Think Oregon doesn’t have sharks? Researchers and students at Big Fish Lab conference would disagree

By BRIANNA BOWMAN/KLCC News

NEWPORT — Newport is a hotspot for sharks — well, shark scientists, that is.

Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center hosted the seventh annual Northeast Pacific Shark Symposium last week, the second largest gathering of shark experts in the United States.

“This is the second largest shark conference in the U.S.,” said Alexandra McInturf, a research associate at the Big Fish Lab at OSU. “It is definitely the biggest one on the West Coast and it actually started pretty small in the early 2000s. It was pretty specialized at the time, but it’s grown a ton and our attendance is over 150 people this time, which I think is one of the biggest audiences we’ve had for this type of conference.”

OSU’s Big Fish Lab hosted this year’s symposium along with the Seattle Aquarium.

The symposium kicked off with an open-to-the-public Science on Tap event with Isla Hodgson, a social scientist from Scotland who focuses on human-wildlife conflict. Her talk focused on the challenges of establishing marine protected areas for the purpose of shark conservation and conflicts with local fishing industries. She also hosts the popular podcast World of Sharks, produced with the Save Our Seas foundation.

The Friday schedule was packed with lightning-round style talks, each about seven minutes long, and covered a wide variety of topics such as shark-tracking technology, feeding behavior, and reproduction. The talks continued Saturday with discussions on life history, human-shark interactions, and conservation.

“Some of the biggest topics are things like movement, about where these animals are going, what they’re eating,” explained Taylor Chapple, the co-director of OSU’s Big Fish Lab. “So we understand the impacts that they’re having on our coastal ecosystems and also how they’re interacting with fisheries and the role that they’re playing in maintaining fisheries. They’re often the apex predator, sometimes the middle predator, and they’re helping keep those fisheries healthy. They’re keeping our coastal ecosystems healthy.”

Researchers from all over the West Coast, Mexico, Alaska and Hawaii presented findings on shark behavior and advances in shark tagging. Graduate and undergraduate students also got to share the stage and share findings from their research.

Auggie Tveit, an undergraduate student in the Big Fish Lab, had a session on his research project about Pacific spiny dogfish, a 1-2 foot-long shark  that is a common bycatch in Oregon fisheries, meaning they are unintentionally caught when fishers are targeting other species such as hake.

He explained his analysis looking at how Pacific spiny dogfish respond to the environment and their seasonality in certain bays in Washington, in a presentation he titled: “Who Let the Dogs Out? Tracking Pacific Spiny Dogfish Movements Using Acoustic Telemetry.”

McInturf said the conference provides a supportive environment for students and early-career researchers.

“What’s really exciting about this conference is that it’s really student-centric,” he said. “So, we have a lot of undergraduate students speaking both from the Big Fish Lab and many many other labs along the west coast. You also have post docs, you have a lot of people who are early career who are given a platform for presenting their work.”

Oregonians may be surprised to learn that there is a wide diversity of sharks along the coast. People often think of great white sharks (or simply “white sharks” as they’re referred to by scientists) but Oregon has many other species of sharks, big and small.

“There’s a lot of diversity and people here are all studying that diversity,” McInturf said. “In Oregon we have 16 different shark species — you might not think of Oregon as a place where there’s a lot of sharks, but we do have a tremendous diversity here.”

The event also included some opportunities to tour Oregon Coast Community College’s Aquarium Science facility, as well as socialize under the sea in the Passages of the Deep exhibit at the Oregon Coast Aquarium.

The symposium underscored the urgency and the opportunity in shark conservation, but was also an opportunity for shark researchers to connect in person and nerd out about their favorite marine predator.

As Chapple put it: “I think what’s super cool is that this event is bringing people from all over the West Coast and it was bound to be a ‘jawsome’ event.”

• Brianna Bowman is a Newport-based reporter for KLCC, a nonprofit public radio station in Eugene and a news partner of Lincoln Chronicle.