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
