Let me tell you this.
I was going to have a chat with this gentleman last night. He is a shark scientist from the Australian Marine Conservation Society. And did you know that it's almost pretty much to the day fifty years ago that the movie Jaws came out, one of the greatest films, one of the really important films. Scared the hell out of me, and you know, people were petrified if you go back to those days, if you remember, people saw that film and they were petrified to go in the water. And
the shark music didn't help either. So I had a chat with the doctor Leonardo Guider, the shark scientist, I said, fifty years after Jaws, you know, and he's obviously he's a conservationist too because he wants to talk about you know, shark's just doing shark things.
But I said to him, how did you get into this? It's a favorite of mine.
I was born in eighty five, so it's out about ten years after it first came out. As a little boy, I loved monster stories, I loved predatory animals.
I won't lie.
The movie scared me, but at the same time it also inspired a lifelong passion for sharks, and I'm very privileged today to not only have studied them, but also work with their conservation in the oceans.
When I saw that film, I also had a fascination for sharks, which I couldn't even try to describe to you.
To be honest, the best way I can put it this is only from a personal perspective, is I love things at the extremes of existence. And by that I mean I'm a marine biologist and I love sharks.
They're like the most extreme motion predator.
If I wasn't a ring biologist, I'd be an astrophysicist, and I'd.
Look slightly black.
Hold again, like everything's in new discovery and marrying that passion with my natural curiosity and love of science. I followed my heart as it were, and yeah, I'm now today working for the conservation of these animals.
The shark thrilled us in the movie Jaws. It got a really bad rap because a shark is only doing what a shark knows to do, and that is to be a predator in its own domain.
Exactly, sharks have got a bad raps.
It's Jaws, and you know it's commonly owned of the unquote jaws effect and how that's shaped people's perceptions and sharks and how we coexist with them, whether it be through aspects of beach safety or even how we go about our commercial fishing and the things.
In Australia, we'll have three hundred and thirty one species of sharks and rays.
One hundred and eighty or so of them shark species, and the realities is some of the range from only a meter long living over a kilometer under the waves, and then you have balls, tigers and whites. A healthy ocean has healthy populations of sharks, and the reality is is we need healthy products of sharks to enjoy our oceans.
And our lifestyle.
What's the biggest great white that's ever been observed?
They do get quite larger, and by larger, looking at adults that can be anywhere from four to six meters, so absolutely huge.
I was absolutely bob. SPEC's actually how calm and.
Placidly are she swam past the cage and she's had four and a half meters.
She had an eye the size of a dinner plate.
And we look at it back close, and it looks at you and you see it turn you realize it's small.
Interest in animal This is a thinking thing that has existed. This pointed from into years and we're just at a.
Moment I read that a shark has to just keep moving forward its entire life, otherwise it will die.
Sharks are so varied in how they live their lives, so they should have to ram through the water constantly to fushwater over the kills and get oxygen.
But some sharks are capable of what they call buckle.
Pumping, so this is literally at risk on the ground, opening an ouris and popping water through. And this is quite prominently a lot of small sharks.
So generally speaking, a lot of sharks have to move to breathe. But it's amazing how to.
Burst they are and how they are able to live their lives.
And yeah, some of them just happy to just sit down and chill for a bit.
What about in that scene from Jaws where they cut the shark open and they found all kinds of things like number plates, Is it true that the shark will eat anything?
Tiger success plates, They found boles, random different items.
Give us an amazing shark fact that we need to know.
Species called Reo spur dog. It's only found in Australia. It lives more than colomitable at waves, and it has one of the longest pregnancies in the vertebrate kingdom, and that is nearly three years.
You've just given me one thing. I never knew either, that baby sharks are called pops.
What about that?
Yeah, bose sharks called pops and some sharks believe it or not, put the majority of.
Them at some sharks lay eggs, stop it. So I suppose you could call them things as well.
How about that, doctor Leonardo Guida, the sharks scientists, the Australian Marine Conservation Society, and as I mentioned, fifty years to the day for the movie Jaws,