Chelsea Black is a shark expert at UNC-Chapel Hill. She’s researched them at the population level—counting them along the North Carolina coast—to the microbial level, culturing the bacteria in the pores of their snouts. Her Ph.D. research was on shark migration. But when Black started working with shark fishermen from Maringkik, a small island in Indonesia, a whole new world of research opened up to her.
She first travelled to Indonesia to help tag tiger sharks with Project Hiu, a non-profit that provides shark fishermen with an economic alternative to fishing by establishing them in the ecotourism industry.
Tiger sharks are famously migratory. But, the fishermen suspected that something was in the water.
“No one knows what’s going on in the ocean like fishermen,” said Black.
They knew one area to be a bountiful hunting spot. Fishermen would harvest shark fins for sale on the shark fin soup market there. It turned out to be a tiger shark hot spot.
“We would have no idea that there was a tiger shark hot spot if it weren't for them,” Black recalled. “They said ‘oh, that's where all the tiger sharks are.’ We said, ‘What? You can just go to one spot and find a bunch of tiger sharks?’ And they said ‘yeah.’”
Project Hiu hired fishermen as experts to assist with a new conservation project, led by Black. With the fishermens’ expertise, the team caught 55 tiger sharks in just a few days. They tagged and released them. A GPS coordinate is marked when a shark comes up to the surface. After a few days, what the fishermen knew by experience was reflected in the data.
“It's just points on points on points, like all these dots layered on top of each other in this one area,” recounted Black.
There are only two known tiger shark aggregates—an area where tiger sharks swarm—like this in the world: one in the Bahamas and the other in Maldives. The Indonesian hotspot would be the third.
Black’s collaboration with Project Hiu is an example of citizen science, or public participation in research. In this case, fishermen are not only leaving behind a practice that harms sharks, but they are using their unique knowledge of the ocean and skill set in catching sharks to help protect them.
“This mission was the first time that the fishermen caught a shark and didn't kill it in their entire lives,” said Black. “And so at first they were terrified.”
But, after seeing how Black tagged the sharks, the fishermen realized that the sharks weren’t as dangerous as they thought.
Now, Black hopes that the data that they collect on the tiger shark aggregate can influence changes to permitting regulations.
She said this would protect it against overfishing, which would put tiger sharks at risk for regional extinction. That is what happens when a generation of sharks gets wiped out in an area.
As apex predators, sharks regulate the ecosystems that they live in. Black said their survival is essential for healthy oceans, which means that fishing economies depend on them too.
“This is everyone's problem,” she said. “It's a scientist’s problem. It's the sharks’ problem. It's also the fisherman's problem, because if they wipe out everything that they're trying to fish, they won't have anything left. And I think they're starting to realize that.”
