I'm out here with my team and we're doing surveys for sharks
so we're using drones to fly along the beach to look for sharks that we see
close to shore and if we see them from the video we can use that to estimate
their size and determine what species most of the sharks you see here are juvenile
white sharks and we believe this is a really good nursery habitat for them my
name is Chris Lowe a professor of marine biology and the director of the shark
lab at Cal State Long Beach so this new project that we've embarked on is a
survey study where we're shooting video transects along the beach so the goal is
to come up with what we'd call an encounter assessment who's most likely
to encounter sharks and under what conditions and then we can also use that
same video footage to look at how sharks behave when they're in close proximity
to people are attacking aggressively are they attracted to people are they
repelled by people or do they just ignore people so we have hours of
footage of people in the water surfing swimming sharks swimming right by them
sometimes right underneath them and completely ignoring them they don't
change their speed they don't change their heading they don't turn around and
come back when we show that video footage to people they're astounded
because it doesn't match what they think of as encountering a shark so we're
right in the middle of a two-year study and hopefully by the end of this study
we'll be able to answer those questions
so one of the challenges of doing a large-scale study like this is you end
up with hundreds of hours of video footage that somebody would have to
screen through so by working with engineers computer scientists we're
developing machine learning algorithms that will go through and identify
surfers stand-up paddleboarders boogie boarders swimmers waders and then the
software will automatically identify those and then measure their distance to
the wave break into the shore line so to my knowledge this has never been done at
this scale so if we can develop those predictive models here the goal should
be we can do this anywhere in the planet
we've been studying juvenile white sharks in Southern California for about
15 years now we've tagged over 80 sharks right now that have active transmitters
we have listening stations all along the shoreline from Santa Barbara all the way
down to San Diego so anytime the tagged shark swims within 300 yards of one of
our underwater receivers the receiver will log the time the date of the ID
number and then all the lifeguards or our partners can become subscribers to
that alert system so they will get text alerts or they'll get email alerts and
then they will use that information at their own discretion to decide whether
they want to pull people out of the water or not we also have an autonomous
underwater robot that we use to characterize the water column around
these beaches where we know the sharks are hanging out the robots also have
video cameras on them so as they're moving up and down through the water
we're videotaping the seafloor what's in the water column there's also on the
robot a receiver so it's listening for tag sharks while it's swimming along
doing its transects so this new technology coupled with our aerial
surveillance coupled with our tagging is doing something nobody else has ever
done before and giving us really high resolution information about why the
Sharks are here at this Beach and not that Beach and not that Beach so the
idea there is maybe with enough data we'll be able to predict why they're
here and where they're gonna be next
you