Swimming with Sharks and Loving It with Dr. Jess Cramp
On today’s episode of The Adrenaline Zone, Sandy and Sandra welcome Dr. Jess Cramp, a marine biologist and shark researcher. Jess is also the founder of Shark Pacific, which is a non-profit organization for studying and protecting sharks. Jess kicks off the episode by telling us about her exciting journey from quitting a high-paying job to beginning an adventure of her lifetime –sharks’ preservation. She also opens up about her childhood and how it helped her learn she should always listen to her gut and pursue her passions. Then, Jess goes on to talk about her first shark encounter while sailing across the Pacific Ocean, which eventually led her to shift her career focus towards shark sanctuaries, conservation policies and fisheries management.
Next, Sandy asks Jess the question that’s on everyone’s minds – what exactly does a job of a shark researcher entail? And is it all swimming with the sharks and enjoying the beautiful water? Jess debunks some popular shark myths and then shares the details of her day-to-day job activities, from catching and tagging sharks to tracking their movement and protecting them. She says that despite popular belief, sharks are not necessarily dangerous and won’t probably even come close to you while you’re diving, especially if you don’t have any bait on you. Then, Jess proceeds to talk about the importance of preventing overfishing, which is currently the greatest threat to sharks. Finally, Jess points out the true impact of preservation measures and why it’s important to advocate for shark protection.
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Transcript:
Dr. Sandra Magnus: It lies somewhere between the pit of your stomach, your racing heart, and your brain, somehow trying to keep it all together. It's an area we call The Adrenaline Zone. I’m retired astronaut Dr. Sandra Magnus.
Sandy Winnefeld: And I'm retired Navy fighter pilot Admiral Sandy Winnefeld. We’re two adrenaline junkies who love spending time with people who are really passionate about pushing their boundaries as far as possible.
Sandy Winnefeld: It’s not unusual for many people when plunging into salt water, whether it’s at the beach or diving on a beautiful reef, to have at least at the back of their mind a notion that they could be jumping into an environment inhabited by sharks. A fear that was highlighted by the 1975 film Jaws.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: There is even a word for this fear, Galeophobia. These apex predators trace their roots back to the Jurassic period and nearly 500 species of shark can be found all over the world in every ocean. But they aren’t necessarily the mindless killers they are made out to be by the media.
Sandy Winnefeld: Helping people study these fascinating animals is what marine biologist, Jess Cramp, has dedicated career to, including spending a lot of time in the water with them and starting her own non-profit Shark Pacific
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Many thanks to our sponsor for this episode Freedom Consulting Group. If you're looking for stimulating work in our national security intelligence sector, check them out at Freedom Consulting Group.com.
Sandy Winnefeld: We caught up with Jess recently during one of her research efforts in the Cook Islands.
So Jess, welcome to the Adrenaline Zone. We are so delighted to have you with us today, it’s a real treat. Can’t wait to get into this.
Dr. Jess Cramp: Ah, thanks so much for having me, I feel very honored to be your first shark guest.
Sandy Winnefeld: I guess the first question for you is, where are you right now?
Dr. Jess Cramp: I am on an Island called Rarotonga, so you get 10 extra points if you know where that is. It’s in the South Pacific in a country called the Cook Island.
Sandy Winnefeld: And that’s pretty far south of Hawaii, but it’s really cool that just as an aside, that we have somebody on an island on the South Pacific, we have somebody on a mountain top in Colorado, and somebody in Poland, and we are all able to talk at the same time. Pretty neat.
Dr. Jess Cramp: Magic.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Modern technology to the rescue. So let’s just jump right in, and actually before we get to the sharks question and why sharks, we have to talk about how it all came about. Because you had a stable job in San Diego working in a lab, but all of a sudden you quit and changed your lifestyle, and for lack of a better description, went adventuring. Which totally sounds awesome. So can you tell us a little bit about that? Because that was a big step right there.
Dr. Jess Cramp: Like all normal sane people do, I had a pretty well-paying job which allowed me to, you know, to live near the beach and surf everyday and I decided to quit all that and go volunteer for a year. Well it was supposed to be a year at the outset. The emphasis behind that was just that I have these scientific skills, I was spending a lot of time in lab, but I felt that my dream and, I suppose, my daily actions weren’t really aligned, but I that could use my a scientific training to try make more of impact on the world, or so I thought at the time. So I saved up a bunch of money, and just set a date on a calendar, and then I quit. And I first headed to Haiti which was an eye opener, and then Panama, Costa Rica, sailed across the Pacific and here I am.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So, just real quick. I’m curious. I did something similar, where I took a little break and did a bunch of volunteering. What kind of volunteer work did you do?
Dr. Jess Cramp: Well, what I had done prior to quitting my job, I spent some time researching organizations that I thought might be making a good impact on the ground. Because I felt that what was coming out of the media versus what was happening on the ground, that there may have been a disconnect and I wanted to see what the real impact was in-country. I first went to post-earthquake Haiti and worked with a great group called Project Medishare. Because of my scientific training in a lab, I actually spent 12 hours a day filling IV bags for medical procedures and staring out over, you know, a bunch of people in a field hospital. It was quite apparent to me that there is a very special breed of human that is cut out for this work and it was clear to me that that person wasn’t me, that was a hard pill to swallow. Because, you know, in your mind you think, I’ve got the gumption for this, I have the training. But it was really clear to me that doctors and nurses were the real heroes there, and I just felt a bit like overflow.
Sandy Winnefeld: Jess I was in Haiti right after the earthquake and it was devastating. I know that it was so important to have volunteers like you going down there helping in any way they could. But it had to be shocking for you to see the devastation.
Dr. Jess Cramp: It absolutely was. And it was also very apparent that, you know, there was a lot of aid money flowing into Haiti, but there was still so much work that needed to be done on the ground, that anyone and anyone that could help seemed to show up, but not everyone was well paid. And you know I can say there was some groups that were really incredible and there were some groups that where money was flowing into the organization and maybe not into Haiti. So that was a bit of an eye-opener for me and really changed my mind on how if I wanted to work in a country, how it would be more important to actually become part of a community rather than just kind of showing up and then you know, leaving.
Sandy Winnefeld: So let’s go all the way back, you were raised in Pennsylvania if I recall correctly. And you know, we are going to talk about some of the other risks you take here in a minute. But, you know for most people departing from a sure thing a stable job is already too risky. Was there anything about your upbringing as a little girl in Pennsylvania that sort of set this up for you, so that you knew you were going to do something quite special?
Dr. Jess Cramp: Well to be quite frank, I ripped the band aid off, I came from a home of addiction and we were told very early on, that maybe I wouldn’t amount to anything. Not from my family, but from people in the outside world who saw what my home life was like, and I think that it just made me really gritty as a little kid. I was like “Hey who are you? Watch me, and watch what I do.” And so I think really early on it was a drive to prove people wrong. But then you know my whole life, while maybe not super stable, was always filled with love, and ‘you can be whatever you wanted to be - don’t listen to anyone’, and that really drove me as a child. To just be able to look at my dreams and say “Hey, I am going to be the shortstop for the New York Mets’, like I thought that at one stage and there was no reason that I couldn’t do that. Or I want to be a fighter pilot, and that was a real dream of mine for a long time, and I was never told that that was something that I couldn’t do. So, I think just that encouragement, but also the outside perspective of ‘maybe I won’t amount to anything because of what my home life was like’, I think those combined really created a fire in my gut that to this day is unquenchable.
Sandy Winnefeld: Well I don’t know about being a shortstop for the Yankees, but you definitely could have been a fighter pilot, there is just no question about that. And we should talk sometime on the side because you know I have a nonprofit that is dedicated to ending the addiction fatality epidemic. So it’s great to see that you came out of that very difficult situation and from a family that was in that situation and have sort of made something of that, and I’m sure has influenced your character, so that’s terrific.
Dr. Jess Cramp: Yeah, I definitely love to chat and offer any stories or anything in the future..
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So going back to the volunteer work, so you were in Haiti, and the sharks - how did that leap happen?
Dr. Jess Cramp: I’ll try to make it as short as possible. I was constantly doing a self-evaluation as you will, or a gut test to be more frank, as to whether my abilities or my ability to actually assist a program, was aligned with how I was feeling inside. And like I said, after Haiti it was very apparent to me that I wasn’t then best fit for that. It was quite torturous for me to look out over the sea of people at the hospital. And I found myself counting the seconds until my shift was over, because it was just really hard. And I understand that, you know, inside it made me feel weak or like I didn’t have a strong enough character to do that work. But, I just had to be honest with myself that there are people who are really good at this, and that just wasn’t me. I had the field skills to do it but it just didn’t sit well with me.
And I was in Panama, and I was doing some volunteer work for a local group that was trying to get the Indigenous sea turtle nesting walk back and I was good at Spanish. I could argue in Spanish. But I didn’t feel like I could argue with politicians in Spanish. And again, I felt that there were probably people who were better suited to that work than I was, and so I had an opportunity to sail across the Pacific. The Roxy & Quiksilver Foundation at the time, they had a spot on a sailboat and they were looking for a scientist that could help who could help troll for plastic particulates and I raised my hand. I could certainly do that. But, by that time I had a real conviction that if I really wanted to try to, whether it was to make an impact or understand what was going on in a community, what they needed, I needed to become a part of that community. I couldn’t just drop in as an outsider. And so I promised myself that no matter where the boat ended up I was going to stay there and I was going to commit.
And along the way our boat stopped at a place right in the middle of the ocean called Henderson Atoll, and on Henderson, it’s an uninhabited island, it’s part of the Pitcairn Group, and the boat wanted to go ashore and they asked me and another crew member. “Hey you guys are surfers, can you paddle your surfboards ashore and see if it’s safe?” “Yep, sure.” So we jumped off, I put my mask around my neck as I often do, and on the way back in, my crew was like “ Hey Jess look down,” and I put my mask on, and there were a bunch of grey reef sharks circling me and following me. And I wasn’t filled with terror, I thought it was the most incredible experience. Just to have these sharks just so curiously following me and as serendipity would have it, there was a marine biologist on the boat and we had been talking a bit about the plight of sharks, and I had learned a bit about it as well. But it just clicked to me that, like. “Wow, this is maybe something that I could do.”
And then again, serendipity, or faith, however you would want to call it. There was an opportunity that I had learned about from another crew member for a non-profit organization in the Cook Islands that was interested in building a shark sanctuary. And they were interested in a scientist, someone who could write grants, someone who could understand policy, which I really didn’t at the time. And yeah, so I raised my hand. I quickly learned it was a guy with a beautiful website and not a large organization, and I signed on to help his organization. And you know, one of the very first things we said was if the community is not interested in doing this we will walk away. And it turned out that the community was quite interested so that’s me from the lab to sharks. I should mention that as a child I was obsessed with the series, The Ocean World of Jacques Cousteau. It was something that I definitely wanted to do, but I was a young woman from Pennsylvania. It wasn’t a very clear path for me, but I got there eventually.
Sandy Winnefeld: So other than that, it’s probably a very beautiful place to live and the shark effort you serendipitously came across was in the Cook Islands. Was there anything particularly special about the Cooks in terms of shark habitat? Is it a special place or is it one of many where it’s a great place to study sharks?
Dr. Jess Cramp: Yes to all of that. Firstly, it is a place where there had never been any shark research. So that was a very interesting niche for me. And also coming off the back of we were successful in getting the shark sanctuary legislated in 2012, and the scientist in me knew that there was quite a bit of work to do to understand whether or not the policy was actually be effective, to do what it said it was going to do, which is reduce mortality of sharks.
And so I didn’t feel good walking away at that stage, not knowing if the policies would be implemented. If the word in the actual legislation and regulations would be sufficient to protect the animal. So that’s when I decided to do a PHD to study the actual effectiveness of the shark sanctuary itself. And so through that I was able to do the first shark research in-country with all Cook Islanders and my research associates. And as part of that we went to an island called Penrhyn, Penrhyn is at 8 degrees south, quite far away from where I am. It’s still in the Cook islands, and it has the highest density of reef sharks of anywhere in the world where people live. And it’s a pretty interesting place because in Polynesia, there is a story, that you know sharks are guardians in the culture. Which is a beautiful story, but in practice, in actual fact, the fisherman don’t really like sharks that much. So here is a place where there is incredibly high density of shark, fishers still fishing in the traditional way, as well as with, you know, motors and deep drop reels. And they are somehow coexisting with high numbers of sharks. So for that way it can help us to not only figure out, “Hey, what’s going on, why are there so many sharks here?” But also if shark conservation is meant to be successful in the future, here’s a place where we can actually study how high population or density of sharks are coexisting with humans. Not without conflict, with quite a bit of conflict but, it’s an interesting case study in that way.
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Dr. Sandra Magnus: Talk about sharks and high density of sharks in this area, is there one species or shark species that are living together, and hanging out with the fisherman?
Dr. Jess Cramp: It depends. That’s like a typical scientist question, which you would be very familiar with, in which “It depends” is the answer to everything. It depends where you are, whether you are on the reef you are generally interacting with a smaller species, your grey reef shark, your black reef shark. Whereas if you are further offshore, or at what they call fish aggregating devices, those are the buoys that are anchored to the ground or to the sea floor which actually help you attract more fish, which attracts the fishers, you will often encounter pelagic sharks or some of the oceanic whitetip which are critically endangered. Or the shortfin shark, the Mako,, so it really depends on where you are.
Sandy Winnefeld: So Jess I’m sure your shark research involves a lot more than just jumping in the water and swimming around and observing them - it’s actual science. So tell us a little bit about the kind of science you are doing with these sharks. I know you are enabling other researchers, you are doing your own research. Give us a sense for what exactly it is that you do.
Dr. Jess Cramp: Yeah, Sandy, thank you for acknowledging that, I think a lot of people… I should be on one of those posters that says what people think I do versus what I do. I think most folks think that my life entails shark swimming in beautiful clear water. And yes it does do that sometimes. But the majority of my time is spent on fishing vessels large and small, and that is because I am tracking the movement pattern of sharks and in order to do that I need to touch the animals and put a tag on them so that mostly happens from a boat. And so, my skilled work entails lots of bait, so I would be covered in fish guts most days. And lots of time on the water in rough conditions and oftentimes we will be tied to those offshore buoys, and that can be quite uncomfortable for folks who aren’t used to it. And you know, particularly when I am looking at the oceanic whitetip shark, which are critically endangered which means there aren’t that many left, which also means that they aren’t that easy to find. So we can spend hours, sometimes weeks without finding one of those animals on the small boat, but I also spend time on industrial long line vessels. And these are the vessels that are primarily targeting tuna in this region. And they will have tens of thousands of hooks in the water. And because they have so many hooks in the water, they will often catch more shark. This is obviously an issue, one of the reasons shark populations are in trouble. So yeah, I’ll spend time out there with the fisherman, hauling in the gear, setting the lines, and tagging sharks when we find them alive.
Sandy Winnefeld: We will talk about swimming with these guys in a minute, but being out on one of those boats is not without its own risks, no.
Dr. Jess Cramp: That’s right. You know these boats are notoriously dangerous. Commercial fishers, observers, do go missing every year, for reporting things that they see that might be against the law in that area. And there is an incredible book called The Outlaw Ocean written by Ian Urbina if anyone is interested in really understanding what does happen on the high seas away from port, and it is quite harrowing. And I can say that here in the Cook Islands it’s very safe, but it is still quite nerve wracking being out to sea for weeks at a time and not having any way to get out of the vessel. And yeah I can’t say I didn’t hesitate before going out there, but I’ve had wonderful experiences with the crew and I think long line fishers in particular get a really really horrible reputation, particularly from conservationists which is embarrassing for my kind as I should say. But, they are really just men trying to make an honest living, and they were so excited about the work and they engaged in the research. And two of them told me they actually wanted to be marine biologists but they are from countries where it’s quite difficult for them to do that. So I would say incredibly nerve wracking for a while because you are very vulnerable, especially being the only woman on board far away. No one can see what’s happening but, I trusted my gut there. I also brought a bodyguard as you will, in the form of one of the local fish observers and really had an incredible time, and it was an eye-opening experience.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: We could probably have a whole session just talking about that. But back to the data you were collecting, you mentioned that you had to tag the sharks to track them, so what kind of training or did you have a special training or procedures or processes that you had to go through to be able to interact with the sharks that way or get close to them in the water?
Dr. Jess Cramp: Yeah I did, and I would say shark research especially these days, it seems like there is a lot of people who want to get into it. And you have to be very lucky and persistent in order to get in with a group and get the training. So my first, well I had been living here in the Cooks and no one had done it, so I was reaching out to different groups saying, “Hey, can you help me understand how to do this?” So I had a few people who were willing to take me on, based on my commitment to the project and probably my ability to do work in an area where no one had access to. But I would say the most profound help I had was through my PhD advisor, you know learning the proper techniques for fishing and handling the animals first in Orpheus Island Australia.
And then the Western Australia Fisheries Authority took me on the request of one of my advisors, and I could tell these guys were not thrilled to have a young woman on their team as they were telling me. I think they thought I might act like a princess, and people always say, “How do you not get treated like a princess?” And well I say “Just don’t act like one.” So I learned how to catch and tag very large tiger shark with this group of guys. So these guys were great, Rory, Ian, I and spent a couple weeks with them in West Australia tagging very large tiger shark. And what I needed to know, I felt very comfortable running a program for the reef shark, but big animals are quite different, because they require, I don’t know if guts is the word, you need to have a real handle on the boat. Because in here I am the only person who really knows what the hell is going on, so I need to be able to run the boat, and doing that when things are fine is great, but when things go wrong is when I really felt I needed the training and I felt confident about that after spending time with the guys in West Australia.
Sandy Winnefeld: I think that’s really cool, I have been around some amazing women dive instructors, so running a boat, I know exactly what you are talking about. Jess I wanted to ask you, sharks have a mystique right, people are fascinated by them, they are scared of sharks based on films and things like that. What is the real story in your view? How dangerous are they? What risks are you really taking by exposing yourself to them, by diving with them? And, candidly, kind of a dumb question here, but have you ever made friends with a shark?
Dr. Jess Cramp: First thing, I can say ‘no’, I’ve been asked that a few times, I have not made friends with a shark. I’ve been asked “Is there a shark that you hang out with?” kind of like My Octopus Teacher, and ‘no’ is the answer. But I have had some pretty interesting encounters with sharks. So just to get back to your main question about how dangerous are they, my favorite answer - it depends. If you are just out there diving you are very lucky if sharks even come up to you, in fact most of the footage that you see on major documentaries and in particular with people interacting with sharks, they just generally have bait. And if they come up and check you out on a dive, you are very lucky. And so I always consider that instead of being very afraid we should actually be quite thankful that we get the opportunity to see them in the wild without bait.
And then when you have bait in the water it changes a little bit, their movements get a little bit twitchy as I should say, or you know, they might bump into you when you have bait. Or if you are in a bait ball when they are feeding then yeah they might bump into you and move you around, because then you either have the bait on you and they want it, or you could be seen as competition. But even then I have been in big bait balls with sharks, I’ve been in the water in large schools of sharks, and I’ve never had an issue. And it seems that the larger shark generally are a bit more chill. The sharks that I’ve had interesting encounters with are actually the great reef sharks - they get quite territorial and they can charge at me. And I have been chased out the water by a shark or two, it’s important that you just know their attributes I suppose when they are frustrated, and yes otherwise I think they get a bad rap overall.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So how did you mitigate the risks that are involved in getting up close to them? Do you just learn to read their behavior as you just said and that is just pretty much everything? I mean you are swimming around with bait which is going to attract them so…
Sandy Winnefeld: It’s not like you are in a cage or anything like that.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah, it’s like how do you manage that?
Dr. Jess Cramp: No, I don’t often spend time with sharks with bait unless we are out spearfishing, and then you know it becomes an interesting encounter if you are offshore. If you are near a boat it’s no big deal. You just get the fish out of the water as quickly as possible, plop it in the boat. Then my partner has had surprisingly larger shark encounters here in the Cook Islands than I have in the water because he is spearfishing, and so he will take some bait out, or chum or tuna, and he will have tiger sharks and hummer heads check him out.. And I’m like “What the heck? I am the one who does this for a living.”
But yeah the short answer is - you read the situation like you do in any job, you know when it’s looking risky and you make a call based on all available factors such as how far do I have to swim back to shore? Or is the boat right here? Or am I alone, is there one other person? Do I have anything to poke a shark away with? You get a little space and you make a call based on your experience and situation.
Sandy Winnefeld: Have you ever gotten out of the water Jess and said to yourself, “Yeah, that was a little too close for comfort”?
Dr. Jess Cramp: Yeah once, and again these were just reef sharks on an island called Palmerston Atoll in the Cook Islands. And my survey buddy and I, we were actually doing sea turtle research at the time. We were about 2k away from shore running trans sats for monitoring sea turtle habitat, and a grey reef shark just kept charging at us and charging at us, and there was nowhere for us to go. And so yeah kind of at the last minute it charged at me with its teeth glaring and I just screamed in my snorkel because I had nowhere to go and it turned at the last minute. And anyway that’s probably about as close as I’d like to get. I have not had anything else.
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Sandy Winnefeld: So you are out there pretty far away, I mean you are in a civilized place, but you are doing things away from what most of us would consider the big healthy infrastructure of rescue medicine when things go wrong, that sort of thing. So there's got to be a little bit of a pucker factor there, in terms of doing what you do in a fairly remote location.
Dr. Jess Cramp: Yes, particularly when we are on the outer islands. Here in Rarotonga we have a hospital, but when we are in the outer islands, when we are diving we don’t have a chamber, we don’t have access to emergency medicine at all, so we have to be quite careful and calculated with what we do. So for example when we were in Penrhyn, we were working off of local fishing boats and there are no regularly scheduled flights there. There has to be enough jet fuel in Penrhym for a flight to come up from the Cook Island, because the airplanes that we have can’t make it back immediately, so if there is not enough jet fuel there, you can’t get an emergency flight in. Of course you could get the New Zealand enforcement vessel that could come out, but that’s 4-6 hours if it leaves immediately. I would say that we are more careful than probably others with what we do and for that reason we are extremely careful around what I call the pointy end of the shark. We secure the shark's head to the side of the boat when it’s in the water. And some folks just rely on the hooks, but we actually secure the head and we never take our eyes off the pointy end and usually it’s huge that handling the pointy end. Just because it can move its head around and bite you, so yeah, it can be tricky.
Sandy Winnefeld: I have never heard anyone refer to it as the pointy end of a shark, but, that makes a lot of sense, because there are a lot of pointy ends.
Dr. Jess Cramp: That’s right there are a lot of point parts, that’s right.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Is one of the crew trained as sort of a first responder medical person then, because you are so remote?
Dr. Jess Cramp: I wish! No I should be, we should be. If anyone who is listening has access to emergency tropical medicine, it’s one of the programs that I would actually like to try and design - emergency medicine for the remote tropics. Because they have a lot of courses for wilderness first responder, which are mountains and generally colder. But, the tropical diseases, yeah I think that would be really useful and helpful, something that we need to do.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So, if I’m not mistaken there are nearly five hundred species of shark out there and many of them are endangered. So a couple of question, which are somewhat related, one is, I would imagine the biggest threat to this apex predator is humans, and the other one is, are there a lot of other people out there like you out there studying sharks all over the planet and are we gaining any, you know really important insights as we get further into this?
Dr. Jess Cramp: You are spot on, so sharks are about 500 if you consider their cousins, the rays. So sharks and rays, they both have bodies made of cartilage so they are in the same family, there are over twelve hundred and fifty species. And of those more than 30% are actually threatened with extinction. And there are a number of people doing shark work, particularly people get really excited by Nat Geo Shark Fest, and Shark Week and the changing perception I suppose, of sharks being monsters to an animal that needs protection against humans. Which yes, are the greatest threat to sharks from you know overfishing, but there is still a lot more that needs to be done. I mean we are still discovering new species every year, there are absolutely insufficient policies to protect them and I would say the vast majority of the world, there are very few countries in the world, usually the highly developed nations that even have the capacity to properly manage sharks, and they are doing that alongside other species, such tuna or swordfish or Mahi Mahi.
So sharks are often, I would say, side effects of management as opposed to an absolute targeted species for management, so that is changing. So if there is anyone out there that is interested in shark research and conservation, if you don’t mind spending time on boats or you have a law background, or computer science, like, there is room for everyone and there is a need, a great need.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So what is the ‘dive with the sharks’ experience? I mean it could be good because it's exposing people to the animal and maybe they lose their fear. Or it could be bad because it is putting more interference in the shark’s natural habitat, with people who really don’t belong there.
Dr. Jess Cramp: I am a bit conflicted on you know the diving to be really honest. I am not a huge fan of the hand feeding operation. It's just not necessary to experience that interaction. To experience a positive interaction with sharks I don’t think it’s necessary to hand feed them. And you know people are touching them, putting their hands all over them. I’m not a huge fan of that. They are wildlife and should be respected as such. But, there are operations, for example there’s Beqa Lagoon in Fiji. They are a locally run operation, a marine reserve, I think, created the funds that are raised from the shark diving operation are shared with the community and help them deal with reserve impact. And it’s run by local people, so in that regard you know, I think it’s a great operation. But there are a number of them I think that are run by cowboys and are more interested in, I would say, being profound more than being productive for shark conservation.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Are there a lot of other shark sanctuaries around the world like yours, and if so do you guys compare data, or are they just completely different scientific ecosystems and there is really no way to sort of correlate?
Dr. Jess Cramp: There are 15 shark sanctuaries on the planet, and there are only that I know of, two or three that have active research going on inside of them. So, it’s quite a new field that is actually studying the effectiveness of sanctuaries themselves. Tthere has been quite a bit of work done in Australia in particular, around the effectiveness of marine in protected area on shark. And so shark sanctuaries not to get too policy wonky but they are a little bit different from marine protected areas just based on what is written in policy. So there is quite a bit of note comparing, and publication that talk about what works in one area and maybe what doesn’t in another. Or what is needed to better protect the animal in sanctuary.
Sandy Winnefeld: So Jess, this sort of sounds like it has turned into your life’s work which is cool, and by the way we should mention the name of your non-profit, which is Sharks Pacific. If anybody wants to look that up, it’s a nice website. So where do you see this going? Where do you want to take the research? Where do you want to take your future? Because you are kind of in a spot right now where a lot of people are listening to this thinking, “Wow I wish I could be at the Cook Islands doing something cool like that.” But where do you see this going?
Dr. Jess Cramp: Great question, thank you. Sharks Pacific, I founded the organization in 2015, it was initially a fiscally sponsored project by the Wildlife Conservation Society, and I just want to give them a shout out as a thank you for taking me on. And then we rolled out into our own non-profit a couple of years ago. And we work on research, outreach, and policy. And so, while we are currently working on the Cook Islands and also Niue, we had hoped to expand our research in the Pacific more. And we need real science to actually drive better policy to better protect not just sharks, but also the people and places that depend on them. And that is because in order to have effective conservation you have to consider the people, because you are looking at behaviour change. But you also can’t then try to impose conversation policies on people that will force them to go hungry, for example. And so it’s important to understand the local impact of the conversation measures for an animal that you are advocating for.
Sandy Winnefeld: I can say more easily than you can, there is a donate button on the website. Just in case.
Dr. Jess Cramp: Thank you. But also I would love for more people to see shark research and conservation as a more nuanced topic. So I think right now, people that fish are seen as villains and sharks are these magical creatures you should ride on, which I think there is a bit of disconnect there on the reality. And I would just like a bit of more balance and more I suppose interaction in the real process of protecting sharks which includes this kind of gritty, dirty, policy and horse trading as you will.
Sandy Winnefeld: Well Jess I have to tell you, one of our previous guests, was a wonderful interview with a guy called Jamie Mitchell who is an Australian big wave surfer. And so the three of us have a shared passion for surfing, although I don’t get to do it as much as I really wish I could. How is the surf in the Cook Islands, or do you even want to tell us if it’s good?
Dr. Jess Cramp: I could tell you, but then I would have to kill you.
Sandy Winnefeld: There we go. I love it.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: It’s a sanctuary they don’t want the surfers there
Sandy Winnefeld: Well Jess this has really been traffic, it’s really been something we have been wanting to do for a long time as I had mentioned, it’s incredibly interesting. We could talk to you for a lot longer about the nuances of what you deal each and every day and frankly sort of what seems to the outsider idyllic life living on a South Pacific Island and doing important research and getting to go surf. So thanks very much for being with us today.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah it was really great chatting with you
Dr. Jess Cramp: Thank you
Dr. Sandra Magnus: That was shark researcher and founder of Sharks Pacific, Jessica Cramp, I'm Sandra Magnus.
Sandy Winnefeld: And I'm Sandy Winnefeld. Thanks again to Freedom Consulting Group for sponsoring this episode. Do some work that matters. Check them out at freedomconsultinggroup.com.
Sandra Magnus: And check us out on social media, including a short video of our interview with Jess on Tik Tok. Our handle is very simple, @theadrenalinezone.
Sandy Winnefeld: And we’ll see you next week for another episode.
