there's onething we could do, it's, it's do
what we say we're, we're doingwith the Canada Ocean Act, which
is, we've had since 1990, but wehave not.
done our coastal protection theway it should have happened.
You know, the goal was to tryand have 15 percent of the

(01:07:11):
coastline by long ago.
Now we've passed the bestbefore.
So the production of MPAs thatare no take reserves, in other
words, you can go there, you canlook, but you can't drill for
oil, you can't fish, you can'tgarbage there you can't run your
sewage lines I think more ofthose in key areas that are
actually biodiverse.
I mean, there's been a tendencyto build it to, for the

(01:07:33):
government to put MPAs in placeswhere A, they're inaccessible
and therefore not relevant tomost of the population, and B,
where, frankly, the cookie jaris already busted.
So, you know, don't do that.
Protect areas that actually aresuper rich and biodiverse and,
and, and hot zones in terms ofdiversity.
So MPAs are one thing thateverybody should get behind, I

(01:07:54):
think.
the other thing the problem withthat is that a lot of the
species we're talking about arehighly migratory.
And so the MPA doesn't reallyyou know a shark that's going to
be, you know, a white sharkthat's up here in Cape Breton in
July and will be off a beach, aswe know from some animals we We
tagged a white two years ago,October, and in March it was off
a swimming beach in Florida.

(01:08:15):
A pinger picked it up downthere.
So these things are goingthrough all kinds boundaries and
from nation to nation and somenations do better jobs than
others.
I think being an educatedconsumer.
You know, there still are awhole heck of a lot of products
out there that be consuming.
They're based on you know, watchout for anything with squalene
in it.
It's unusual for even now forplant squalene to be used in

(01:08:37):
things like cosmetics.
Now, the family, particularlyhis mom, Sandy, they've been
very active in approaching someof the big powerhouse companies
that produce cosmetics likeRevlon and they're all agreeing
to take shark squalene out ofthere.
But we're still seeing, youknow, if you, any product you
look at, look carefully at thelabel.
If it says marine oils on thereas an ingredient that can be

(01:08:58):
coming from sharks, from Spainit's a barrel full of oil.
a lot of the time it's comingfrom, it's also in some cases,
marine mammal.
So there are places where marineoils are being extracted from
whale, seal.
And put back into, into your lapas a consumer product that's
invisible.
So educate yourself and Becauseyou know, a lot of the that we

(01:09:20):
buy are still non sustainableand certainly in the case of
packaged seafood.
I mean, that's a whole otherstory.
The stuff, you know, the cheapfish sticks we're getting at
Costco people are doing DNA workon this and finding out all
kinds of interesting things.
Some of them severelythreatened.
You know, there's a little sealantern shark called that mop
tourists.

(01:09:40):
that is about, you know, they'reabout this big, they're about
two feet long.
They're found in super deepwater.
They have a great huge liver andthey're commercially fished in
the North Sea and English otherfisheries for these things to
catch these little lanternsharks that nobody knows
anything about thembiologically, but they're
probably very old and slow toreproduce.
Squalene So, you know stay awayfrom squalene.

(01:10:05):
where you can.
You know that more than anythingwould probably help.
I think also, you know, the lastThe last frontier is the ocean
and we're still hunting in theocean.
It's like going to the plainsand shooting bison, you know,
but we're now at the point wherethe what's coming out of the
ocean versus what's coming outof aquaculture.
We pass the tipping point.
We're producing more fish inaquaculture than we're taking

(01:10:26):
out of the oceans.
That's how ridiculous it'sgotten.
So yeah, so caution in, in, inwhat you purchase.
And I think also this is true ofgoods.
I you know There are other waysto solve carbon than putting yet
another massive tax on humansour country.
Once, you know, there are other,there are other measures, you
know, there are ways to, toresolve things beyond taxation.

(01:10:47):
We already pay plenty of tax andit's an, it's the sort of tax
that would be, that will justdisappear and it will go into
general revenue and who knowswhat happen to it.
But it will not, you know, thecarbon tax that you're being
asked to pay, Is a punitive taxthat is supposed to encourage
you to consume less carbon.
Well, if it's actually aboutconsuming less carbon, let's
have a look at all the otherjunk we buy.

(01:11:08):
So I don't know about you, butreplaced all our our appliances
in this house.
And they were only eight, nineyears old and they were all
breaking down.
And the choice you had was arepairman would come and look at
your refrigerator and say, well,I can fix that for 900 bucks,
but it's probably going to breakagain, or you can go just go buy
a new one for 1300 bucks.
And that's what everybody'sdoing.
It's happening because consumergoods are being badly made with

(01:11:32):
cheap materials, but there'sstill deep carbon carvers.
I mean, the plastic and themetal that goes into this, the
landfills, go to you know, mymom 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 shouldbe made better, so they last
longer.

(01:11:52):
So we have to mine less metal,burn less fossil fuels, and you
know.
That's something I feel reallystrongly 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 withconsumer culture and I really
and the fact that all this stuffis being made to wear out and
throw away is to me is becausethe cost to the environment and

(01:12:16):
making these durable So quitcarbon taxing and start taxing
bad manufacturers for makingjunk that needs to be replaced
regularly.
That's what I think.

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

Unfortunate.
Mm

who's, who wants to know more about about yeah, fish
fraud and that kind ofrepackaging of seafood
mislabeling, we did a episodes acouple like a year or two ago
with with interviews with SeaChoice, with Oceana Canada,
Ocean Wise Seafood Program, andone of your colleagues at
Dalhousie, actually, Dr.
Sylvain Charlebois, yeah.

(01:12:56):
So we got to, yeah it's just sadwhere that's gone and on the
topic too of plastics, we did anepisode about microplastics and
the

Yeah.

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

The problem is we are such a consumer
culture.
We're also a Northern culture.
You know, we, we, you need tostay warm up here in the winter.
It's not, it's not a pleasantplace to be.
So, you know, we do burn fossilfuels to do that.
We do, we do.
We're in some ways we'reobligate consumers here because
the environment we live in, butchoices about, you know, how
many air air air, how much airtravel you do those, you know,

(01:13:31):
every time you fly in a, in ajet, boy, are you ever putting
out a whole chunk of CO2?
Do you really need to go to Cubathree times this winter?
You know, it's, it's crazy.
Personal choices like that, thatI think are as impactful and
yeah, I'll leave it at that.
Cause I'm going to try and notsoapbox too much here.
And I'm for sure I'm a consumerjust like everybody else.
We don't have a choice, so, I'mcareful

And that's, the important thing.
That's the important thing.
And yeah, I, thank you so muchChris.
It's that I've really enjoyedour conversation and yeah, I
just wanted to, is thereanything else that you wanted to
share?
I know you said that you areyou've said there's so many like
films and documentaries you'vebeen a part of, you have your
books.
I'll leave show notes for that.
Is there anything else you'rehoping to share with our

(01:14:14):
audience here today?

No, I think we really covered a lot of a lot
of the tracks.
I really I hope people enjoy thebook and I really wrote the book
to be edutainment.
So you'll see there's a lot offun and a lot of anecdotes.
There's a lot of humor, butthere's a lot of meat in there.
There's a lot you can glean fromreading that book.
You will know a lot when youfinish reading it.
Not only will you have beenentertained, but you will have
learned a lot about the planetsharks.

(01:14:39):
ocean.
And I didn't, you know, Ifigured a mono theme of shark,
shark, shark would probably betoo much.
There's a chapter in there onbeavers.
I did a lot of underwaterfilming of beavers and beavers
are most fascinating creatureand very advanced and they have,
they have family values.
They have play time.
They are really amazing animals.
All I can say, and the troublein Canada is, you know, they're

(01:15:01):
a national symbol, but.
Very few people know about themand and there's lots, there's
lots know.
But the most important thing isthey're keeping water on a, on a
desiccating, burning planet onthe ground and not sea.
And I in there about, a place inQuebec a beautiful river where
there was a large beaver familyand then the next year going
back and they were gone.

(01:15:22):
They were gone because the localmanagement of the river, which
is a fishing river, had trappedthem all.
And I had been in there with acamera filming all the brook
trout, and rainbow trout, andsalmon larvae, and salmon
hatchlings, all living in thepalisades of this beaver house.
I mean, it was the best fishhabitat you could imagine.
And the local managers, theydidn't care.

(01:15:42):
They just didn't want beaversaround because they, you know,
and it was an impossible riverto dam.
It was a very fast flowingriver.
So it's stuff like that.
I mean, I think these animalsdeserve better than we're giving
them as a species and andunderstanding how important they
are and the fact that they're ofwater on this planet where water
is becoming very precious.
To me, that was, you know, thatwas the bottom line of that

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

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 atthe end of the winter.

yeah,

no, it's things are not, not,

yeah,

be.

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

Hey, my pleasure, Dave.

I love it.
It's been a blast.
Thanks for tuning in.
Today's, what are we doingpodcast episode?
It was so great.
Thank you so much.
Dr.
Chris Harvey Clark for speakingwith us.
Absolutely blew me away.
So excited to go check outeverything else that I can, and

(01:16:57):
I'll leave links in the shownotes so that you can follow
along as well.
Now I'm your host and producerof the, what are we doing
podcasts, David Evans.
And I'd just love to thank therest of the team from the
aquatic biosphere project,specifically Paula Pullman and
Dr.
Ross Shaw for being superhelpful with getting these
episodes together.
I'd also really love to thankLeanna Bresson for editing these
episodes.

(01:17:17):
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 usout on YouTube.
We've got a video now.
Who knew?
Thank you so much.
And it's been a splash.

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