Dave Ebert: The Insider’s Guide to Sharks

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Today, we are diving into the subject of sharks with one of the world's leading experts in the field, Dave Ebert. Dave has studied sharks for decades.
He earned his bachelor of zoology from Humboldt State University and Master of Marine Biology from Moss Landing Marine Laboratories. He also has a PhD from Rhodes University in South Africa. Dave has discovered over fifty types of sharks. He is director of the Pacific Shark Research Center, president of the American Elasmobranch Society, and an honorary associate at the California Academy of Sciences.
He has written thirty books about sharks. NBC News, Good Morning America, and The Today Show have featured his work.
He leads Shark Week expeditions to find the rarest and most elusive sharks. He has appeared in and advised BBC's Shark and Blue Planet II and National Geographic's When Sharks Attack.
I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. And now here is the remarkable Dave Ebert. You sent me a copy of Sharks of the World. It's 600 pages, color, thousands of illustrations and photos, and it's only $55. I don't understand. Why is that book so cheap?
Dave Ebert:
You would have to ask the publisher, Princeton University Press. They set the price and everything. It's a great deal when you look at how much books cost. For fifty-five bucks, it's a great deal, and there's literally a ton of information in there on sharks of the world.
Guy Kawasaki:
That is not exaggeration. There is literally tons of information. I write business books and they're 200 pages, black and white, no illustrations, no color, no photography, no nothing, and they're $26.95. Let me tell you something, if those books are $26.95, your books should be $250, but I digress.
Dave Ebert:
Yeah, I'm glad it's a relatively cheap book because things are so expensive. A lot of people, $50, $60, they think, "Oh, I can get a book that's 600 some pages." Whereas a lot of smaller books, they want $90 or $100 for them. People got to think, "I don't want to spend that much for a book." But yeah, for $50, $60 you can literally get a book that has all the sharks of the world at least up to last year.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm just curious, one more question about this book, how do you sure write and produce a book like this that is so long and has so much information? There's pages and pages of “this is the kind of teeth that sharks have...” How do you even write a book like that?
Dave Ebert:
It started probably about, oh, almost forty years ago for me when I first started studying sharks as a young grad student. In my case, I just had a wealth of information just from working in the field for so many years and decades. The whole thing really was the illustrations that Marc Dando does.
That's a key to books like this. You need to work with an outstanding illustrator. Because people will read the text, but your eyes immediately go to the illustrations, and that's what everyone's going to look at first.
And then they'll get onto the text and realize, wow, there's a lot of information about that shark. The key for this kind of book is to have an outstanding illustrator as I did with Marc. And then also I had a colleague of mine, Sarah Fowler, who's also another shark conservationist, and she's been around for, I don't want to embarrass her, but she's been around for a number of years as well. It was just a really good collaboration with the three of us on that, and it's a lot of work.
Guy Kawasaki:
I swear, this is my last question about this book. Let's say you decide to write this book. At the time, I don't know, maybe there's 400 species of sharks, not the 600 that there are today. You tell your illustrator, "Okay, guys, start drawing 400 sharks." How long does it take to have that 400 illustrations?
Dave Ebert:
It was years. It was years. The recent one is an updated edition. The original edition came out in 2013, and then this was an updated one. We had a number of illustrations done, quite a few done already, but Marc updated... As we get more information, you think, oh, once you draw something, that's it. But you realize on some of the rare species, you get more information on something as simple as the coloration. Often you'll see a dead specimen or something in a museum that's gray or brown, but then you see it in the wild alive and you're like, wow, this thing's really a pretty shark. We just didn't know that.
In Marc's case, he updates these illustrations. That takes a lot of extra work. But the meticulous part is doing things like the teeth, just to get the teeth in there, because sharks are usually identifiable by their teeth if you know what you're looking for in the teeth. Each tooth on the, whatever, I think it was 545 species of sharks in there, each jaw from each shark is unique.
You think about that. You could draw each shark. You got to draw the teeth for them because they're unique. And then other little characteristics, like you see that there'll be a ventral image of the snout and the nostrils. And then a lot of the times that could be very distinctive for some of the shark species.
We try to put in as many of the characters as we can and then just hit on the main characters that people would look for. Again, because I'm a scientist, I want to write this to the average person, someone like yourself who might be interested in it, but it's not an expert or anything.
You can look at that, understand, hey, here's some characteristics how I can tell this is this particular species of shark. I try to write that for the average person. I'm not writing this for technical people like myself. I want the average person to be able to pick up this book and to be able to find a shark maybe washed up on a beach or something or they see on TV and they can try to identify it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Let me give my audience a plug for your book. If you are at all interested in sharks or fishing or the ocean, I cannot conceive of a more impressive book to buy than this book for a mere fifty-five bucks. Eat out one less time and go buy this book. Man, it's magnificent.
Dave Ebert:
If you check around too, even better, occasionally they'll have some special offers. We got things like this summer we'll have Shark Week, Sharkfest stuff coming up, and they'll sometimes give a 30 percent discount on the $55. If you check back or follow me on social media, I'll post it. When they come up and there's a discount, I'll post it. You can even get that book for less than $50 at times.
Guy Kawasaki:
All right. Now, take us back to forty years ago or whenever. You're a grad student. At what point do you say, okay, I'm going to dedicate the rest of my life to sharks? How did that go down?
Dave Ebert:
Oh, I can take you back further than that. When I was about five years old, my parents gave me a book on sharks. I still have it too. I just thought these were the coolest things I'd ever seen. I just thought, man, these are really cool. Now, when you're five years old, sharks, whales, dinosaurs are cool and most kids grow out of that. But when I was about ten years old, I told my parents, I said, "I want to travel the world and study sharks. I want to figure out a way to get paid for that." I was ten years old. My parents were like, "Yeah, don't worry. He'll grow out of that. I'm sure it's some phase." Just from there on, just went on through my life.
Even when I was a senior in high school, you go to your guidance counselor wants to talk to you about what you're going to do. I still remember seeing my guidance counselor my senior year in high school and he said, "What are you going to do? " I'm going to go to college and then I'm going to travel the world and study sharks.
He was like, "Oh, that's great." He goes, "That's good." He goes, "Do you have a plan B at all?" I was like, no, not really. I'm going to travel and study sharks. He was like, "Okay, good luck on that shark thing," but he wasn't discouraging. He didn't discourage me at all. That counselor, about ten years after I left high school, I saw him.
I was talking with him and I said, "So what'd you think about the fact that..." At this point I'd already had a master's degree from Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, and I was actually just getting ready to leave for South Africa to start my PhD.
I asked him, I said, "Do you remember that conversation we had? What'd you think about me when I mentioned the shark thing?" He says, "I see a lot of kids." He goes, "Honestly, I didn't think the shark thing was going to really work out for you, but the fact that you had a direction and a passion, I didn't want to burst your bubbles."
He goes, "I see kids all the time that have no idea what they're going to going to do, but you had a direction, so I was like, I'm going to let you pursue it. I never thought you were actually going to still be doing sharks ten years later." I've turned that passion just into a lifelong journey really at this point and just taken me all over the world, just some amazing experiences with it. It started when I was young.
Guy Kawasaki:
We have interviewed 200 remarkable people and this kind of early discovery of your passion is rare. In fact, you chime in, but I think it's only Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jane Goodall, and Dave Ebert.
Dave Ebert:
That's good company.
Guy Kawasaki:
That is good company, yeah.
Dave Ebert:
Guy, if I could just punctuate the thing here, when I had this passion, this started before the movie Jaws came out in 1975. The field of shark research really started in the late 1970s, early 1980s. I was in high school, like a sophomore or so, when the movie came out. I already had this direction that I was going to travel the world and I was going to study sharks.
There really was no field of shark research at the time. Thanks to Peter Benchley and Steven Spielberg for a great book and an awesome movie, this whole field started and it was because people were interested in sharks. How many shark species are there?
How old do they get? Where do they live? All these kind of questions. A lot of the university programs started asking these questions and I was in that early young group of grad students. I always refer to; I was part of the Jaws generation of grad students.
We just caught that wave literally in the early 1980s. There's a whole group of us. The cool thing about it is when I started, I'd asked the professor, "Well, what should I do?" He goes, "I don't know. It's your master's. You figure it out." This is the best part. This is like being an explorer. There was no roadmap. It was just like, if you could think about it in your mind, you could go pursue that direction.
Some stuff turned out to be like, it was a little crazy, but we tried it. But you found your footing. It was just such a golden age to study sharks because there was really nobody in front of us, and we just went ahead to go basically blaze our own trail, our own path. It was fabulous.
I look back on it now and I almost get goosebumps. I'm so excited. God, it was just so great. I had professors that were just like, “Hey, if you can think about it, go do it.” No one was saying, "Here's what you have to do. You got to do A, B, C." It was just like, “Go figure it out. There's no map here.” It was awesome.
A side story is if you watched the original Jaws movie that came out in 1975, at the very end of the movie when they're rolling the credits, the last credit that comes up is a guy named Leonard Campano, who was at Stanford University at the time. I don't know if you knew this or not, Guy, but Stanford used to have one of the preeminent theology programs in the world for close to 100 years and they closed down in the 1970s. But anyway, this guy who I mentioned here, he actually designed the mechanical shark Bruce and worked with Spielberg on the movie. Turned out that he was my main professor advisor for my PhD.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow!
Dave Ebert:
Twelve years later after the movie came out, I started PhD. At the time, he lived in the Bay Area up in Tiburon where he was working. I got to know him. Because people ask me, they'll say, "How'd you do this whole traveling thing?" I was working. I did a lot of research in Monterey Bay, San Francisco Bay, Humboldt Bay, and I got to know this guy, Leonard Campano. He took a job in South Africa. Now, this is about 1985, 1986. For those of us that are a certain age, South Africa probably wasn't the main place people were looking to go to at that particular time.
But he had taken a job there. I went up to say goodbye. I was just finishing my master's degree. As he was leaving, I said, "Hey, if you need anybody to carry your bags or something in South Africa, let me know." It was literally almost like a throwaway statement.
Eight months later, I got a phone call from him and he says, "Hey, Dave, I have a PhD position here. Do you want it?" In a nanosecond I was like, "Hell yeah, I'm going." Basically here I was, twenty-six years old and I'm taking off to go travel the world and study sharks and I was going to get paid to do it.
It was this dream I'd had since I was ten years old was all falling together at this time, and it was the best thing I ever did. It was just this huge adventure I had.
Guy Kawasaki:
It's becoming apparent to me that you're the Jane Goodall of sharks. How's that?
Dave Ebert:
That sounds awesome. She's quite a person. I remember seeing her on National Geographic back when I was a kid. That's cool to hear that.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think I can guess at your answer, but all things considered, is Jaws the best or worst thing that ever happened to sharks?
Dave Ebert:
I saw Steven Spielberg was just on a program comment where he thought it was a negative thing. I know Peter Benchley, who I never met, I actually haven't met Spielberg either, but Peter Benchley felt it was a bad thing for sharks. It was the best thing that ever happened to sharks was those movies. The thing was is everyone focused on the negative.
Keep in mind, and it's hard for younger people to understand this, but there was no field of marine conservation, certainly no conservation on sharks at the time. Again, as I said, when the movie came out, people got interested in it. The thing is there were already shark tournaments going on in the world.
They're happening here in Elkhorn Slough, in San Francisco Bay. They were just going on, but nobody paid any attention to them. They would have a shark attack on Monterey where I grew up. It'd make one day news story. But after Jaws, every shark attack became an event. All these shark fishing competitions became events.
It brought this out of the shadows and into the public light. But again, people were just more interested in sharks as they got going. I might mention my colleague Sarah Fowler, who I did the Sharks of the World book with. She was actually one of the pioneers who started the entire field of shark conservation in the late 1980s, early 1990s.
We're cohorts. I didn't know her at the time, but before she started it, there was no field of shark conservation. Young people that weren't around at that time can't imagine that, but it was one of these things that nobody even thought about it. It was just like sharks were being finned, sharks were being caught, but just nobody paid any attention to it. The movie Jaws, it changed that entire trajectory because people got interested in it and the people like myself pursued it as a career.
Guy Kawasaki:
You could knock me over with a feather, I thought for sure you're going to say it's such a negative thing, but okay.
While we're on the positive/negative spectrum, can you just tell us the most common misconceptions of sharks?
Dave Ebert:
I think that one of the reactions I get with sharks is when people... We talked already about the number of shark species. I mentioned the book, there's 545. I'll ask audiences when I give talks, I'll throw out a question, “Does anybody know how many species of sharks are out there?” Everybody will go, “Maybe twenty, thirty.” Some people will throw out, “How about 100?” They have no idea that there's over 500 species of sharks. That's probably one of the biggest misconceptions that people don't realize how diverse they are. Because most people, particularly if you watch a lot of TV shows, you got flying white sharks.
You've got tiger sharks, the big toothy ones that occasionally attack people, and that's all they ever see. They don't realize there's this huge diversity out there. When I talk with young people, I try to emphasize to them, “Don't go do what everyone else is doing because there's like 1,000 people out there studying white sharks. You'll just be another face in the crowd. If you want to make a name for yourself, if you want to rise at the top, find something that no one else is studying and go out and become an expert on that, because then you're an expert and you know something.”
And then chances are, there's so many species out there, you almost inevitably could find something that no one else is even looking at. That's really a thing I try to emphasize to people. There's a lot of stuff out there. Another study on white sharks, okay, get in line, there's a whole bunch of people out doing that.
Guy Kawasaki:
What about the impression that sharks are these stone-cold killers that are going to come bite you when you're swimming?
Dave Ebert:
I kind of gloss over a little bit when it comes to shark attacks or they try to use something more friendly, shark-human interactions. If you go walking out in the wood in Alaska or Montana, you might run into a grizzly bear. You might actually be injured or killed by it. It's a bear attack. It happens. You might run into a mountain lion. You go in the ocean, you might run into a shark. The chances it's a white shark or something that might actually hurt you is pretty remote. Oftentimes people will see sharks, large like white sharks and stuff, it's especially around Monterey Bay, it's not uncommon.
Most of the time they just swim by. It might scare the hell out of you, but they just generally swim by and they don't really bother you. People really aren't on the menu for sharks because honestly, a chubby seal or harbor seal or something has a lot more protein for them now than basically a skinny person or even a slightly overweight person. There's not going to be enough fat content for them to really energize their body. They need to look for things that are high protein like, again, harbor seals or sea lions. Elephant seals are great. They love those. People are not on the menu by any means.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think I know the answer to this question too. I'm a surfer. Madisun is a surfer. I surf. I don't know if that makes me a surfer. But anyway, when I try to encourage people who don't surf to surf and almost all of them say, "I'm afraid of sharks." It seems to me that there's more danger driving over Highway 17 to get to Santa Cruz than there is being in the water and getting attacked by a shark, right?
Dave Ebert:
Absolutely. Yep, absolutely. I grew up here in the Monterey area. I started skin diving at Lovers Cove when I was about eight years old. My dad took me out and my brother and I just started to choose how to free dive. I started free diving at a very young age. I felt comfortable swimming through the kelp. I was a free diver for about ten years before being a scuba diver and anybody that free dives. I was young, teenager, I used to spearfish. I'd like to go out and catch some fish for dinner or something. You think about, let's see, you're shooting fish. You're carrying them around on a stringer, wiggling fish, blood in the water.
I did that from the time I was eight years old for all this whole time and I've never seen a shark while I was spearfishing. I've seen a few sharks diving, but just never when I was spearfishing. If you think about scuba diving, you're down at the bottom. Free diving, you're pretty wide open there. Especially if you go out to some of the places like along... We used to call it Flounder Flats area between the Monterey Wharf and the hotel there. It's a big sandy area. It used to be a good place to go spearfishing for halibut. Of course, now I go up in the helicopter looking at sharks in Monterey Bay. I got to tell you, there's a hell of a lot of white sharks out there, but they don't really bother anybody.
They just hang out there during the day. I go out there where the cement boat was, Manresa, which is a popular surfing area and stuff. Now, if we see a shark, we'll call down to the lifeguards and stuff. But I think if people really realize how much is out there, they might rethink it. Like I said, if you're going to go walking in the woods or something and you're going to go in the ocean, you might see a shark, but it's pretty remote. It's really remote. Let me put it this way, a statistics I like to use. Since 1950 to the present, there's been anywhere from zero to about eight shark attacks a year off California.
The average is about three or four a year, but some years there's zero and some years there's as many as eight. When you think about it, the average number of attacks hasn't changed in what, seventy-three years, but the population in California has gone from what, about fifteen million to forty million. There's a lot more people as you know in the water now than there was even thirty or forty years ago. I tell people that to put in perspective that yeah, if you want to spend time in the water, great. Go out for it. Go diving. Go surfing. I did a little surfing when I was younger, but I really got into the diving, so I never really pursued the surfing as much because I probably should have grown up around here.
I'll be up in the helicopter just looking for sharks. We'll go along up there around Sea Cliff and the cement boat area and stuff. Especially in a summer day, you'll see people on the beach laying around, their kids are playing in the surf, and they don't realize there's six white sharks about 100 feet beyond the surf just hanging out. If people saw that, they'd be running around with their hair on fire. The sharks are just hanging out there. The kids are playing in the surf. Usually during the day the sharks are just hanging out.
They tend to get I don't want to say aggressive, but more active. It's usually around dawn, between dawn and dust, because that's when they're typically hunting. During the day, they're just hanging out, resting, chilling. They're not trying to avoid the people in the water.
Guy Kawasaki:
Let me get this straight. You're in a helicopter. You're near the cement boat, Seacliff. You see sharks 100 feet from swimmers. You don't dial 911 and call them up and say, "Hey, get those people out of the water." You just continue on business as usual?
Dave Ebert:
Oh, they'll usually call down. They'll let the lifeguards know, and they'll usually put up some kind of notice just that there's sharks around. The interesting thing around here in Monterey, which has been interesting, is that the sharks we see up around the cement boat tend to be the little... Okay, let me qualify this, the little white sharks, which are the young of the year, and they're between six and eight feet long. My personal thing, if the shark's as big as me, I'm six foot, if the shark's as big as me or bigger, I'm going to get out of the water probably, depending on the species, but I'm going to get out of the water.
But the big ones, and I know you're a surfer and any surfers would know this, if you go down towards Manresa, that's where you see the larger sharks, the ones that are over twelve feet or so, the bigger ones. If you think about white sharks, because really in California, if there's a shark incident, that's the problem. White sharks generally eat fish and other sharks actually until they get to be about ten to twelve feet. Their teeth when they're smaller are very narrow. When they get about ten feet, their jaws become much larger and triangular, which is what people... When they think of Jaws the movie, these large triangular teeth, they don't get that way until they're about ten to twelve feet.
What happens is at that size, they switch from feeding just on bony fishes and other sharks to starting to feed on marine mammals, harbor seals, elephant seals, those types of things. When I talk about ones like at Sea Cliff, the cement boat, most of those are small white sharks, like six to eight foot. Some days I'll go up there and I'll literally count forty white sharks along a two to three mile stretch of beach. I just get tired of counting. There's so many of them around there at this time. Actually I got to put in a plug in for this. That's actually a good thing in a way because to me it speaks to the health of the bay.
Because when you see that many sharks out there, up until 2014, it was only the larger sharks you would see. We never saw the small white sharks. They were always in Southern California, which is their main nursery ground. What we think's gone on is because the population is so healthy, part of it is due to the Marine Mammal Protection Act. There's a lot more marine mammals out there. The population's expanded and their nursery area has now expanded up to Monterey Bay. That's why we're seeing these little ones up here. Since about 2014, we really didn't used to see them before that.
I really want to talk about the health of Bay. In marine conservation, you hear so many just negative stories, one after another, and your eyes gloss over, God, aren't we doing anything? Here we're doing something right. I think people should stand up and pat themselves in the back. Hey, we did something right here with this whole project. In 1994, California was the first state in the US, it was only the third location, to pass a prohibition on catching and targeting white sharks. If you catch them accidentally, that's one thing, but you can't target them since 1994, which probably helped. I think it was more the Marine Mammal Protection Act from the 1970s.
But what was interesting is the first country to ever develop white shark protection was in South Africa. I fortunately happened to be involved with that back in 1990 when they passed protecting white sharks. Then it was Australia in 1993, and then after that it was California. It was neat to see some of these. Again, all this came about much after this whole conservation thing started to get going in the early 1990s.
Guy Kawasaki:
Two more questions about surfers and sharks.
Dave Ebert:
Sure. Fire away.
Guy Kawasaki:
In the very unlikely chance that Madisun and I are in the water and we see a white shark, what should we do?
Dave Ebert:
I would be safe and just probably get out of the water. Some people stay in the water. If I'm diving... Knock on wood, I've never seen a white shark diving. I've seen plenty from the boat. But if I'm in the water and there's a large toothy shark, white shark, tiger shark, I just try to get out of the water just to be on the safe side. On social media, you'll see people post these pictures of divers swimming up to tiger sharks and patting them on the nose or free diving with white sharks.
I think that's not a good thing because I think it sends the wrong message to people that don't know that they're going to think, “Oh okay, I can swim up to this twelve-foot-long white shark and swim with it”, or whatever. You don't know. Think about it as a wild animal. Again, you might see a mountain lion or a bear in the woods. It probably won't attack you, but you don't want to go poke the bear so to speak and create a situation where you could get hurt. Same with white sharks or any large sharks like that, you just don't want to take a chance.
Guy Kawasaki:
You see all these videos from Yellowstone where the tourists is going up to the buffalo and the buffalo charges them. You cannot fix stupid, but anyway. Now, Madisun and I are in the water. We see a white shark, twelve to twenty feet. In our brains we're thinking, get out of the water. Now, I want to know how to get out of the water. Do we turn and burn and paddle as fast and furiously, or do we try to gently sneak out of the water? How do we get out of the water?
Dave Ebert:
I'm saying this as we're sitting here not in the water right now, but as calm as you can, try to paddle to shore without getting too... Because sharks can pick up on stuff when there's a change in behavior, and that's what you don't want to do. Just as calmly as you can. Again, it's qualified because if you see a large shark there, your adrenaline's going to go up and stuff and everything. Sharks will cue off that. They pick up on that type of stuff. As calmly as you can, paddle to shore as quickly as you can.
Guy Kawasaki:
But I would suppose that the old joke is I don't have to paddle faster than the shark. I just have to paddle faster than Madisun. If I were the shark, I said, "Okay, I can bite Madisun, or I can bite this old stringy Asian," guess what I would pick if I were the shark? Let's take an apocalyptic scenario where for some reason all sharks disappeared, overfished, some virus, whatever. All the sharks in California disappeared. What would happen to the ocean environment if all sharks went away?
Dave Ebert:
By the time all the sharks disappeared, we'd probably be screwed, to make it short. This is actually a great question. Because when I talk to general audiences a lot of times, when you see things like white sharks disappearing, it's probably pretty late because they're a very high level predator. When you start to see those things disappear, you've got some problems further down the food chain. Again, I look for these what I call the lost sharks. A lot of them are lower level predators. But if you start seeing those things disappear, you've got a problem and that's when you should be addressing it.
I say there's a problem because probably their food's gone along, which could be smaller fishes. It could be crabs, crustaceans, things that are lower down the food chain. By the time you get to where all the sharks are gone, you've probably got a huge problem and we're probably screwed at that point because there's been a whole cascading effect of things that have gone on below that's caused them to disappear. Actually an example going on now, there's a bit of a debate. You may have heard of in South Africa that a couple of orcas started feeding on white sharks down there. I don't know if you've heard of that.
It's been in the news a bit. You'll see these articles about these two orcas wiping out the white shark population in South Africa. The white shark population was pretty healthy. Talking to people there that I know that have been studying this thing, what it looks like is that a lot of the white sharks would feed on and a lot of the bony fishes that these other sharks would feed on have been overfished. Basically if you remove the foundation of a building, your building is going to collapse.
If you think about the top of that building or pyramid, whatever, I always think of a building because you have your foundation, you build up, at the top of that, your roof's going to be like the white shark and you've got all this stuff below it. You take out the foundation of all these lower level, trophic level predators, these other sharks that are food for the white sharks, you get rid of those, the white sharks, they're around, but they're just going to move to a different area where there's food. The ones that are left are being taken out by these orcas in South Africa. But tying it to the sharks, you better be looking and paying attention because a lot of other things is going on at a lower level.
Guy Kawasaki:
Is there any part of sharks that really has these magical medicinal properties like shark teeth prevents cancer or shark fin prevents cancer, all this mysticism about eating parts of sharks? Is that all bullshit?
Dave Ebert:
The short answer is yes. We don't know. Right now we don't know. I don't want to quite say BS because sometimes you might find something later on, but I know people have studied this whole thing about sharks and cancer and other medicinal uses. One of the ones is the squalene from shark liver oil for treating certain things. I mean, a lot of these go back to a lot of the Asian markets there. I know people have actually studied that and they just have never found anything that they could say, “Yeah, if you take this cartilage extract, this'll prevent cancer.”
Or “If you take this squalene, this will help with some other medicinal use.” There's just been nothing proved. But again, people will swear by it. It's like a lot of nutritional supplements people take, some people swear by them and other people think they're just hocus pocus.
Guy Kawasaki:
I didn't realize, I guess I had heard about it before, but this practice of finning where you cut the fin off a shark that's still alive and you put the shark back in the water. Is that the definition of cruelty?
Dave Ebert:
You just opened up a big can of worms there on that, but this is actually a good example. Shark fins and shark finning has been going on for well over 100 years, probably a couple hundred years. A lot of it goes back to a lot of Chinese and a lot of the Asian were finning sharks for years. If you went to San Francisco's Chinatown before the movie Jaws came out in the 1970s, you could find shark fins in the markets there. Nobody paid any attention to them. Even after the movie Jaws came out, people got a little more interested in sharks and are focused on shark attacks, but nobody really got too interested in fins.
Again, until in the late 1980s when I was doing a lot of my research, I'd lived in Taiwan, I was living in South Africa, and I was seeing these buyers, primarily Chinese buyers, going around to villages in Africa and stuff and buying shark fins. At the time, again, it's a different mindset than today. I was curious whether they were using them for different soups and stuff. I've had shark fin soup before. It's okay. I don't really get what the big attraction is. But I know from living in Asia they'll say, oh, it's like having chicken noodle soup. I don't know. But anyway, my professor... This is again a great example of what a great time it was in the 1980s and 1990s was that...
This was actually my first book, we write up this thing. We started talking about this whole shark finning, and we actually wrote a section in our first book I ever did on this shadow industry of the shark finning going on. At that time in 1989, nobody was even talking about shark fins. Are you kidding?
And then also at that time, we also estimated that there was probably somewhere between about twenty-five and sixty-five million sharks a year were killed as bycatch. Again, nobody was even thinking about this at that time. Of course, nowadays shark finning is a huge issue. But this, again, traces back to the movie Jaws.
People got interested in sharks because of that movie and now pay attention. They look at fins. You talk about the cruelty of shark finning and stuff. Again, I know they probably do this on the high seas a lot more. Things like blue sharks, the meat's not very good, so I know they a lot of times take the fins off and keep the fins. But I can tell you from my own experiences having lived in Asia and stuff, a lot of these areas, these villages, they don't send any protein back. Same in Africa, protein is protein for the village or the small community. The fins are an added bonus to it, but the meat will get consumed as well.
When you're on the high seas and they catch things like blue sharks, which are kind of like bunny rabbits of the high seas, they breed, they're so prolific, people will remove the fins. I understand they'll keep the fins and remove the carcass, which there's no doubt that you can make a case for it being a very cruel behavior and stuff like that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Let's suppose that my listeners are now just fascinated by sharks and hopefully they buy the book. But then the second thing is, where are the best places to go and see sharks?
Dave Ebert:
It depends where you want to go. I should add too, we talked about mainly sharks, what people think of sharks, but there's these other things that are called flat sharks, which are the rays. If you think about it, if you take a shark, which you think of a typical shark, and you flatten it down and you roll the gills from the side of the head underneath of it, that's really a ray. When you see skates or rays, that's really a flat shark. In addition to the 545 species of sharks, you have another 650 species of rays out there too. I mentioned the rays because rays tend to be a lot more gentle and you can swim with those.
They're not going to generally bite you or snap at you and stuff. But if you want to go see sharks, think about manta rays. People love to go to Hawaii or someplace to be able to dive with manta rays and stuff. With the sharks, there's certain areas where people can go. If you wanted to see white sharks, for example, that's really popular places. There's places you can go see tiger sharks. It really depends on what you're looking for. Because California, you go out to Elkhorn Slough at times of the year and you see leopard sharks.
Go kayaking up the slough in the springtime on a low tide and you can see lots of leopard sharks out there. You can see blue sharks out in Monterey in the summer and in the fall out here. Of course, white sharks. It depends what you want to see and where you want to go.
Guy Kawasaki:
White sharks. I want to see Jaws.
Dave Ebert:
It depends on the species. You want to see Jaws?
Guy Kawasaki:
I want to see Jaws.
Dave Ebert:
Why don't you go out and go surfing? Go out to Manresa. Maybe take some chum with you, or Madisun with you, and just go out and splash around a lot, make a lot of noise. I'll coordinate. I'll fly above in the helicopter and I'll radio down, "Oka, Guy, we got one. They're there." Something you should think about too is people tend to think of... With white sharks, you think of the fin at the surface.
White sharks are mostly under the water. You could have six of them around your surfboard and you'd never know it because they're under the water. When you're at surface level, you can't see them. But you get up a little bit and you'll see them.
Guy Kawasaki:
Great. Do they like yellow surfboards or is that a myth?
Dave Ebert:
You mean yum yellow?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah.
Dave Ebert:
Yeah, there seems to be something like these bright colors, like bright yellow, they call it yum yum yellow, or bright orange. Those bright colors, they definitely seems to be a bit of an attraction for them.
Guy Kawasaki:
That is also good to know. What are the biggest threats to sharks?
Dave Ebert:
Again, I want to put it in perspective. Places like in California and actually in the US, sharks are generally very well protected. You can make a few arguments here and there, nitpick, but generally the populations are pretty good. But the big thing is overfishing in a lot of areas from them, habitat degradation, a lot of species, particularly in poor countries developing countries. Habitats. A lot of the sharks, coastal sharks will use mangroves and areas for part of their reproductive cycle. Those things have been destroyed in a lot of areas. But overfishing is probably the number one issue, and then followed by habitat destruction.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now, when you say overfishing, you mean overfishing of what sharks eat or overfishing of sharks themselves?
Dave Ebert:
Overfishing the sharks themselves. Now, again, I want to qualify a little bit, but some shark species you can fish sustainably. There are a few species you can, but a lot of the species, particularly some of the larger species, coastal species, and these are what are called whaler sharks that occur in coastal areas, and it's been shown time and again, you can fish these things down pretty easily in some of these areas. You can go out there and you can hit them pretty hard. They'll disappear locally. You can wipe them out. There's documented areas where this has occurred.
Guy Kawasaki:
Let's say someone's listening, ten years old, it's the next Dave Ebert. What's your advice to them about how to pursue your footsteps?
Dave Ebert:
Again, you're ten years old, you just want to stay focused on what you want to do. It's a little different today because people want instant gratification, but you got to look at the long-term. This sounds basic, but you want to do good in school because you want to get to college. But also broaden yourself. Everybody thinks like you just need to do sharks. Do other stuff, have a well-rounded experience. You learn to go diving. Work on any kind of projects. Probably the one thing I tell grad students, you want to develop skills, whether it's on a computer, it's in the field. You want to develop skills.
The shark stuff will come. When students come, grad students that I have come to my lab, I'll teach you about sharks. You want to learn skills, whether it's diving, whether it's boating, computer. Probably the two things I would tell anybody to learn as you start from your ten years old and you're going forward, learn how to write and how to speak publicly. Because my friends now that knew me laugh about, but I was so introverted even through high school and into college. It was really a professor of mine told me, he says, "If you want to make it in this field, you've got to learn how to speak professionally, and you need to learn how to write."
I couldn't write to save my life and I couldn't speak. But what was a key thing for me on the speaking part was this professor said, "Dave," and I was in graduate school this time. Again, this is the 1980s, so take into account inflation now. But he says, "If somebody's going to pay you $100 to get up and speak in front of that group, would you do that?" I'm like, "Hell yeah, I would. For 100 bucks, heck yeah, I'll learn to speak." It was that financial and that little thing to speak, but it really is two. Those are probably the two best skills you could learn, how to speak and how to write. It's all skills.
Again, don't focus on the sharks. If you have a chance to go work on marine mammals or invertebrates or learn some other, even if it's a lab or some field experience, take it. It doesn't matter. You can learn about sharks. Just get the experience.
Guy Kawasaki:
Are you just a great example of someone who luckily discovered their passion very early and just kept at it? Did you ever think that when you're ten and you look forward, when I'm middle-aged, I'll be the shark guy? Was that the goal?
Dave Ebert:
I never imagined I'd ever even write one book. I've written like thirty-five now. I just never thought about that. I just had this fascination with sharks. Also, I like to travel. I always had this dream when I was young, I wanted to go see the world. I don't know where that came from, somewhere in my family. I got a family of explorers that like to go out and learn new things and explore. I think that was the big thing with me is I had that explorer gene. I wanted to go learn. The few things I always encourage people, you want to have a positive attitude. You want to have a drive, a focus. You want to be persistent and a passion.
If you got those five things, it'll carry you far in life with whatever you want to do, whether it's sharks or some other area. Those are just things you can learn and you just have to have innate, and you can go really far in life. Here's something else I'll pass along to you. People don't realize this, but white sharks actually hunt in the surf. They actually like to hunt there. The reason they do that is it puts them at an advantage over the seals. That's the best time where they like to catch the seals is right when you get a nice surf break and stuff, that's oftentimes when they'll attack.
Guy Kawasaki:
What? Wait, but doesn't a human being in a black wetsuit look like a seal?
Dave Ebert:
Could, yeah. And here's something else that very few people know, another little thing I'll share with you, because I was the first person who actually did this back in the late 1980s, early 1990s, is I documented that large sharks... I did this mainly around sevengill sharks, which occur in the bay, but white sharks do this too, is they'll hunt cooperatively in groups, in packs, depending on the prey that they're taking. Now, they're not likely to hunt as a group on surfers, but you never know. But oftentimes if you see one white shark around, there'll be others around and sometimes larger prey that they will cooperatively hunt depending on what they're hunting.
Guy Kawasaki:
Geez!
Dave Ebert:
Just something else for you think about.
Guy Kawasaki:
There's another parallel with you and Jane Goodall, because until Jane Goodall discovered this, everybody thought that chimps didn't have social interaction, didn't use tools, didn't use all this kind of stuff. Jane Goodall is the one who proved that, yeah, chimps used tools and all that. Now, Dave Ebert is telling us that sharks cooperate when they hunt. It's good to know.
Dave Ebert:
It's interesting you brought up Jane Goodall on this because I'd seen some of this stuff when I was doing my master's degree. Again, just so people understand, it's like I spent years to get a few glimpses of this thing and it was very opportunistic, but I was watching how these sharks were hunting, just different types of sharks. I was going like, “Man, they're not just randomly attacking stuff. It's a very coordinated attack”, basically social facilitation. I was living in Africa and my advisor, Leonard Campano, and this is the great, brilliant stuff like I learned from him.
At that time he says, "Let me give you some books and read these." The books were on the spotted hyena and the Serengeti lion, and it talked about their feeding behavior, their forging behavior. I couldn't put these books down. I was like, “Oh my God, this is exactly what these sharks are doing.” If you think of some of these species, like the way lions will hunt in a pride or hyenas will hunt in a group, that's how these sharks will hunt. If they find a good area that they like that they're successful hunting, they'll go back there repeatedly to hunt in the same area.
We know this. At the Farallons, there's certain areas where the elephant seals will come in and out of the water. We see this at Seal Island often. These sharks will come back and they'll hunt in the same spot. And then sometimes, depending on what they're hunting, they'll hunt in a group, in a pack basically. It's fascinating. You got to spend a lot of time in the field. This is the kind of stuff I'd encourage young people to do. Just watch. Just sit there and watch what's going on and try to put it into context.
That was probably some of the most exciting stuff I ever did. But of course, when we started thinking about these large sharks actually will hunt in a group, it could be a little I don't want to say scary, but a little, I'll say interesting.
Guy Kawasaki:
I hope you enjoyed learning about sharks and the life and work of Dave Ebert, a true pioneer in the field of shark research. His discoveries and explorations have shed new light on these majestic creatures and contributed to our understanding of the ocean's complex ecosystem. Don't forget to check out Dave's books and watch for his appearances on TV shows and documentaries to learn more about his fascinating work. I'm Guy Kawasaki, this is Remarkable People.
My thanks to Neil Pearlberg for introducing me to Dave and making this interview possible, not to mention letting me have a few waves when we're surfing together. My thanks to Jeff Sieh, Peg Fitzpatrick, Shannon Hernandez, Alexis Nishimura, and Luis Magana, all part of the Remarkable team. And last but not least, is the drop-in queen of Santa Cruz, Madisun Nuismer. Until next week, mahalo and aloha.