Sharks

Hollywood has a lot to answer for when it comes to how we view sharks. The Great White, we all know. But sharks have been around since before the dinosaurs, and in that time they’ve evolved into 538 different species of all different shapes and sizes – and counting. Sharks with glow-in-the-dark armpits, sharks that can fit in your pocket, sharks with spots, sharks with frills. Isla Hodgson joins Hannah in the studio, and she’s got some astonishing shark facts up her sleeve.

We’ll also meet Shaama Sandooyea, a climate activist from Mauritius who staged the world’s first ever underwater climate protest.

Isla Hodgson (Intro):
When you’re out at sea, and you’re trying to, you know, have an encounter with a shark, you know, quite often the visibility is not that great. So the waters usually quite murky, you’ve got nothing beneath you apart from this, this vast expanse of ocean. And then kind of all of a sudden, out of the gloom comes this incredible, magnificent kind of silhouette coming towards you. And it’s almost like time stops. And you feel very, very much, in that instance, you feel very, very much out of your depth, because sharks have been around for over 400 million years. And so that’s a lot of time to fine tune and evolve and become, you know, almost like the most efficient, most perfected version of something. And you’re just kind of watching it go by and not, go about its daily life and not be interested in you at all. And it makes you feel small, but sort of in the best way that that could possibly mean.

Hannah Stitfall:
You’re listening to Oceans: Life Under Water, a podcast series all about the oceans and the fascinating creatures that live within them.

I’m Hannah Stitfall, and in this episode: Sharks.

Isla Hodgson (Intro con’t):
I think we’ve made quite a lot of progress, if you think about where we were sort of back in the 1970s, when Jaws came out. The perception of sharks as man hunters started, you know, way before that.

Hannah Stitfall:
They date back to over 400 million years ago, making them older than the dinosaurs. And while you’ve probably heard of the great white, and the hammerhead, did you know there’s also something called the goblin shark, the megamouth shark, and the cookie cutter shark.

Isla Hodgson (Intro con’t):
What they use these pockets for is that they are filled with a bioluminescent goo. And what happens we think when the shark is threatened is that they spew out this bioluminescent goo into the surrounding water. So essentially, they have glow-in-the-dark armpits.

Hannah Stitfall:
This is Oceans: Life Under Water, Episode nine.

My guest today is Isla Hodgson. She’s a research scientist and a science communicator for the Save Our Seas Foundation, an organisation dedicated to the protection of sharks and rays. She produces and hosts their official podcast World of Sharks. And she has worked for years as a shark guide. And it gives me great pleasure to welcome live into the studio today from Scotland. Hello, Isla!

Isla Hodgson:
Hello! Hi, thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. And what a lovely introduction as well.

Hannah Stitfall:
Well, listen, thank you for being here. Because we know you’re in the middle of moving house. And you’ve you’ve put all your boxes to one side to come and talk to us about sharks. So we really appreciate you coming on. Thank you.

Isla Hodgson:
Oh, you’re welcome. It’s nice to have a sit down actually and a cup of tea. And put my feet up for a bit.

Hannah Stitfall:
Bless you! So, let’s get into it. So talk to me about all of the different kinds of sharks that are. Where do they live? And what’s the biggest, what’s the smallest? Just give us an overview of the sharks.

Isla Hodgson:
Wow. Okay, that’s a, this is a really big question, because as you said, there’s a lot of different species of shark. And I think a really good place to start actually is, our perceptions of sharks and what we actually think of when we think of a shark.

I imagine a lot of our listeners, if they close their eyes, and they heard the word shark, they would immediately think of what I like to call Hollywood’s classic shark species, which is, you know, your big, muscular predatory shark with the big sharp teeth and their little black eyes. That is not the full story.

So when we are talking about sharks, we’re talking about an entire group of fishes. So that sort of first thing they’re sharks are actually fish. And if we go right back to basic taxonomy, and we look at our fishes, we can split them into two categories.

So on one side we have our bony fishes, that’s your things like your salmon, your tuna, your mackerel, and these guys will have a skeleton that is made out of bone, just like you and I.

But if we look at the other side, we have this whole other group of fishes called the chondrichthians, which are the cartilaginous fishes and rather than having a bony skeleton, they have a skeleton that is made entirely out of cartilage. So if you take the tip of your finger and you wiggle the end of your nose around, or you feel the top of your ear, that exactly like that. And you feel this kind of tough, rubbery substance. That is what a shark’s skeleton is made out of. So that is our cartilaginous fishes. And this is a vast group of fishes. So within that we have our sharks, of course, but we also have close relatives of the sharks, which are, two of which are rays and skates, which are the same thing as sharks, they have a cartilaginous skeleton, but they’re sort of flattened like a pancake, I’m sure quite a few people are familiar with them.

And then we also have a group of animals called the chimeras, which we aren’t going to get into in this episode, but they are a super cool group of animals. They are really ancient lineage. So we think a lot of our shark species evolved from chimeras, hundreds of millions of years ago, which we’re gonna get into a little bit later on in the episode.

But within this big group of cartilaginous fishes, we have the sharks and within the sharks, we have a vast number of species. So it’s very hard to have an accurate number of how many species of sharks there are, because we are discovering new species all the time, probably as I speak, there’s a deep water scientist, somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, pulling up a brand new species of shark that has never been described before by science. And but at time of recording, we are standing up over 538 different species of shark, which is phenomenal! And they come in all different shapes, sizes, different colours, even. They’re a hugely diverse group of animals.

And we know for definite what the largest species is, that is the whale shark. So they are actually, they are sharks, they’re not whales, and but they’re called the whale shark because of their size. So they can reach maximum length of 18 metres, that’s almost 59 feet, which is just mind boggling. But the most amazing thing about these sharks is that they’re actually something called a filter feeder, which means that rather than like great white sharks, they’re not kind of swimming around the ocean hunting seals or hunting larger fish, they are actually filtering water through their mouth through a mechanism in the mouth and catching lots of tiny, tiny, tiny little organisms out of the water called plankton. So that’s things like krill, tiny little fish, tiny little jellyfish. That’s all the things that our largest species of shark in the world is feeding on. So they’re effectively like a kind of giant underwater vacuum, if you like, they’re sort of swimming around the water, sucking water in and extracting all these tiny, tasty little morsels out of the seawater.

Hannah Stitfall:
And what’s the smallest species of shark then?

Isla Hodgson:
So this is where the waters get a little…

Hannah Stitfall:
That we know of!

Isla Hodgson:
…muddier. That we know of, yeah. So there’s two species that are kind of vying for the title of this.

So for the longest time, we thought it was something called a dwarf lantern shark, which is a deep water species that kind of reaches a maximum of 20 centimetres. So if we think about a whale shark, which is the size of a double decker bus, a dwarf lantern shark can fit inside the palm of your hand, which is just amazing. And they come from a family of sharks called the lantern sharks, which is a deep water species of shark, or a family of sharks that exist in deep water. And if you think about the deep sea, you know, there’s not much light down there. It’s very, very dark. And so if you’re an animal living in the deep sea, you typically have to try and you know, make a form of your own light to be able to either communicate with other animals or even to hide yourself from prey. And this is exactly what our lantern sharks do. So they have light emitting organs called photophores on their belly and their fins that can produce light so they can effectively glow in the dark.

Hannah Stitfall:
Wow! That’s so…

Isla Hodgson:
Yeah, it’s amazing. Quite a lot of sharks can do this, which is just spectacular. But for the longest time, people thought that the dwarf lantern shark was actually the smallest species of shark. But then another species came along, which is called the pocket shock.

Hannah Stitfall:
Oh!

Isla Hodgson:
Uh huh. Uh, huh. Called the pocket shock for two different reasons. The first is that it could actually fit in your pocket. So this guy is 14 centimetres, so that’s a whole six centimetres smaller than our dwarf lantern shark. So that’s about five to six inches, for people who maybe need that converted. And there are a species of shark within the kite fin shark family, which again, is a deep water species. And so again, these guys can produce light.

So the second reason that they are called the pocket shark is because they do this in a slightly different way to our dwarf lantern shark, in that pocket sharks have this little pocket of skin underneath their pectoral fins. So for you and I that would be the equivalent to our armpits. And what they use these pockets for is that they are filled with a bioluminescent goo. And what happens we think when the shark is threatened is that they spew out this bioluminescent goo, into the surrounding water. So essentially, they have glow-in-the-dark armpits. This tiny little shark.

Hannah Stitfall:
I’d like some bioluminescent goo that I can spew out my armpits when I needed to. Could you imagine? That’d be great. What a party trick!

Isla Hodgson:
Yeah, it’s quite a statement, isn’t it?

Hannah Stitfall:
It’s a statement and a half! That’s incredible!

Isla Hodgson:
It’s amazing, isn’t it? But we can’t quite say that the pocket shark is the smallest species because we have only found two of them. In the entire world, there’s only two specimens that exists.

Hannah Stitfall:
Oh! I, when you said that, I thought you meant two species of pocket shark. No, you mean, there’s actual two individuals that’s ever been found.

Isla Hodgson:
Two individuals. So one was found in 1979. And the other one was found in 2010. And actually, funnily enough, they are two separate species. So two separate species of pocket shark, but only two individuals, so only one individual of each species has ever been found. And so we don’t know if these pocket sharks, you know, we can’t say for certain that that is the maximum size that they grow to because we only have kind of one to go off.

Hannah Stitfall:
I mean, yeah, yeah, I did. I did zoology at Uni. I know datasets is quite important. You can’t really, two individuals many, many years apart, you can’t really infer a lot from that, can you?

So why can’t we find any more pocket sharks? Are there people out looking for them, I feel like we need to like find some more.

Isla Hodgson:
I know, I mean, I don’t think it’s for lack of trying. It’s because again, there are deep water species. So you’re not going to find one of these, you know, diving in the ocean or swimming around the ocean.

Typically, the way that we find a lot of deep water species is when they’re brought up in trawls. And so a lot of the time, that’s how we discover new species. You know, you might have a scientist on board.

Or sometimes what happens is we have a lot of kind of very weird specimens in a museum that have never been described by science. And people just kind of find the specimens in a museum, and then scientifically described them. And then you know, that all of a sudden, we have in a species that’s brand new to science, even though it might be from the 1800s or something like that.

So that’s usually how we come across them. But if you think about how big the ocean is, and how deep the ocean can get, it’s pretty… it’s by chance that we sort of come across these species. So yeah, it’s you can’t, you can’t exactly drop into the ocean and go, I kind of want to find a pocket shark today, as much as I would love to be able to do that.

Hannah Stitfall:
Any of any of our listeners that are going to start a PhD in marine biology, I say I say pitch the pocket shark. We’ll come along.

Isla Hodgson:
Deepwater sharks is where it’s at; they are weird, they’re wacky, they glow in the dark most of the time, which is just amazing. We have another species of lantern shark actually, just to sort of add weight to this argument.

We have another species of shark called the velvet belly lantern shark, and they have those kinds of light emitting organs, those photophores on their belly, but they also have two light emitting spines on their back.

So that was a very long winded answer to the question of what is the smallest sharks. So basically, there’s a handful that could deserve the title. But the main messages is that we get sharks that go right up from you know, 59 feet, right down to sharks that that can fit in the palm of your hand. And there’s all sorts of shapes and sizes in between.

Hannah Stitfall:
We know that we get sharks around the UK in our waters, I mean, up where you are, you get a lot of basking sharks, we used to get them in Cornwall, not so much anymore. We get the blue sharks down in Cornwall, where I live every year. Usually towards the end of the summer, I still haven’t swam with them.

Isla Hodgson:
It’s on my list.

Hannah Stitfall:
Come to Cornwall, and we’ll go we’ll go this year. But I guess those those two species of sharks are sort of the ones that we think of around UK waters, especially if we’re into marine biology. What other species of shark do we have here?

Isla Hodgson:
It’s a really good question. So we have roughly around 40 species in the UK, which I think a lot of people are really surprised by. And at least half of those are resident which means they are present sort of all year round.

One of them is the spiny dogfish or the spear dog, who’s a relatively small species of shark, they’re quite cute in my opinion. They have these kind of big round eyes, kind of round snout, and they usually sort of hang around on the seabed or something times you’ll see them sort of free swimming over rocky reefs or you know, across the rocky bottom of the seabed. And there are really beautiful little species of shark, these guys can also glow in the dark as well. And they are one of the few venomous species of shark in the world. They’re called a spear dog because they have these little spears on their fins, which contain a very, very mild venom. So for people who are panicking, they’re thinking, Oh, God, there’s a venomous shark, you know, in UK waters. It’s a very mild, very mild…

Hannah Stitfall:
Isla we need to do more for the PR of sharks.

Isla Hodgson:
I know, I thought about that as I said that. Forget about that!

Hannah Stitfall:
Generally… carry on.

Isla Hodgson:
You would have to try very hard, for one thing, to be stung by one and fishermen who have picked them up by accident, and you know, got quote/unquote, “stung” by one of the spears, they say it’s just kind of like an irritating, it’s like, like a nettle sting. So yeah, they can’t hurt you. They’re very harmless. And also, they’re very, very, very small.

We also have another species of shark that’s quite similar to a spear dog called the small spotted cat shark. They’re really beautiful little species of shark and we find them kind of all around UK coastlines. And the biggest evidence of this is that you can often find their egg cases on beaches, so I actually… I feel very much like on Blue Peter.

Hannah Stitfall:
Oh! Oh, she’s got one. She’s got one! We love it.

Isla Hodgson:
Here’s one I made earlier. Mermaid’s purses, a lot of people in the UK will be familiar with these, you can often find tonnes of them washed up on the beach. And these are quite often in the UK small spotted cat shark eggs. And so that’s really cool. It’s like kind of being connected to that sort of underwater world when you find one. They’re designed to look exactly like a tiny little piece of kelp. And so what a female small spotted cat shark will do, she’ll commonly lay them in pairs. And she’ll lay them sort of around the kelp so that they’re disguised, they’ve also got these curly tendrils to attach onto the substrate so that they can’t, you know, fly off and you know, be taken away by the tides or the currents. And this is what a little baby shark will grow in. So we often find the egg cases sort of after the shark has hatched out of that, which is just really beautiful and cool.

Hannah Stitfall:
So one species of shark I know that you’ve seen and that’s the basking shark. They’re just, they’re huge aren’t they?

Isla Hodgson:
They are enormous. So we were talking about the whale shark earlier, the basking shark is the second largest species of shark in the world. They can reach lengths of up to 12 metres, the largest that we ever have on record is 12.2, which is enormous, and I can attest to the fact that they are big, big fish. But they often get bad press in the UK because if you think that you see a 12 metre shark hanging around our coastlines. They also have a one metre high dorsal fin. So it looks like an enormous shark, and they are enormous sharks. And we will often see those kinds of headlines in the Daily Mail. That’s like massive shark stalking UK coastline. You don’t need to be afraid of these guys at all. They are truly our gentle giants. So they don’t actually have any teeth at all. What they do have is essentially a giant sieve inside the mouth. So they have these big structures called gill rakers, which fully encircle the head. And they effectively act like a giant filter. And there are absolute filter feeding machines. So they can filter up to 1 million litres of seawater per hour

Hannah Stitfall:
Per hour?!

Isla Hodgson:
Per hour.

Hannah Stitfall:
No. Really?

Isla Hodgson:
Yeah, it’s pretty cool. And I often get asked a few questions about basking sharks about people who are a bit worried about them. And they say, okay, but you know, what if I were swimming, and somehow I got into their mouth, which is, you know, people are worried about that, because a basket shark’s mouth can be up to a metre wide. So you can imagine yourself, you know, fitting in there, but they actually have a very tiny throat, so their throat is no bigger than a tennis ball. So even if somehow you managed to get stuck inside its mouth, it couldn’t swallow you even if it wanted to.

Hannah Stitfall:
I guess. I mean, my next question was going to be about, you know, you and your job, but you must spend a lot of time you know, myth busting, because there are all these myths about sharks and how they’re all, they’re all ferocious killers. And you know, and that’s a big part of a part of your job to try and get the PR of sharks up. But it’s also it’s very difficult when we don’t know that much about a lot of them.

Isla Hodgson:
This is this is very true. And obviously you said there one of the biggest myths about sharks is that they are these kind of bloodthirsty mindless killers that have a taste for human flesh. And that sort of perception of sharks is driven quite a lot by Hollywood. So there’s a lot of films out there still that portray sharks, it’s usually a great white shark. They’re usually very clever. And you know, a human enters the water and the shark is instantly like, there’s a human over there, I must go and investigate and gobble that human up. But that just doesn’t happen.

Hannah Stitfall:
You wait, you wait Isla. After this is going to be the next, the next baddie shark is going to be a pocket shark. Gonna be shooting it’s bioluminescence out you wait, they’re gonna pick up on this in Hollywood.

Isla Hodgson:
I would love that. That would make me laugh so much. Just this all we have tiny little sharks come into blind humans with their bioluminescence.

Hannah Stitfall:
But I mean, how, how dangerous are sharks really to humans? I mean, they don’t they don’t see us as a food source.

Isla Hodgson:
No, no. But we do have to acknowledge here that we call them ‘shark bite incidents’. So to call it ‘shark attack’ is quite antagonistic, it implies the shark is actually doing something on purpose. Whereas a lot of time, a lot of the time it’s not.

So shark bite incidents do you happen, but the actual fact of things is that it’s incredibly rare. And it’s usually not a case of a shark actively seeking out a human to eat, which is you know, how it’s kind of portrayed in the media, you often in the media, you often see language like shark stalked human or shark attacked human, that is not what happens in the wild.

A lot of the time, you know, the shark will either have mistaken a human for a prey species, or it’s an investigative bite. So it’s kind of trying to if you think about it, sharks don’t have hands or you know, they can’t come up to you or I and sort of, you know, touch your face and try and figure out what you are, you know, they use their mouth, you know, much like a dog would.

I can’t stress this enough, these situations are incredibly, incredibly rare. So there’s actually a really, really good website called the International Shark Attack File, which is run by the Florida museum. It’s been running since the 1940s. It’s the the most comprehensive database on, you know, human shark incidents in the world. So if something has happened, and it’s been documented, they have the data on it. But across the entirety of last year, there was only six or seven fatal incidents across the entire year. And we’ll often hear the statistics, you know, you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a shark or you’re more likely to be run over by a car. And a lot of people say to me, obviously, that’s the case because you know, we’re walking around on land, you know, we’re gonna encounter things like lightning and cars more often, but there are statistics on being in the water as well, where it shows that the chances of a shark attack is incredibly, incredibly rare. So you have more chance of being stung by a jellyfish and having a fatal reaction to a jellyfish sting than you do encountering even encountering a shark in the wild. And there’s a lot of footage to support this, you know, there’s a lot of drone footage now drones are becoming more and more popular. And there’s tonnes of footage of sharks swimming alongside surfers, swimming alongside humans. Not being interested in this slightest.

Hannah Stitfall:
Let’s have a quick break from our shark chat. Don’t miss out on the amazing bonus content the team has been making for you, including some seriously weird shark videos. Come check us out @oceans pod on Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok. Okay, back to Isla.

Hannah Stitfall:
Over the years throughout your your work. I mean, I guess when Jaws came out many, many moons ago now, you know, the public perception of sharks around the world was you know, rock bottom. Sharks. Dangerous, terrifying. No good. Would you say that perceptions are now warming to sharks as they are warming more towards ocean conservation… Do you know what I mean? Would you say it’s getting better? Or we’ve made a bit of progress surely?

Isla Hodgson:
I think no, I think you’re right. I think we have made I think we’ve made quite a lot of progress. If you think about where we were sort of back in the 1970s when Jaws came out, and I mean, the perception of sharks as man hunters started, you know, way before that.

So roundabout the 1800s when we had Victorian game hunters, that’s kind of really where that perception started. And it just grew arms and legs as the as time went on, more people were swimming in the water more people were seeing these animals and then Jaws came out and it was kind of like a match to a tinderbox. So we kind of were in a really, really bad place at that point with shark conservation.

Whereas I think now, social media has been such a powerful tool. And being able to showcase a) just how diverse a group of animals sharks are, like we said, here we have sharks who, you know, kind of go right down, you know, to into the deep, deep sea, right up into the shallowest waters. We have sharks on coral reefs, we have sharks in seagrass beds, you know, sharks are a part of every single ecological niche that you can imagine in the ocean, or pretty much anyway.

And I think something as well, that has changed people’s perceptions of sharks, is the fact that so much more information has come out about our impact on them. Some form of shark has been around for 450 million years, which is a astounding amount of time. And just to sort of hammer that home, so the dinosaurs were around, you know, 220 million years later than that. Sharks have been around for 220 million years more than the dinosaurs. And they’ve also outlived the dinosaurs as well. They outlive that mass extinction, about 65 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs – that everybody knows about. They’re also some form of shark was older than trees. So trees first appeared sort of around 390 million years ago. So that’s just, it just gives you something to think about of how long sharks have survived for.

Hannah Stitfall:
It’s mind blowing that isn’t it? Sharks are older than trees!

Isla Hodgson:
They are older than trees. And what’s incredible about that is that they’ve survived most of the mass extinctions as well. So we often talk about, you know, I said it there, you know the one that killed off all the dinosaurs.

But there was also a mass extinction that happened before that one with the dinosaurs that was called The Great Dying, simply because it wiped out almost 96% of marine life. So it was a deoxygenation event where we lost a lot of oxygen from the ocean. And only 4% of marine life that was around at that time survived. And some of those were sharks. So if you think about that, think about how much sharks have made it through to get to this point.

And then we had a paper that came out in 2021, which looked at the decline in global abundance of sharks and their relative to the raise, since you know, in the last 50 years or so since the 1970s. So around when Jaws came out, and they showed that there has been a 71% decline. And we now have over a third of oceanic sharks and rays threatened with extinction. And we can pin that down pretty much we can pin all of those declines down to overfishing. So we know for a fact that that is human driven. You know, we are killing hundreds of millions of sharks a year. The figures on it are just absolutely staggering, absolutely mind boggling. And I think it really, really has changed people’s perceptions of you know, thinking about this animal that has been so incredibly successful for such a long period of time. And now we are facing the very real prospects of losing them from the ocean forever. And the reason for that is us.

Hannah Stitfall:
So what are your hopes for the future of sharks around the world?

Isla Hodgson:
Oh, that’s a big question. And there’s been some really positive things that have happened in the last couple of years.

Perhaps the most prominent of these was the addition of requiem sharks and small hammerhead sharks to CITES. So for people that don’t know, CITES is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Flora and Fauna. And it’s an intergovernmental agreement, which means that it’s lots of different world nations and governments coming together to regulate trade and endangered species and how it works very briefly, is that you list certain endangered species on two appendices. So basically, two long lists.

Appendix one means that trade in this species cannot be sustainable in any way. shape or form. So therefore trade in this species is prohibited. And appendix two means that trade currently isn’t sustainable. But if we, you know, regulate it, we’ll be adding some of these measures, we can basically try and make it more sustainable, traceable and legal, which is what CITES is all about.

And up until 2023, there were a few species of shark that had been listed on on CITES. And so their trade was regulated. But still, it only represented 25% of fin trade. So, the International fin trade, the practice of finning is one of the driving forces behind the overfishing of sharks and rays globally. And I’m sure a lot of people know this, they’ll have heard about this. But the practice of finning is basically taking just the fins of the shark, removing the fins of the shark of its body while it’s at sea. And then, you know, discarding the rest of the shark back into the ocean, it’s an incredibly wasteful practice. But it’s also an incredibly lucrative industry. So it generates billions of dollars every single year. And so regulating currently, a lot of the fin trade is unregulated, we have a lot of unsustainable fisheries, we also have a lot of, you know, illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing when it comes to sharks. And so regulating that trade would be an enormous step towards curbing the problem that is overfishing.

And what happened in 2023, is we had a landmark listing. So 56 species, which is the kind of requiems sharks, the requiem shark family consists of 56 species of shark, they were all listed on appendix two of CITES, which effectively brings 90% of the fin trade under regulation, which was a huge move, it was an enormous move in the right direction, when you consider that there’s 184 countries, signed up CITES. And these are some of the biggest names in the trade of international shark fins. And what this means now is that they then have to adhere to certain rules and regulations in trade of the CITES listed species. So that was a huge step forward.

Hannah Stitfall:
Is that, has that been happening, though, since since they weren’t on the list.

Isla Hodgson:
And so what happened, the vote was passed in November 2023. And then all countries who have signed up to the to the convention they had about a year to put everything in place, because you know, when you’re implementing something that big, you have to allow governments, customs officials, you know, everybody in the chain, the chance to get all the documentation ready, get everybody trained up to identify these new species.

Although the great thing about having 90% of the fin trade regulated is that it actually makes identification easier. So rather than you know, if you have like a huge pile of fins come through customs, and you’re having to sift through all of those and just find the CITES listed species. Now what we have is, the entire pile of fins is CITES listed. So a customs official, that just makes their job a whole lot easier.

So what we’re in the process of doing now, so that year has passed. And so now we’re in the very early days of implementation, so seeing how these new rules and regulations are actually going to work in practice. So you know, we’re kind of waiting to see how things are going to go. But it was a huge step in the right direction. And my hope would be is that we kind of continue on that trajectory.

So what we really need to do now is we need to, well, there’s two things. So we we talked a lot about in this episode about how little we actually know about sharks and how little we actually know about sharks and rays in general. We really do need to fill in those data gaps. So get a lot more of that missing information, and that missing data on sharks and rays so that we can better inform their management and better inform conservation strategies to protect them. And a lot of that is being done. There are so many incredible researchers and so many incredible scientists and conservationists around the world who are working together with fisheries, with governments, you know, with a whole host of other stakeholders to try and make this happen. And so we are seeing a really positive step forwards kind of in that direction.

And we also need better protections for sharks. So once we have that information, and you know, we’ve got that information for you know, quite a few different species now, we can then identify areas that are most important for different life stages of sharks. Places, you know, for example, where they breed or maybe feeding sites or nursery sites that really, really do need protecting because you know, we talked about overfishing there, but sharks are facing, you know, on top of overfishing sharks are facing pressure from things like climate change, you know, from habitat degradation, habitat loss. So we kind of really do need to protect these very important sites for them. And so it would be my hope that we kind of continue to see that happen.

And the support for sharks continues to grow. Because there are so many people now who every time I talk to them, you know, I talk about sharks, who are more clued in more excited, you know, and you know, very, very much on the side of we need to protect these incredible, amazing animals. And there’s so many things that I could have gone into in this podcast that shows how incredible they are. But yeah, it feels like the tide, the tide is slowly turning, which is which is great.

Hannah Stitfall:
Well, listen, it’s been brilliant talking to you today. Thank you so so much. Pocket sharks have legitimately blown my mind. I want to know all about them. I want to come up to the west coast of Scotland see,you, see some basking sharks, but I want to find a pocket shark. And for all of our listeners, if you know anything about pocket sharks then follow us on socials and get in touch @oceanspod. I love them. But thank you so so much, Isla. It’s been great talking.

Isla Hodgson:
You’re so welcome. Thank you so much for having me.

Hannah Stitfall:
We’ve been tracking the progress of the Arctic Sunrise as it heads towards Galapagos for a few weeks now. And in next week’s episode, it’s finally anchored. We’re joining them on board for an episode all about Galapagos you’ll meet the ship’s captain, Ecuadorian scientists, and local fishermen. I’m also joined by Spanish actress Alba Flores, who you might know from her show on Netflix’s Money Heist, she’s just returned to the outside world after spending a week on board the Arctic Sunrise.

But first, it’s our closing story. And this one’s pretty incredible.

Shaama Sandooyea:
My name is Shaama Sandooyea. And I am from Mauritius I’m a marine biologist and the climate activist. And I was part of the world’s first underwater climate protest, and it took place in the Indian Ocean.

We did the protests back in 2021. And the main point of it was to raise awareness on the urgency of the climate crisis and how we need to tackle it, especially for small island nations in the Indian Ocean, Mauritius for example, there is a photo of me staging the protests in the middle of the ocean and the whole picture is just the ocean around me, on top of me, below me. I’m right in the middle of it, and I am there holding this board saying climate strike.

It’s symbolic because I come from Mauritius and I advocate a lot for protection of the ocean for the climate, and also for islands themselves because we are kind of left behind when it comes to conversation around the climate. And that picture I know it like it travelled a lot around the world and everything. But for me, the thing that is most important about it is the water that is around me how, how we are closely related to the ocean, how we depend on it, how we come from the ocean and everything but we just don’t realise it and the ocean, the climate and the people these things they are interconnected. And I hope that at some point this photo also shares this message that you cannot remove the people from the ocean or from the climate or any of each. They all work together.

This episode was brought to you by Greenpeace and Crowd Network. It’s hosted by me, wildlife filmmaker and broadcaster Hannah Stitfall. It is produced by Anastasia Auffenberg, and our executive producer Steve Jones. The music we use is from our partners BMG Production Music. Archive courtesy of Greenpeace. The team at Crowd Network is Catalina Nogueira, Archie Built Cliff, George Sampson and Robert Wallace. The team at Greenpeace is James Hansen, Flora Hevesi, Alex Yallop, Janae Mayer and Alice Lloyd Hunter. Thanks for listening and see you next week. Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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