Hello and welcome back, Shark. Here's to another episode of
Deep Dives with Sharks. I am Alex, I am the host here.
I did not get washed away by one or two hurricanes.
I somehow made it. But Speaking of Hurricane Milton
did decide it was going to come right for us.
And as a Northerner, I just kind of decided I wasn't going to
play with that, so I left. Thankfully, we didn't face any
losses or damage. Goalie was out in California
during it, so she was OK over there.
And thankfully we came back and everything was pretty good in
our life, which was nice. Fortunately, some people did get
hit pretty hard. So I am going to ask that if you
guys please can consider donating to the Red Cross or
other organizations that are aiding victims of the
Hurricanes, which I will link in the description of this episode
as of course, we did do all right.
And you guys did check in, which I do really appreciate, but some
people did lose quite a bit in those storms.
And of course, we can give back. That'd be fantastic.
But no pressure If not, I did want to thank you guys for
checking in, making sure that me and my family were all right.
We all did very good. The rest of my family was up in
Maryland, so they weren't affected really at all, which is
great. And then everyone that's down
here, all of our friends made it out all right too.
So thankfully there weren't a whole lot of losses there, but I
did want to thank you guys for that.
And of course, if you guys want to follow along for more details
on the podcast or on the stream that I've been doing, you can
follow along on Instagram at Deep Dives with sharks.
Twitch is the same name there and Twitter.
You can go to Deep Dive Sharks, although I'm very bad at
updating that and I'm going to try to do a little bit better,
but I still don't use Twitter a whole lot.
So work in progress, we'll see what happens.
But getting into the shark that we have for this week, we have
the salmon shark. Now the salmon shark is a member
of the mackerel shark family, which includes the great white,
the goblin sharks, and basking sharks as well.
Salmon sharks are grayish black in color, but they have a white
belly as many sharks tend to. This is what they're counter
shading is. So that way it looks like it's
the sunlight from below or the dark depths when looking from
above. Now these sharks do get black
spots that appear as they age, so the juveniles tend not to
have the spots unless they are stressed with life's issues such
as taxes or bills. You know, things that sharks are
typically stressed out about. They look like a squished great
white or a slightly elongated poor Beagle, which I'm very
excited to do an episode on poor beagles coming sometime in the
future. And I cannot wait to find out
that poor Beagle is actually longer than salmon sharks.
So therefore they're not elongated at all, but the face
is really squished as well. It is rather short.
They have large black eyes, gills that sit a little back
then where they typically are found on other sharks, and a
longer body with a tall dorsal fin that's it's a little bit
lower on their back as well. Their eyes are also angled more
forward than other sharks, which gives them binocular vision,
which is similar to a human, although their eyes are placed a
little bit further on the side of their head.
So little bit larger field of vision.
We have about 180°. They go a little bit further,
closer to 200. They grow to be around 6.6 to
8.6 feet or 200 to 260 centimeters and can weigh about
485 lbs or 220 kilograms. So they're not necessarily huge.
They're around the average length that sharks tend to grow
to. The largest confirmed individual
was 10 feet or three meters, which of course in comparison to
other sharks like great whites that can grow to be 24 feet.
Whale sharks, of course, that can grow up in the 40s, fifties,
even 60s, and there's just others that tend to grow
anywhere about 141516 feet. These sharks aren't huge, but of
course they're not as small as cookie cutter or dwarf Lantern
sharks, which are about not even a foot long.
So very there quite a bit. Now, the salmon shark is
typically found in the Pacific Ocean in the Northern
hemisphere, in offshore waters, so really about subarctic to
subtropic waters. Some countries they live around
include Japan, the US, mostly around Alaska, Canada, Russia,
China, and the Korean Peninsula. Humans don't often come in
contact with these sharks as they are offshore, and humans
don't tend to be offshore quite a bit.
They're also not a commercial fish.
There's not a commercial market for them, which is rather rare
among sharks, especially since many sharks are caught for a
variety of reasons, but the skin and heart are seen as delicacies
in Japan. Although they are not caught in
mass for consumption, they are actually known as a nuisance
among commercial fisheries as they often damage fishing gear
going after the Fisher's catch. They can sometimes get caught as
by catch, but more often than not they're getting one over on
the fisheries versus getting got by the fisheries.
So to explain that in not weird terms, they usually do more
damage to the boats and the Nets then the Nets in the boats can
do to them. They do tend to eat salmon,
which is how they got their name, but they also eat squid,
sablefish, which look rather interesting, definitely worth a
look up. And herring.
And as you may know, salmon and herring do tend to make up quite
a big portion of fishing industries.
So when salmon sharks are going after them, they tend to bite
into Nets and that can cause the fishing gear to get damaged.
So connecting the two dots there.
Now sports fishers in Alaska and Canada will try to catch Sam
salmon sharks, but they are limited to only two a year or
one a day, depending on the jurisdiction they are in.
Now one a day does tend to sound like a lot, especially when
there's 365 days in a year or of course if it's a leap year 366.
But in the grand scheme of things, getting 365 sharks out
of the whole population is not a whole lot.
Now mind you that is quite a bit, but also sports fishers
don't tend to go out every single day, so they're not going
to really catch 365 sharks. Plus it's not even guaranteed
they'll get a catch that day. So even if they do somehow
managed to go out every single day, they might not get one.
Or if they get 2 that day, they can only keep 1.
So it does help to limit the numbers so that way they do not
plummet and the shark does not go into any sort of danger area
population number wise. Now there have been a few
reports of individuals being bitten by salmon sharks.
Of course, when you are fishing for them, you tend to come in
contact a bit more fisheries trying to get them away from
Nets. There's a food source, they're
in hunting mode. They might bite you, but for the
most part the numbers are generally low.
The food source of these sharks has declined, which has caused
the salmon sharks to hunt outside of their typical menu a
bit and also driven them into some areas a little bit closer
to shore. But thankfully they're not quite
knocking on our doorstep like other sharks such as the angular
rough shark, which has been pushed rather close to shore.
These sharks are also under Least Concern when it comes to
conservation status. They have been doing very well
out in the wild. They don't come in contact with
humans a whole lot. They don't go and get haunted by
a lot of predators and they reproduce pretty well, which
they are ovoviviparous, which means that they have eggs
internally that hatch and then they give birth later.
So their numbers are doing pretty well and thankfully
there's not a market to hunt them or go after them, so
they're doing pretty great, which is fantastic, but that of
course is what I have for the salmon shark for this week.
If you guys have any questions or want anything clarified or
anything like that, feel free to send it over on Instagram or pop
in twitch chat or send it over on Twitter.
Of course the handles were mentioned earlier, but once
again, it is deep dives with sharks or deep dive sharks.
You'll see the same logo there. But going into shark safety.
Now, one thing I wanted to talk about with this of course does
come on the back of people asking, well, we've got the
portions where we talk about how to be safe around sharks and how
to help individual sharks. And we even talked about how to
protect sharks in our daily lives.
But we're not really looking at the whole picture.
How are how are we protecting sharks overall?
So that is exactly what we're going to look at today.
And of course the main article I used was by the NOAA Fisheries,
which is NOAA. Firstly, there are many agencies
that have been working to help protect sharks and that goes all
the way from NOAA which is the National Oceanic Atmospheric
Administration, Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, Shark Trust,
Project Aware, and Shark Alliance, just to name a couple
of them. Now these agencies vary in size
but have been been instrumental in shark conservation.
Sharks do tend to rule the oceans, being an apex predator
and all helping ecosystem stay in balance through controlling
fish populations. But humans decided one day they
wanted to wade into the water and touch things because we
never keep our hands to ourselves.
Rather rude we got to stop doing that.
But humans overfished and over haunted many animals into
extinction or being endangered. Thankfully other humans came
along and realized the importance of animals and nature
and are trying to put an end all of that.
Noah has worked to protect over 20 species of sharks within the
US and has worked with other countries to set up protections
across many oceans. Now you may have recently heard
of NOAA a bit as they do help the track and monitor
hurricanes. And as we started this episode,
it's hurricane season. Quite a few have been forming.
So they've been mentioned quite a bit in the recent news.
NOAA overseas the commercial and recreational fishing in the US,
meaning they can limit how many fish are caught legally.
This of course they can try to limit poaching, but that comes a
whole another different conversation.
They also partner with the DNR, which is the Department of
Natural Resources on enforcement of regulations as well as
regulation adjustment. Outside of the US, many
organizations have come together to aim to limit the number of
sharks caught in different countries, including those that
frequently consume sharks for a variety of reasons.
Some organizations were able to introduce imitation shark meat
to countries that frequently consume shark fin soup, which
has had some success. Although similar to Beyond
Burgers and Impossible Burgers, some people just feel like it
doesn't replicate the original enough to be worth trying and or
continuing to consume. For me personally, when it comes
to Impossible burgers or Beyond meat, anything like that that
I've tried, I feel that it tastes pretty similar to what it
is aiming to be. I do love a good cheeseburger of
course, and I am now realizing I should probably be eating more
Impossible burgers than regular burgers since they help the
environment and have some health benefits, but they also do have
a butt load of sodium. But you know when some lose
most. Which is a quick shout out to
Grass, Geno and Amelia for the amazing phrase.
And I don't even know if they listen to this, but if they do,
I'm still using that phrase. Guys, thanks.
But of course you may be thinking.
So really the only hope I have is to just hope an organization
can set up regulations to protect sharks.
Well, not really. As previously mentioned, you can
support companies and products that do not utilize shark bits
or contribute to overfishing practices, which is why you got
to check what you are buying. You can also write local
legislators to push for more protections for sharks and for
our oceans overall. I am planning on flooding my
local legislators with so many letters about protecting sharks
and all around Florida, especially with the upcoming
election, which I do need to go into a minor political rant once
again. So if you are living in the US,
of course, as you know, the election is coming up November
5th. And all I got to say is just
please go vote and please go vote for those that will protect
the environment and the sharks and the oceans.
I don't see how we could all be here.
Listen to this podcast, spending time together, having a good
time. I assume we all love sharks and
the oceans and things like that and then look at all this and
figured that you need to vote for someone who's not going to
do anything to protect those things.
So all I'm asking, please go out there, have your voice be heard.
If you're outside the US, sorry this doesn't pertain to you at
the moment. But when your elections do come
up, if you have those, please support politicians and local
leaders who will help to protect the oceans and the sharks around
us. It's how far political I'm going
to go with that. But that of course, is what I
have for the safety segment of this episode.
Once again, if you guys have any topics or anything you want me
to talk about or anything like that, send them over on social
media. I'll also eventually get an
e-mail if you guys be more comfortable doing that.
I think I have one. It might be deep dives with
sharks at Gmail. I'll double check that and
update that in a little bit. But I'll also put that in the
link of this episode description.
So you guys have another option to reach out to me, which is
fantastic. But going on to Shark News now,
we do have two stories once again.
The first one is that UCSB researchers use drones to
develop shark prediction technology.
And this comes from KCBX, FM, Central Coast Public Radio,
which I could probably do a better radio voice, but I'm just
trying to read this because I've messed up recording it 16 times.
So that's fun, but the, as the title says, University of
California, Santa Barbara is trying to create shark
prediction technology by monitoring ocean water
conditions that would be favorable for sharks.
Now they're mostly utilizing drones currently to monitor
where the sharks are going, but there is already a lot of
technology out there such as acoustic tags and things like
that, that are monitoring the sharks directly.
So of course this hasn't fully helped to prevent shark bites.
It's probably limited a few, but for the most part it hasn't
really stopped anyone from getting in the water or anything
like that. So they figured why are we only
looking at the sharks instead of what brings sharks towards
shore, which tends to be that warm water that comes to the
surface, especially as deeper waters tend to cool.
So all that water gets pushed towards the surface makes it
nice and kind of like a bathtub. If you guys have ever had a
really rough day and then the shark here is decided, you know,
I'm just going to hang out, have a nice little bubble bath and
calm down. It's usually nice and warm.
Well, when that surface water gets really nice and warm,
that's when sharks tend to come up and they get to have their
own little bath, as some would imagine.
But this of course can bring sharks closer to shore as the
water will be warmer. The shallower it gets suddenly
get closer and closer to the beach.
Now monitoring for things such as current water temperature,
food, population, things like that, if their food is coming
closer to shore and the warm water is coming closer to shore,
you've got a pretty good equation for a shark to come
closer to shore. Now, this doesn't mean that
they're going to start closing beaches or anything like that.
We're not having the Amity Island where we're just going to
close the beach because there was a shark.
That's not the greatest idea. Although in that movie, they
should have probably closed the beach for a little bit because
that shark was he was nuts. I'd there's nothing better I can
say about Jaws. Jaws was just nuts.
But what this is not to close beaches or to ruin anyone's fun.
It's more to make sure that we can try to limit the number of
bites and make sure that people are able to be informed before
they get into the water and things like that.
Because often times people may notice, oh, there's an uptick in
shark bites but not realize where it's coming from.
And they'll still go in the water thinking, well, it can't
happen to me, but there have been quite a few.
We still aren't outside of the national average or anything
like that. And as of course, the seasons
begin to change, those shark bites will go down again.
It's more of a density problem as we talked about earlier,
rather than the sharks are going crazy and trying to bite
everyone, which rather nice. But hopefully with this
technology, they'll be able to alert local authorities so that
way signs can be put up warning people that there are favorable
conditions for a shark to be closer to shore.
So that way people can be well informed before they get into
the water versus having to see someone get bit and then your
only reaction is to run away or or try to help.
Which once again, as always, please do not put yourself in
danger if things are already handled or if you feel that you
are not equipped to handle the situation, make sure you keep
yourself safe. Everyone asked me that quite a
bit. I don't want you to put yourself
in danger to save a shark or save someone else.
You have to save yourself sometimes, but that's what I
have to say about that. Now going into our next topic,
we have Teen surfer survives shark bite in Florida and this
one was reported by The Inertia. Now I do really like how they
presented this article. They don't focus on how
terrifying the experience was or that the shark is a monster,
that it was an attack. They call it a bite and present
it pretty factually. So to go over it very factually,
a 16 year old surfer had fallen off his board and was reaching
to get back on when a 5 foot bull shark decided to grab onto
his arm for a couple seconds and then let go.
The surfer begin paddling back to shore, yelling for help and
only focusing on the fact that he needs to get back to shore to
get help. He did catch himself realizing
that he was bleeding pretty bad and could attract another shark,
but sharks tend not to go back due to a lot of commotion.
Usually when there's yelling, screaming, things like that,
they tend to not want to be involved in that.
And also especially since it wasn't a good meal, the shark
wasn't about it. So thankfully he was all right
and did not get bit a second time.
He was able to get back to shore where they were able to stop the
bleeding by tying a tourniquet by his shoulder, which I did
mention before. Tourniquets are very helpful,
definitely look into how to use those properly.
But thankfully he was OK. They were able to stop the
bleeding and then get him over to the hospital where they found
he did not have any ligament or tendon damage and would be able
to make a full recovery. He stated he plans on returning
to the water as soon as he is able to, noting he didn't want a
small bite, well a small speed bump as he changed the two to
control his life. So on this, the story really
focused on the facts of what happened without adding a lot of
fluff or filler about how terrifying the shark was or how
horrible the incident could have been.
Of course, the incident could have been much worse, and I'm
very glad that it was not. But a lot of times you'll see
different news stories talk about how horrifying and how
terrible and the screaming and all the blood and everything
like that. And it's like, yes, like this
does happen during a shark bite. But at the same time, we're out
here kind of villainizing sharks for being a shark.
Like they're trying to figure out what we are in the kind of
took a little bite and realized, oh, snap, they're really,
they're really fragile. That's not great.
So I love stories when they report like this.
They tell you what happened, where it happened, what the
outcome was and how the person's doing.
And thankfully in this case, the surfer seems to be doing very
well. I do of course know that it will
take time for him to get back in the water, but I'm hoping it
happens faster than he thinks it will, and I'm hoping it happens
very soon. But of course, this is one of
those situations where it was reported very well.
It seems like the surfer's doing great and it's kind of just the
the best of a bad outcome or best of a bad situation.
I should say it was a good outcome.
But yeah, one of those best of a bad situation moments because
yes, this is unfortunate, but it wasn't really hyped up in the
reporting and thankfully the injury was minor at at most with
this like it, it's it's going to take some recovery and some some
time to to heal. But it was very, very good
outcome of this and I wish him a speedy recovery there.
But that of course, is what I have for this episode.
I want to thank you all for listening and tuning in and
sending all your things and all your love and everything there.
You guys are absolutely incredible.
And I know I thank you constantly.
But once again, it's just wild to me that I get to talk about
sharks and y'all want to listen and send me more sharks to talk
about, which I really, really appreciate.
So of course, thank you all there.
Follow on Instagram or Twitch at deep dives with sharks to get
more sharky content there. And of course on Twitter at deep
dive sharks, which I think I need to update a whole bunch.
So we'll see what happens there. But feel free to send in any
questions, comments, concerns, anything like that.
And of course, give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, anywhere
where you're listening. The higher the rating, the more
likely it is to pop up when people search for Shark Podcast.
And hopefully we'll get more listeners, grow the shark here
is a little bit more and of course, also the sharky bobs.
But you guys take care, be kind to each other and I will see you
in the next one.