JENNY SIMPSON: It's a beautiful November day, we load up the
passengers, full boat, we go round to an island where there's
seals, all of a sudden something just leaps out of the water.
ROSIE HOLDWORTH: Hello and welcome to Wild Tales. I'm
Ranger Rosie Holdsworth and today we're heading to Colmore.
To untangle one of the world's most endangered and cryptic
species.
JENNY SIMPSON: First split-second reaction is a
dolphin, but as soon as it came a bit further up out the water,
the shape of it, the way in which it was vertically coming
straight up in the air, it definitely wasn't a dolphin.
ROSIE HOLDWORTH: Jenny is a wildlife guide in Padstow. A
quaint seaside town nestled in the Camel Estuary on the
Atlantic coast of Cornwall. Spending hundreds of hours out
at sea each year, Jenny has a suspicion about what she's seen.
JENNY SIMPSON: You do get some people who say to us, there
aren't any sharks here, are there? And I just say to them,
well, anywhere there's ocean, there are sharks.
ROSIE HOLDWORTH: Jenny knows that when someone says shark,
all we think of is jaws full of teeth.
JENNY SIMPSON: I remember seeing a basking shark and there was a
little boy in the boat and he was so scared. And I was like,
this is really exciting. It's not got big teeth. Just because
it was a big shark, he was sure it was something scary.
ROSIE HOLDWORTH: Jenny has to find out what she's seen.
When it comes to sharks, being able to tell people on board
exactly what is out there can be the difference between
fascination and fear.
But with just that glimpse of a shape, how could she do it?
MOLLY KRESSLER: So I'm American. When I was born, my grandparents
moved to Florida in a really beautiful place called Vero
Beach. You'd wake up and you'd see manatees and dolphins and
pelicans. And it's just like a breeding ground for marine
biologists.
ROSIE HOLDWORTH: This is Molly.
MOLLY KRESSLER: I was kind of the target demo of something in
the U. S. Called Shark Week on Discovery Channel. And it
coincided pretty much annually with our vacation down to my
grandparents' house. So it really was this like perfect
storm. So we'd watch Shark Week.
And then we would go to the beach. And I remember some of my
siblings being absolutely petrified of going near the
water. But I was more like, if I go in the water, I might
actually see one of those sharks that I saw last night.
ROSIE HOLDWORTH: Unlike in the UK, in Florida, sharks are a
reasonably common sight. For Molly, they start to become an
obsession.
MOLLY KRESSLER: We would do surf fishing. You're literally
standing like ankle deep in the surf. And you cast it as far as
you can. It's got a really big weight on the end. And then it
plops in. And you know there's something because it bends
really dramatically. And in that moment, everyone's screaming,
reel it in.
For a while, you have no idea what it is. And then it'll come
up in the swell. And when it's in that wave, you kind of get a
good picture of it. And I just saw that elongated gray body.
And I was like, that does not look like the fish we're looking
for food-wise. We pulled in a juvenile scallop hammerhead.
And I got to hold it. I've got a photo of it somewhere. And
there's just this beam across my face. And I think I'm actually
wearing a hat at the time that had a little shark embroidered
on it as well. So it's just like picture perfect, kind of like a
shark obsessed girl.
ROSIE HOLDWORTH: The shark obsessed girl grew up to become
Dr. Kressler, a marine ecologist specializing in predator
behavior.
MOLLY KRESSLER: I think getting to see that wildlife, it really
instilled in me the sense of there's so much going on beyond
that calm of the surface. I'm one of those people when you
give me a little bit and then... Everything else is kind of
hidden.
I'm like, no, no, I need more. And when you have the marine
environment, unless you're scuba diving or swimming, you really
can't see below. It instilled those questions in me of like,
what else is out there?
ROSIE HOLDWORTH: But Molly's thirst for knowledge kept coming
up against the same problem.
MOLLY KRESSLER: We describe marine animals like sharks a lot
as being cryptic. So that's when They have these behaviours that
mean we don't really know what they're doing most of the time.
They can be really hard to find.
And any time you have a cryptic species, you often have really
high research costs to even interact with the animal once,
let alone to understand what it's doing over time. And that's
really where the power lies in understanding what a species is
and what we can do for it in terms of conservation.
ROSIE HOLDWORTH: Back across the Atlantic, Jenny is on a mission
to figure out what it is she's seen. She quizzes local
fishermen and scours the newspapers for sightings.
JENNY SIMPSON: I'm thinking it seems a bit small for a basking
shark. I know we get blue sharks around Cornwall, but this shark
seems a bit too sort of big and stocky. I'm kind of going
through it all in my head, but it wasn't until I got back to
the office and looking at some videos of the style of breaching
of different sharks, I'm looking at Mako sharks who kind of do
this stuff.
Of twist as they leap out. I was like, that's not it. That's not
what we saw. Looking at a video of a Thresher shark that comes
straight up and then splashes down, the way in which it
breached matched perfectly.
ROSIE HOLDWORTH: Thresher sharks are best known for their long
tails, which are almost the same length as their body. They use
this tail like a whip to stun their prey. Known in some
cultures as the fox of the sea for their elusive nature, they
have a few cunning and deceptive features.
JENNY SIMPSON: Yeah, they've got these really dopey faces, almost
like they're kind of tucking their bottom lip in.
ROSIE HOLDWORTH: There are three species of Thresher sharks,
common, pelagic and big eye. Sharks, as a group of species,
are second only to amphibians when it comes to their risk of
extinction. To get a sighting of their leap is extraordinary,
once in a lifetime. But just two days later...
JENNY SIMPSON: We'd heard about a Thresher shark being caught.
In some fisherman's gear. It wasn't an intentional catch with
bycatch. It just means that they're fishing for something
else and something accidentally gets caught in their nets that
they don't intend to catch.
But it had died and there's no way of knowing it's the same
animal. It just feels a little bit sad to know that there's
these amazing beautiful animals right up our coast but then you
know they can still fall foul to getting caught in nets.
ROSIE HOLDWORTH: Is the problem with cryptic species. We often
only really know they're there when they're dead. And for
Thresher sharks, we know almost nothing about their lives.
MOLLY KRESSLER: Threshers are a pelagic species, which means
that they spend most of their life out in kind of what is
described as the high seas. What that means is the further from
shore, the further from humans' realm of day-to-day operations a
species exists, the harder it is, the more cryptic it is, to
understand.
ROSIE HOLDWORTH: And this is a problem with many of the sharks
that Molly studies. She's determined that there has to be
a way to get more information. And to do that, she needs to
find a method that a lot of people can use.
After moving to Cornwall to study for her PhD, she attends a
conference and comes across a government study that's using
EDNA, or environmental DNA, to search for the presence of fish.
EDNA looks for tiny bits of DNA in the water. Like searching
your shower plug for hair. There are methods with medical-grade
filters, but they're too expensive and complicated to be
done on a large scale, especially if the species you're
looking for is out on the high seas. But at the conference, she
came across the Metaprobe.
MOLLY KRESSLER: This is a 3D-printed sphere. It kind of
looks like the Death Star. And inside are rolls of gauze. The
grocery store sometimes has it. It's much more affordable. And I
just, I saw the method and I think that the gauze-based might
be really powerful in answering some questions about shark
ecology.
ROSIE HOLDWORTH: Molly knew she would need help, but she didn't
just want to test the samples. She wanted people to know more
about the sharks that drift through our coastlines. She
wanted someone who could take the work and keep telling people
about the incredible species that are there, day after day.
JENNY SIMPSON: We had an email from Molly and asked if we would
help with her data collection. So she's looking for something
called EDNA and it helps them to identify what species have been
around our coast, basically.
MOLLY KRESSLER: So when they go out to do wildlife tours, I
would go out, take some water samples. One of my favourite
things about going out with Padstow and Jenny was the fact
that every time I was able to talk a bit about it, answer
questions and also get to do my science.
Hopefully we'll be publishing the paper this year. But, the
kind of short version is that we found that the gauze-based
method performs just as well as the medical method.
ROSIE HOLDWORTH: That means the Metaprobe, the Death Star full
of gauze found sharks. Porbeagles, Mako, and the
dopey-faced Thresher.
MOLLY KRESSLER: That means that it's much more accessible. One
part of the project that we looked at was having citizen
scientists, sailors around Cornwall take the Metaprobe out
with them and sample with it and collect samples.
ROSIE HOLDWORTH: For Molly, accessibility and people's
ability to engage with the Metaprobe is central to its
design.
MOLLY KRESSLER: So I'm disabled. I have a congenital birth
defect. I'm missing four fingers on my left hand. And so I kind
of have always faced this barrier to entry, not because
I'm incapable of entering, but because of people's perception.
I've encountered experiences in the field before where people
have outright told me that they know I can't do something and
therefore I shouldn't be given the opportunity to do it. I'll
just say I've proved them wrong every time. There was one
instance where we had a three and a half meter. Adult male
shark along the side of the boat.
And what you do is you have to hold them half out of the water
by the dorsal fin. I'll never forget that moment hanging off
the side of the boat because I had the feeling in my head as I
was losing grip on that dorsal fin of this is where they're
going to disqualify me.
To have somebody, a mentor who just said, it's fine. There's
something else you can do. You can still take lead on this
shark. And so when I was coming up with the field packs for the
metaprobes, I put materials in there that could be understood
by children.
Adults with mental or learning disabilities, as well as, you
know, your quote-unquote normal adults. And I was really pleased
because all the feedback was it was easy, it was
straightforward, and the kids loved it. And the kids found it
really interesting and they had more questions.
ROSIE HOLDWORTH: The ocean is not our world. Everyone, no
matter their ability, needs specialist equipment to be
there. So the accessibility limits are ones that we design.
To find these elusive sharks requires everyone.
MOLLY KRESSLER: A lot of populations are endangered,
critically endangered, but a large proportion of sharks we
don't have enough data on. If we don't know about them, we can't
help them, we can't protect them.
ROSIE HOLDWORTH: But despite all this, their huge diversity and
their increasing fragility, it's undeniable that in the UK we're
still scared of sharks. We're scared of the filter-feeding
basking sharks and that dopey-faced Thresher.
JENNY SIMPSON: The more people think they're scary, the less
they'll be interested in their conservation.
Whereas actually, if you find out more about all their little
superpowers, and some of them are really fast, and some of
them use their tails like a whip to catch their prey. And so
hopefully the more people know about them, the more they're
around, the more we can talk about them, the more people will
love them, maybe, hopefully.
ROSIE HOLDWORTH: Thanks for joining me in this Wild Tale. Do
you have an amazing story about the natural world? I'd love to
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