Bountiful Basking Sharks!

As part of a California Sea Grant fellowship with NOAA Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, I'm expected to work a plethora of diverse and challenging projects. I'm incredibly proud to have worked on a really exciting collaboration with both CINMS and the National Marine Fishery Services's Southwest Fisheries Science Center (SWFSC) . Last month, I joined a crew from the sanctuary office to look for, and hopefully tag, rare and elusive basking sharks. These gentle giants are the second largest sharks, after whale sharks, and, like whale sharks, they're filter feeders! I know this has nothing to do with algae, but sharks need love too! Especially basking sharks, since we know so little about them. 

Check out this web story that I helped draft for more information! Spoiler alert: we tagged 2 sharks!!! Nearly doubling the tagging effort first started in 2010. 

Updated August 8th, 2019

Holy cow! We got an honorable mention from Medium in the Sci Short Form Institution category for the April - June quarter! Big shoutout to all of our collaborators on this project, you're all rock stars!