like many things you know that you start woth
you see the sphere expand in front of you
of where you can go with it
I started to feel a lot more a personal connection than
with marine conservation. Which before that had been a bit of an abstract concept
especially growing up in Canberra
we used to go down to the coast fairly often but I didn't have day to day
experience with the ocean.
I teach about things I feel passionate about and it's also the sorts of things
that
students can easily get excited about and passionate about because their
real-world
situations and and animals and living systems that they can see and touch and
understand.
What I really enjoy seeing is
the growing confidence that students have over a period of a few days
to make a statement or ask question
from position understanding rather than feeling in the dark:
"oh, is this what Richard wants to hear?"
Then going out whether it is
measuring sea turtle nests or counting fish or
measuring photosynthesis in coral or whatever it might be
that they understand the biology of what's going on but that they
understand how to ask questions.
When you do biology and you work with animals
you have got to work to their timetable and so that means if you work at night or you
worked long hours or means you work in
uncomfortable conditions and environments well that's what you got to
do.
I've always found it just experience in doing that is
partly it's own reward; you want to get
the answers to the questions you're asking at the same time
but its part of the great experience and
I love that.
These are hatchlings that we incubated from eggs that we collected near Heron island
and they have been growing with part climate change effective
on sea turtle study that we are doing and so we will actually be sending them back up to Queensland in a couple of days
be released.
I started working with sharks seven or eight years ago
and initially my interest was
just to understand a little more about
the stress that sharks experience when they get caught.
It's about a hundred million sharks a year caught and killed by fisheries
some of those, or a large proportion, are for the shark fin trade
but there's an additional, unknown, quantity that are by catch
and it is that group of animals in particular that's a big question mark
and we want to understand what a sustainable
practice is and that's what I'm trying to address.
Sometimes it takes quite a long time before you can
take knowledge and translate that into management
but now recently working with the fisheries management authority
we are talking more specifically about how can handling practices change for
instance
and how cool could the type and duration of
fishing gear change to minimize the impact on
sharks.
I've quite a strong personal commitment to conservation and
effective management and I try as much as possible within the research that I
do
to work in that direction and then with the teaching
to inspire students to think in a similar way.