Sharks and the Sea Around Us

“What’s it all for?” Jeff Maassen, a commercial urchin diver in Santa Barbara, posed this question over the phone as I sat on a dock across the country in Maine watching the leaves turn and lobster boats motor around the harbor. His question was in reference to the increasing amount of data being collected on the state of the oceans, climate change, and our relationship with the sea around us.

This was days before the conclusion of another Climate Week in New York, where the ocean talks I attended focused largely on technical solutions and the urgent need to address sea-level rise while Hurricane Helene was ravaging my homelands in the Southeast. “Is it enough?” Many were echoing this thought across Climate Week, especially as the footage of the flooding began to roll in. 

Urgency is driving action, and it has been a busy year in the world of ocean stewardship. From the sweeping federal Ocean Climate Action Plan to the imminent dawn of the first Indigenous-led National Marine Sanctuary right off the Central Coast, attention to ocean issues is at an all time high. 

Dramatic displays of our changing climate are also prompting reflection. There are plenty of examples where, to reference marine scientist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s new book, we got it right. One of particular significance to Santa Barbara and the country as a whole features everyone’s favorite villain: white sharks.  

How We Got Here 

Love them, hate them, no one can “take” them. It’s been 30 years since California implemented protections for white sharks in state waters. That same year, 1994, an urchin diver was killed while working off San Miguel Island. James Robinson’s tragic death outlines the constant tension in shark conservation, where humans have managed to place the good of marine ecosystems above the very real and very mortal danger they pose to a small number of unlucky individuals every year. 

With few exceptions, it is illegal to catch, pursue, hunt, capture, or kill white sharks intentionally in California. This includes both state and federal waters, although federal protection took another decade to go into effect. In California, there are tight regulations on using seal decoys, chum, or other means of attracting white sharks for our viewing thrills. In other words, we don’t allow cage diving. 

There are a handful of exemptions to this rule. First, accidental catch by commercial fishing vessels using nets is allowed as long as efforts are made to release any living sharks back to the sea. This does happen, and Maassen was party to the successful release of a juvenile caught on one of the last remaining gillnet outfits operating in Santa Barbara. Second, researchers are occasionally granted permits to attract sharks to tag and monitor them. 

The Science of Counting Sharks

Shark tagging and tracking is essential in understanding this famously elusive species. After a long hiatus, tagging is again underway in the Channel Islands. The research team, including Chris Lowe’s Shark Lab at Cal State Long Beach and researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), are seeking to better understand why sharks are frequenting the area and patterns of connectivity between the Islands and other habitats. Ryan Freedman, one of the research leads at NOAA, said, “We know that adults are out there, but we don’t really have the research program that the Farallones, Monterey, and Guadalupe have had.”

Environmentally, the influence of climate change continues to show up in research efforts. “We’re seeing sharks show up in places we haven’t seen them before. Our best guess is that it’s climate-change-related.” This year, the first documented nursery north of Point Conception developed due to abnormally warm conditions in Monterey Bay.

Working in both juvenile and adult hot spots, the research team has tagged 30 sharks so far in 2024. They typically aim to tag 70 animals by year’s end, but progress has been slow due to a combination of “weird weather” and funding challenges. “These aren’t cheap things to do. When it comes to resource management, if you don’t eat it and it’s not endangered, it gets a low priority,” Lowe said.

Challenges aside, research like this is giving clear evidence of a robust and recovering white shark population in California. Estimating numbers of this species has always been somewhat of a guessing game with early assessment dependent on self-reported data from commercial fishers. The culmination of early data, when catching white sharks was allowed, and modern research programs indicate that our policies have worked in ensuring they remain off the endangered species list. 

Our policies, including actions like fishing gear restrictions and protections for important food sources like seals, worked better than intended. Lowe reflected, “I don’t think anyone envisioned the white shark populations would come back as quickly as they have. That created a new problem. Where are all these white sharks coming from and are people at risk because of this?” 

Information, at What Cost? 

While some shark populations have been increasing, bites have been decreasing per capita. Remarkably, there has never been an effort to cull the population in the mainland U.S. The only American shark cull occurred in Hawai’i in the ’70s and failed to produce an appreciable drop in bites. 

Disaggregated data, some of which isn’t always made readily available to the public, isn’t always enough to satisfy ocean users in sharky waters. “People that recreate in the oceans, that surf at the Islands, that dive recreationally and commercially, they’re putting us at risk by not reporting to us in a transparent way what they’re seeing” Maassen told me in no uncertain terms. 

The legacy of James Robinson’s death still hangs heavy over the Santa Barbara fishing community. Ava Schulenberg, who splits her time between crewing on boats and serving as the assistant director of Santa Barbara Commercial Fishermen, said “essentially there’s a level of residual, collective trepidation that exists in our diving community stemming from when it happened in the ’90s. Any effort that might promote another event like that is particularly sensitive with these guys. It’s super emotional.” 

There are rational dimensions to this fear, as Schulenberg pointed out: “It’s not good to condition wild animals to associate food with humans.” Inroads to build trust between the fishing and research communities were central in getting this tagging work completed. Restrictions, including robust information sharing and limits to how close to other ocean users tagging could take place, helped to ensure that everything went to plan. Schulenberg said, “NOAA could have done more proactive outreach, but I don’t really blame them, they have a lot on their plate too. What matters is that they notified us as soon as they could and we were able to notify and educate our fleet accordingly. It all worked out.”  

Researchers also came out with a deeper awareness of these sensitive dynamics. Freedman felt that “those concerns that [commercial fishers] have are valid and real. I do think this work can be conducted without training animals to boats. I think this information is critical for us to understand what the risks are for those people out on the water. We can help inform a number of different management decisions around the species” 

Beyond Fear

There is more work to be done, if there is money to be found. Lowe stressed this urgency, stating that if the Shark Lab can’t land additional funding in the next month or two, “we’ll have to roll up the carpets.” 

Funding shortages force trade offs where time on the water tagging animals could mean less investment in tools to share data with the public in the proactive and transparent way Maassen and others are calling for. Lowe cautions, “If you do it wrong, you can end up in a place like Cape Cod or Western Australia where you’ve created this fear about the animal you are trying to educate people about.” This is not helped by the long legacy of what shark scientist and communicator David Shiffman calls the “dumpster fire of fear mongering, pseudoscientific nonsense” that is most mainstream shark content. 

Bringing it full circle, Lowe said, “these are all things that come back to this 30-year thing. When you look back at the history of this, how it evolved and where it’s gone. The fact that we have as many sharks around as we do is truly the best example of a conservation success story that you will find in California.” 

Protecting the top predators is only one tool to address the problems facing the oceans. Shiffman put it eloquently: “Any solution that’s simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker is a solution I don’t trust for complex global problems.” Fishers like Maassen are quick to point out the dichotomy between our stated goals and the realities of our actions. For a country that imports upward of 80 percent of its seafood, Maassen feels “we should support the local commercial fisheries to provide food with a low carbon footprint that is measurably cleaner.” 

Shark recovery is critical for ocean health in and around Santa Barbara. Everything in the ocean is connected, and persistent problems like the loss of kelp forest raise concerns for the durability of this success. Maassen is also not the only one who is ready to see active restoration play a bigger role in ocean stewardship. “I advocate for restoration, and obviously observation, but I can’t get this paradigm change,” he said in response to efforts to accelerate active kelp restoration in the Santa Barbara area. 

While we may disagree on the right tools for the job or how often they should be used, there is a common call for greater collaboration. For Lowe and others, the path beyond fear lies in establishing a community of practice: one that includes researchers, commercial fishers, managers, California Native American tribes, and other ocean users. For Lowe, “If you do it wrong, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. If you do it right, you can change hearts and minds and that’s the key.” To paraphrase Lowe, “if we can do it right for white sharks, why can’t we do it right in other areas of the sea around us.”   

Conner Smith is a staff researcher at the UCSB Marine Science Institute.