It's a beautiful November day, we load up the passengers, full boat, we go round to an island where there's seals, all of a sudden something just leaps out of the water.
Hello and welcome to Wild Tales. I'm Ranger Rosie Holdsworth and today we're heading to Colmore. To untangle one of the world's most endangered and cryptic species.
First split-second reaction is a dolphin, but as soon as it came a bit further up out the water, the shape of it, the way in which it was vertically coming straight up in the air, it definitely wasn't a dolphin.
Jenny is a wildlife guide in Padstow. A quaint seaside town nestled in the Camel Estuary on the Atlantic coast of Cornwall. Spending hundreds of hours out at sea each year, Jenny has a suspicion about what she's seen.
You do get some people who say to us, there aren't any sharks here, are there? And I just say to them, well, anywhere there's ocean, there are sharks.
Jenny knows that when someone says shark, all we think of is jaws full of teeth.
I remember seeing a basking shark and there was a little boy in the boat and he was so scared. And I was like, this is really exciting. It's not got big teeth. Just because it was a big shark, he was sure it was something scary.
Jenny has to find out what she's seen. When it comes to sharks, being able to tell people on board exactly what is out there can be the difference between fascination and fear. But with just that glimpse of a shape, how could she do it?
So I'm American. When I was born, my grandparents moved to Florida in a really beautiful place called Vero Beach. You'd wake up and you'd see manatees and dolphins and pelicans. And it's just like a breeding ground for marine biologists.
This is Molly.
I was kind of the target demo of something in the U. S. Called Shark Week on Discovery Channel. And it coincided pretty much annually with our vacation down to my grandparents' house. So it really was this like perfect storm. So we'd watch Shark Week. And then we would go to the beach. And I remember some of my siblings being absolutely petrified of going near the water. But I was more like, if I go in the water, I might actually see one of those sharks that I saw last night.
Unlike in the UK, in Florida, sharks are a reasonably common sight. For Molly, they start to become an obsession.
We would do surf fishing. You're literally standing like ankle deep in the surf. And you cast it as far as you can. It's got a really big weight on the end. And then it plops in. And you know there's something because it bends really dramatically. And in that moment, everyone's screaming, reel it in. For a while, you have no idea what it is. And then it'll come up in the swell. And when it's in that wave, you kind of get a good picture of it. And I just saw that elongated gray body.
And I was like, that does not look like the fish we're looking for food-wise. We pulled in a juvenile scallop hammerhead. And I got to hold it. I've got a photo of it somewhere. And there's just this beam across my face. And I think I'm actually wearing a hat at the time that had a little shark embroidered on it as well. So it's just like picture perfect, kind of like a shark obsessed girl.
The shark obsessed girl grew up to become Dr. Kressler, a marine ecologist specializing in predator behavior.
I think getting to see that wildlife, it really instilled in me the sense of there's so much going on beyond that calm of the surface. I'm one of those people when you give me a little bit and then... Everything else is kind of hidden. I'm like, no, no, I need more. And when you have the marine environment, unless you're scuba diving or swimming, you really can't see below. It instilled those questions in me of like, what else is out there?
But Molly's thirst for knowledge kept coming up against the same problem.
We describe marine animals like sharks a lot as being cryptic. So that's when They have these behaviours that mean we don't really know what they're doing most of the time. They can be really hard to find. And any time you have a cryptic species, you often have really high research costs to even interact with the animal once,
let alone to understand what it's doing over time. And that's really where the power lies in understanding what a species is and what we can do for it in terms of conservation.
Back across the Atlantic, Jenny is on a mission to figure out what it is she's seen. She quizzes local fishermen and scours the newspapers for sightings.
I'm thinking it seems a bit small for a basking shark. I know we get blue sharks around Cornwall, but this shark seems a bit too sort of big and stocky. I'm kind of going through it all in my head, but it wasn't until I got back to the office and looking at some videos of the style of breaching of different sharks, I'm looking at Mako sharks who kind of do this stuff. Of twist as they leap out. I was like, that's not it. That's not
what we saw. Looking at a video of a Thresher shark that comes straight up and then splashes down, the way in which it breached matched perfectly.
Thresher sharks are best known for their long tails, which are almost the same length as their body. They use this tail like a whip to stun their prey. Known in some cultures as the fox of the sea for their elusive nature, they have a few cunning and deceptive features.
Yeah, they've got these really dopey faces, almost like they're kind of tucking their bottom lip in.
There are three species of Thresher sharks, common, pelagic and big eye. Sharks, as a group of species, are second only to amphibians when it comes to their risk of extinction. To get a sighting of their leap is extraordinary, once in a lifetime. But just two days later...
We'd heard about a Thresher shark being caught. In some fisherman's gear. It wasn't an intentional catch with bycatch. It just means that they're fishing for something else and something accidentally gets caught in their nets that they don't intend to catch. But it had died and there's no way of knowing it's the same animal. It just feels a little bit sad to know that there's these amazing beautiful animals right up our coast but then you know they can still fall foul to getting caught in nets.
Is the problem with cryptic species. We often only really know they're there when they're dead. And for Thresher sharks, we know almost nothing about their lives.
Threshers are a pelagic species, which means that they spend most of their life out in kind of what is described as the high seas. What that means is the further from shore, the further from humans' realm of day-to-day operations a species exists, the harder it is, the more cryptic it is, to understand.
And this is a problem with many of the sharks that Molly studies. She's determined that there has to be a way to get more information. And to do that, she needs to find a method that a lot of people can use. After moving to Cornwall to study for her PhD, she attends a conference and comes across a government study that's using EDNA, or environmental DNA, to search for the presence of fish. EDNA looks for tiny bits of DNA in the water. Like searching
your shower plug for hair. There are methods with medical-grade filters, but they're too expensive and complicated to be done on a large scale, especially if the species you're looking for is out on the high seas. But at the conference, she came across the Metaprobe.
This is a 3D-printed sphere. It kind of looks like the Death Star. And inside are rolls of gauze. The grocery store sometimes has it. It's much more affordable. And I just, I saw the method and I think that the gauze-based might be really powerful in answering some questions about shark ecology.
Molly knew she would need help, but she didn't just want to test the samples. She wanted people to know more about the sharks that drift through our coastlines. She wanted someone who could take the work and keep telling people about the incredible species that are there, day after day.
We had an email from Molly and asked if we would help with her data collection. So she's looking for something called EDNA and it helps them to identify what species have been around our coast, basically.
So when they go out to do wildlife tours, I would go out, take some water samples. One of my favourite things about going out with Padstow and Jenny was the fact that every time I was able to talk a bit about it, answer questions and also get to do my science. Hopefully we'll be publishing the paper this year. But, the kind of short version is that we found that the gauze-based method performs just as well as the medical method.
That means the Metaprobe, the Death Star full of gauze found sharks. Porbeagles, Mako, and the dopey-faced Thresher.
That means that it's much more accessible. One part of the project that we looked at was having citizen scientists, sailors around Cornwall take the Metaprobe out with them and sample with it and collect samples.
For Molly, accessibility and people's ability to engage with the Metaprobe is central to its design.
So I'm disabled. I have a congenital birth defect. I'm missing four fingers on my left hand. And so I kind of have always faced this barrier to entry, not because I'm incapable of entering, but because of people's perception. I've encountered experiences in the field before where people have outright told me that they know I can't do something and therefore I shouldn't be given the opportunity to do it. I'll just say I've proved them wrong every time. There was one
instance where we had a three and a half meter. Adult male shark along the side of the boat. And what you do is you have to hold them half out of the water by the dorsal fin. I'll never forget that moment hanging off the side of the boat because I had the feeling in my head as I was losing grip on that dorsal fin of this is where they're going to disqualify me. To have somebody, a mentor who just said, it's fine. There's something else you can do. You can still take lead on this
shark. And so when I was coming up with the field packs for the metaprobes, I put materials in there that could be understood by children. Adults with mental or learning disabilities, as well as, you know, your quote-unquote normal adults. And I was really pleased because all the feedback was it was easy, it was straightforward, and the kids loved it. And the kids found it really interesting and they had more questions.
The ocean is not our world. Everyone, no matter their ability, needs specialist equipment to be there. So the accessibility limits are ones that we design. To find these elusive sharks requires everyone.
A lot of populations are endangered, critically endangered, but a large proportion of sharks we don't have enough data on. If we don't know about them, we can't help them, we can't protect them.
But despite all this, their huge diversity and their increasing fragility, it's undeniable that in the UK we're still scared of sharks. We're scared of the filter-feeding basking sharks and that dopey-faced Thresher.
The more people think they're scary, the less they'll be interested in their conservation. Whereas actually, if you find out more about all their little superpowers, and some of them are really fast, and some of them use their tails like a whip to catch their prey. And so hopefully the more people know about them, the more they're around, the more we can talk about them, the more people will love them, maybe, hopefully.
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