Beyond Jaws: Exploring Shark Science and Conservation

Dr. Clova Mabin never set out to become a shark educator. She grew up on Scotland's windswept, freezing beaches with no TV until she was 13, which meant a childhood spent outside with her nature-loving father, and an honors degree in zoology from the University of Edinburgh that ended up focused on bird behavior, not the ocean, simply because no marine supervisor was available. A three-month marine conservation placement in Madagascar gave her a first taste of the field. A chance meeting with a South African at a Scottish aquarium turned what was meant to be a three-month trip to South Africa into 21 years and counting. Today she's the Education Centre Director at the Save Our Seas Foundation's Shark Education Centre in Kalk Bay, leading a team that's grown from six people to more than a dozen.
Andrew and Dave trace the whole winding route with her: two weeks with ragged-tooth and tiger sharks on South Africa's East Coast and two and a half months working alongside Michael Scholl aboard the White Shark Trust's research vessel in Gansbaai, a detour into wildlife filmmaking that included a National Geographic shoot and three and a half years working under a longtime BBC Natural History Unit cinematographer, and a pivotal moment watching a mass whale stranding near her home in Hout Bay that made her question whether chasing dramatic film footage was really the work she wanted to do. From there it was a master's in conservation biology at the University of Cape Town studying invasive species hitching rides on yachts, a solo-adjacent transatlantic sailing crossing from Martinique to the Azores as a break between degrees despite never having spent a night at sea before, and a PhD at Stellenbosch spent leading a team that pulled 36,000 invasive European shore crabs out of a harbor whose official population estimate was 6,000, research that fed directly into South African invasive species legislation. She finished writing it up nine months after her first daughter was born.
Clova also talks candidly about applying for a different role at Save Our Seas and not getting it, only to be asked to step into the director's chair six months later, starting the job four months pregnant with her second daughter, and what it's meant to grow an education team into portfolios covering facilities, digital engagement, a nutrition program that feeds the school groups who visit, and a new research arm focused on how ocean connection shapes kids' lives. It's a conversation about what an unconventional, occasionally "unhinged" career path can look like when you say yes to almost everything that comes your way.
Takeaways:
Clova Mabin is the Education Centre Director at the Save Our Seas Foundation Shark Education Centre in Kalk Bay, South Africa, a role she's held since 2019 after previously applying for and not getting a different position there.
Her path to shark education ran through bird behavior research, invasive species work, a transatlantic sailing crossing, and several years in wildlife filmmaking, not a straight line through shark biology.
Her PhD team removed roughly 36,000 invasive European shore crabs from a harbor with an official population estimate of 6,000, research that directly informed South African invasive species legislation.
A mass whale stranding near her home in Cape Town became the turning point that pushed her out of wildlife filmmaking and back into graduate school.
The Shark Education Centre's team has grown from six people to more than a dozen, now organized into education, facilities, digital engagement, nutrition, and a newly added research arm.
Save Our Seas Foundation Shark Education Centre (Kalk Bay)
Website: saveourseas.com/sosf-shark-education-centre
Instagram: @sharkeducationcentre
Facebook: SOSFsharkeducationcentre
TikTok: @sharkeducationcentre
LinkedIn: Shark Centre
X (formerly Twitter): @sharkcentre
Save Our Seas Foundation (global)
Website: saveourseas.com
Instagram: @saveourseasfoundation
Facebook: saveourseasngo
YouTube: youtube.com/saveourseas
LinkedIn: Save Our Seas Foundation
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Dave: 
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Andrew:
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Every shark course needs a bible, and this one just got a second edition. Five years after the first Shark Biology and Conservation: Essentials for Educators, Students, and Enthusiasts landed on shelves and in classrooms, co-authors Dan Abel, Dean Grubbs, Tristan Guttridge, and Josh Moyer rebuilt it from the ground up: new chapters, new contributed essays from researchers around the world, and two co-authors who weren't part of the original book at all. Three of the four join Andrew and Dave (Dean's internet dropped him from the call, but he's credited throughout) to talk about why a book that was already considered the accessible alternative to a dense academic textbook needed a full rewrite so soon.
Dan walks through where the book started, a shark biology course he and Dean taught together at the Bimini Biological Field Station, and why they brought in fresh voices for the second edition instead of writing it alone again. Tristan and Josh talk about what it was like joining an established two-author project, the freedom they were given to shape their own chapters on behavior and sensory biology, and the unglamorous realities of textbook publishing: turnover with editors, humor that gets cut by copy editors who remind you that you're a scientist, not a comedian, and illustrators like Elise Pullen and Marc Dando who redraw a shark's fin position a tenth of a percent at a time until it's right. Josh also shares how he ended up adopting the first edition for his own shark biology course at Yale, and how that classroom experience shaped what he pushed for in the second edition.
The conversation closes with each author's advice for readers, professors deciding how to structure a course around the book, and a look at what's next: a batoid biology book from Dean and Dan, a title called How Sharks Work from Dan and Josh, and Tristan's focus for now on building a research field station in the Bahamas rather than a fifth book. It's a fun, candid look at what actually goes into building the reference book an entire field ends up using.
Takeaways:
Shark Biology and Conservation is now in its second edition from four co-authors, Dan Abel, Dean Grubbs, Tristan Guttridge, and Josh Moyer, illustrated by Elise Pullen and Marc Dando, published by Hopkins Press.
The second edition added two new co-authors and dozens of contributed mini-essays from researchers worldwide specifically to bring in fresh perspectives Dan and Dean felt they'd already exhausted after the first edition.
Co-authors got real creative freedom: Tristan and Josh were each given latitude to shape their own chapters (behavior and cognition for Tristan, sensory biology for Josh) rather than being handed a rigid outline.
Textbook publishing has real friction most readers never see: editor turnover, cut jokes, and illustrators redrawing figures repeatedly to get anatomical details right, all without royalties for the original artwork licensed into the second edition.
The authors' shared advice to readers: don't stop at what the book says. If a fact or figure interests you, go track down the primary source.
Website: https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/53846/shark-biology-and-conservation
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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lostsharkguy
Andrew:
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Dr. Issah Seidu didn't set out to become West Africa's first dedicated shark and ray scientist. He started his career studying dragonflies, damselflies, amphibians, and even elephants and crocodiles as a terrestrial wildlife biologist in Ghana, a country whose university programs, like most in the region, simply didn't study marine species. That changed on a visit to his uncle, a fisherman in a coastal community, where he watched sharks and rays being landed and sold on the beach and realized nobody in Ghana, or almost anywhere in West Africa, was studying them at all. Today he's the founder and team leader of AquaLife Conservancy, a lecturer at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, a Regional Vice-Chair for Africa on the IUCN Shark Specialist Group, and a 2026 Whitley Award winner, one of conservation's most prestigious honors, for his work protecting Ghana's guitarfish.
Andrew and Dave talk with Issah about what it actually takes to build a conservation program where none existed before: the funding that mostly has to come from outside the country, the near-total absence of local mentors in his field, and the years it took just to convince his first fishing partners that his research wasn't a threat to their livelihoods. Issah walks through the hard math behind his work, sawfish already functionally extinct in Ghanaian waters, wedgefish not seen since around 2010, and four species of guitarfish now at real risk of following them, and explains why Ghana's own high demand for shark and ray meat as a protein source makes this a food security question as much as a conservation one. He also shares how a broad early career studying insects and amphibians turned out to be the best possible training for pioneering an entirely new field, and what he tells young African conservationists who ask him how to get started with no roadmap at all.
This is a conversation about what it looks like to build shark science in a part of the world that the field has largely overlooked, told by someone doing it in real time, with real fishing communities, on a coastline most Western listeners have never heard mentioned in the same sentence as sharks.
Takeaways:
Ghana has four documented guitarfish species (common, white-spotted, blackchin, and spineback), and Issah's research shows they're on the same extinction trajectory that already claimed the country's sawfish and wedgefish populations.
Sawfish are functionally extinct in Ghana, with no confirmed sighting since the 1980s; wedgefish haven't been caught since around 2010.
Building trust with fishing communities took years, not months. Issah's first two committed fishing partners took roughly six months of repeated visits and conversations to win over.
Ghana's own high domestic demand for shark and ray meat as a protein source, not just export markets, is a central driver of the fishing pressure Issah is trying to manage.
Issah's advice to young conservationists starting out with no local mentors or funding: be bold, be committed, and above all be persistent, since changing fishing behavior takes years of sustained relationship-building.
Connect with Issa Seidu:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/antwiseidu88/
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Andrew:
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Dr. Chris Dudgeon has spent more than two decades studying some of the ocean's strangest and least understood sharks, from the reef-walking Hemiscyllium species of Papua New Guinea and Indonesia to the shape-shifting zebra shark that spends its youth striped and its adulthood spotted. In this episode, hosts Andrew Lewin and Dr. David Ebert sit down with Chris, a senior researcher who bridges evolutionary biology, population genetics, and applied conservation, to unpack why a single species can carry two completely different common names, how a newly discovered walking shark came to be named after her, and what it actually took to build a rewilding program from scratch.
The conversation traces Chris's path from a landlocked childhood in Canberra to the front lines of Australian shark science, including her role as a founding member of the Oceania Chondrichthyan Society and her work describing new walking shark species alongside taxonomist Gerry Allen. She walks through the surprising biogeography of Papua New Guinea's walking sharks, where distinct species turn up within a short distance of each other with no obvious barrier explaining the split, and the practical realities of doing fieldwork where saltwater crocodiles share the water. The back half of the episode is devoted to the StAR Project, the rewilding effort that raises zebra shark pups from eggs supplied by aquariums around the world and releases them into the wild in Indonesia and Thailand, and to the taxonomic history behind why scientists now call the species Stegostoma tigrinum rather than Stegostoma fasciatum.
Along the way, Chris shares a personal tribute to her late PhD supervisor, Janet Lanyon, reflects on what it means to build a research career with no roadmap to follow, and offers direct advice for the next generation of aspiring marine scientists. It is a wide-ranging look at how careful taxonomy, genetics, and community partnerships come together to protect species most people have never heard of, let alone seen.
Takeaways
Zebra sharks and leopard sharks are common names for the same Indo-Pacific species, Stegostoma tigrinum, which is striped as a juvenile and spotted as an adult; the confusion exists because a completely unrelated species, Triakis semifasciata, is also called a leopard shark in the eastern Pacific.
A 2018 taxonomic review found that the species' correct scientific name should be Stegostoma tigrinum, not Stegostoma fasciatum, because an earlier valid name had been overlooked.
Walking sharks (genus Hemiscyllium) use their pectoral and pelvic fins to "walk" across reef flats, mostly at night, and new species are still being described in Papua New Guinea and eastern Indonesia.
A newly described walking shark species was named after Chris by her own PhD student, Jess Blakeway.
The StAR Project (Stegostoma tigrinum Augmentation and Recovery) rewilds zebra sharks bred from aquarium-supplied eggs, with active hatchery and release programs in Raja Ampat, Indonesia and the Gulf of Thailand.
Chris was a founding member of the Oceania Chondrichthyan Society in the mid-2000s, part of a small cohort of students who built the region's shark research community largely from scratch.
Chris's advice for aspiring marine scientists: pick an understudied species to build genuine expertise faster, expect the path to feel anything but linear, and be prepared to figure things out without a roadmap.
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Andrew:
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Walking sharks are one of the strangest small predators on the reef: pectoral fins built for crawling across coral flats at low tide, distributions so narrow some species live in a single bay, and a family tree that's still being filled in. In this episode, Andrew Lewin and Dr. David Ebert are joined by Jess Blakeway, a PhD candidate at the University of the Sunshine Coast, whose research on the distribution, ecology, and biology of walking sharks (genus Hemiscyllium) in Papua New Guinea has already led to a new species discovery.
Jess walks through her path from volunteering with sea turtles in PNG to noticing a walking shark outside its known range, emailing shark scientist Christine Dudgeon out of the blue, and eventually joining her as a PhD student. That relationship led to the description of Hemiscyllium dudgeonae, or Dudgeon's walking shark, named in honor of her supervisor. Jess and the hosts also dig into why these sharks have such tiny, non-overlapping ranges, how researchers tell nearly identical-looking species apart using color pattern, genetics, and geography, and the ongoing mix-up between "zebra sharks" and "leopard sharks," which turn out to be the same animal at different life stages.
It's a fun, detail-rich conversation about what it actually looks like to find a new species in the field, what happens after that moment (specimen collection, museum deposits, taxonomic description), and what Jess has planned for her postdoc research.
Takeaways:
Papua New Guinea and northern Australia are home to all 10 known species of walking shark, each with a highly restricted range shaped by deep-water barriers, freshwater outflows, and shallow-water habitat limits.
Jess Blakeway co-described Hemiscyllium dudgeonae, a newly recognized walking shark species named after her supervisor Christine Dudgeon.
Because walking sharks look nearly identical morphologically, researchers rely on color pattern, genetics, and geography, not body shape, to tell species apart.
Zebra sharks and leopard sharks are the same species (Stegostoma tigrinum): striped as juveniles, spotted as adults.
Some walking shark distributions overlap without the species actually co-occurring, raising open questions about how isolation and reef geography shaped their evolution.
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Dave: 
Website: https://www.lostsharkguy.com/
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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lostsharkguy
Andrew:
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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SpeakUpForBlueTV