Oceanic pelagic sharks have declined globally over the past half century due to overfishing. Conservation and management actions are hampered by basic knowledge gaps about movement patterns, migratory routes, drivers of aggregations, climate change impacts, and precisely where they overlap with fishers across population ranges. Without knowing where sharks go and when, and what they do in different habitats, it will remain challenging to understand the impacts of future environmental changes on populations in the face of continued anthropogenic threats.
In this lecture, Prof David Sims will describe his team’s research to understand how pelagic shark movement patterns alter in response to variations in environment, and what this means for understanding habitat selection and their interactions with fishing vessel distributions. He will describe how this knowledge can help conserve shark populations, especially in the light of climate warming and ocean deoxygenation, because interaction of human exploitation and climate change will have important consequences for how sharks are managed in the warmer oceans of the future.
Professor David Sims is Senior Research Fellow at the Marine Biological Association (MBA) Laboratory in Plymouth, UK, and Professor of Marine Ecology at the University of Southampton’s National Oceanography Centre (NOCS). His research focuses on movement ecology and conservation of marine predators and he is best known for bio-logging studies of shark behaviour to identify essential habitats. He also leads the Global Shark Movement Project involving over 150 scientists from 25 countries. He has authored more than 180 scientific papers including numerous articles in Nature, Science and PNAS. He is the recipient of several research awards, including the Zoological Society of London’s Marsh Award and the Fisheries Society of the British Isles’ FSBI Medal.