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What flying drones over great whites really revealed is that far more white sharks live off Southern California beaches than anyone's records showed, often within a few yards of swimmers who never know they're there. Carlos Gauna, known online as The Malibu Artist, has spent years documenting them from above. It started with a shot he missed: sitting atop Point Dume at sunset without his camera or phone, he watched a large white shark chase a sea lion right below him. He had been flying his drone over gray whales, and from that night on he went looking for sharks. Today the photographer and FAA-certified drone pilot films white sharks nearly every month of the year, has published peer-reviewed research on their behavior, and funds most of his fieldwork through his YouTube channel.
Andrew and Dave follow the whole path with him: storm chasing in Oklahoma with his university's first digital camera, 16 years in corporate insurance while shooting weddings on the side, and a first drone bought in 2016 by someone who admits he couldn't stand drones at first. Carlos explains how he scouted beaches by tallying decades of reported encounters in Ralph Collier's Shark Research Committee records, then used empty COVID-era beaches to search alone. That's where his first viral clip came from: four white sharks consuming a common dolphin in 18 minutes. He also describes how outreach to Dr. Chris Lowe's Shark Lab and to Dr. Alison Towner turned an artist's curiosity into careful science communication. Dave adds what he saw from helicopters over Monterey Bay and South Africa decades ago, and the three of them work through a hard question: are there more white sharks now, or are we just finally able to see them?
The conversation also gets into water temperature as the most reliable predictor of where sharks show up, reading a shark's mood from the angle of its pectoral fins, filming natural behavior with no chum in the water, and the viral video of a swimmer who waved off a lifeguard while white sharks circled him. Carlos compares Southern California's approach to shark sightings with Cape Cod's, shares his simple rule for beachgoers when his drone flies close, and closes with advice for young creators: find a story, and make the content you want to watch.
Takeaways:
Carlos' YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/themalibuartist
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:
Save Our Seas Foundation Shark Education Centre (Kalk Bay)
Save Our Seas Foundation (global)
Connect with us:
Website: https://bit.ly/37TMqeKInstagram: https://bit.ly/3eorwXZ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@beyondjawspodcast7591
Dave: Website: https://www.lostsharkguy.com/ Instagram: https://bit.ly/3q1J9Q5 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lostsharkguy
Andrew: Website: https://www.speakupforblue.com/ Instagram: https://bit.ly/37g5WkG YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SpeakUpForBlueTV
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:
Website: https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/53846/shark-biology-and-conservation
Connect with us:
Website: https://bit.ly/37TMqeKInstagram: https://bit.ly/3eorwXZ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@beyondjawspodcast7591
Dave: Website: https://www.lostsharkguy.com/ Instagram: https://bit.ly/3q1J9Q5 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lostsharkguy
Andrew: Website: https://www.speakupforblue.com/ Instagram: https://bit.ly/37g5WkG YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SpeakUpForBlueTV
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:
Connect with Issa Seidu: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/antwiseidu88/
Connect with us:
Website: https://bit.ly/37TMqeKInstagram: https://bit.ly/3eorwXZ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@beyondjawspodcast7591
Dave: Website: https://www.lostsharkguy.com/ Instagram: https://bit.ly/3q1J9Q5 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lostsharkguy
Andrew: Website: https://www.speakupforblue.com/ Instagram: https://bit.ly/37g5WkG YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SpeakUpForBlueTV
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
Connect with us:
Website: https://bit.ly/37TMqeKInstagram: https://bit.ly/3eorwXZ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@beyondjawspodcast7591
Dave: Website: https://www.lostsharkguy.com/ Instagram: https://bit.ly/3q1J9Q5 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lostsharkguy
Andrew: Website: https://www.speakupforblue.com/ Instagram: https://bit.ly/37g5WkG YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SpeakUpForBlueTV
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:
Connect with us:
Website: https://bit.ly/37TMqeKInstagram: https://bit.ly/3eorwXZ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@beyondjawspodcast7591
Dave: Website: https://www.lostsharkguy.com/ Instagram: https://bit.ly/3q1J9Q5 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lostsharkguy
Andrew: Website: https://www.speakupforblue.com/ Instagram: https://bit.ly/37g5WkG YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SpeakUpForBlueTV
It's Shark Week season again, and Andrew Lewin and Dr. David Ebert are joined for the third year running by Jesse Colaizzi, an award-winning television documentary producer, senior editor, and director of photography who works closely with Forrest Galante. Jesse pulls back the curtain on how a Shark Week episode actually comes together, from scouting locations to the final cut.
Jesse joins the show remotely from Gujarat, India, where he is showrunning and editing Vantara's Sanctuary Stories, before turning to his newest project, Alien Sharks: Untamed America, premiering Wednesday, July 29th on Discovery. Built around America's 250th anniversary, the episode traces a journey across the country in search of cryptic and lesser known sharks, including white sharks off Diablo Canyon, a California horn shark, a swell shark located after months of searching, a guitar fish, bonnethead sharks, a swarm of blacktip sharks, a rediscovered tagged sawfish with researcher Dean Grubbs, and a basking shark in Cape Cod Harbor.
Along the way, Jesse and the hosts dig into what editors notice that scientists and viewers often miss: coordinated hunting behavior in sharks, how white sharks react to a drone's shadow on the water, the technical tricks used to slow down fast-moving animals on camera, and how years of watching raw footage trained Jesse to read animal behavior the way a birder reads bird behavior. Jesse also shares stories from filming rescued and rehabilitated animals in India, the discipline it takes to run multiple shows at once, and why this year's episode leans into American wildlife, from bison to elk to the Statue of Liberty, rather than the usual landmarks.
Key TakeawaysConnect with us:
Website: https://bit.ly/37TMqeKInstagram: https://bit.ly/3eorwXZ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@beyondjawspodcast7591
Dave: Website: https://www.lostsharkguy.com/ Instagram: https://bit.ly/3q1J9Q5 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lostsharkguy
Andrew: Website: https://www.speakupforblue.com/ Instagram: https://bit.ly/37g5WkG YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SpeakUpForBlueTV
Dr. Julia Constance is back on Beyond Jaws, and this time she's joining hosts Andrew Lewin and Dr. David Ebert as Dr. Constance. Julia returns fresh off completing her PhD on the natural mortality and movement ecology of two of the world's least understood sharks: the speartooth shark and the northern river shark, both found almost nowhere outside northern Australia and southern Papua New Guinea. Using a long-running acoustic telemetry dataset built by her supervisor since 2013, Julia tracked around 200 tagged sharks across Northern Territory river systems, some for up to a decade, to understand how these animals move, where they go, and what puts them at risk.
The conversation digs into just how little is still known about these sharks once they leave the rivers as adults. Julia explains how individuals vanish from the tracking data for years at a time before reappearing at a river mouth, with almost no confirmed sightings of adults in the open marine environment. She and the hosts also compare the relatively stable status of Australia's river sharks to their close relative, the Ganges shark, a species so rare and poorly documented that even basic facts about its biology are borrowed from research on its Australian cousins.
Along the way, Julia and Andrew share what it's actually like to do this fieldwork: murky, chocolate colored water, gear retrieval by feel instead of by sight, and working in rivers that hold the largest population of saltwater crocodiles on the planet. The episode also touches on a real and growing concern: proposed water resource development on the Adelaide River, home to the largest known population of speartooth sharks anywhere in the world, and what that could mean for a species already living in an extremely narrow habitat.
Connect with us:
Website: https://bit.ly/37TMqeKInstagram: https://bit.ly/3eorwXZ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@beyondjawspodcast7591
Dave: Website: https://www.lostsharkguy.com/ Instagram: https://bit.ly/3q1J9Q5 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lostsharkguy
Andrew: Website: https://www.speakupforblue.com/ Instagram: https://bit.ly/37g5WkG YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SpeakUpForBlueTV
For decades, stunning shark photographs have shaped the way millions of people think about these misunderstood predators. But behind every unforgettable image is a story that rarely gets told. In this episode of Beyond Jaws, we sit down with Manique Fallows to explore the passion, patience, and purpose behind a life dedicated to sharks.
Monique shares how photography became more than a way to capture wildlife. It became a powerful tool for conservation, storytelling, and helping people connect with animals they often fear. We also talk about her work as an author, her experiences in the field, and what it is like building a life around some of the ocean's most iconic species.
Whether you love sharks, wildlife photography, or inspiring stories from people making a difference for the ocean, this conversation offers a fresh perspective. You'll come away with a deeper appreciation for the people behind the lens and why their work matters now more than ever.
Website: https://saltyseadogbooks.com/
Connect with us:
Website: https://bit.ly/37TMqeKInstagram: https://bit.ly/3eorwXZ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@beyondjawspodcast7591
Dave: Website: https://www.lostsharkguy.com/ Instagram: https://bit.ly/3q1J9Q5 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lostsharkguy
Andrew: Website: https://www.speakupforblue.com/ Instagram: https://bit.ly/37g5WkG YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SpeakUpForBlueTV
Dave Ebert returns from a five-week journey across South Africa, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives, sharing stories from shark research, Sharks International, mentoring young scientists, and the search for lost sharks. This episode explores why taxonomy still matters, how new shark and ray species are still being discovered, and why the future of shark science depends on training the next generation.
Shark science, shark conservation, Beyond Jaws, Dave Ebert, lost sharks, new shark species, guitarfish, South Africa sharks, Sri Lanka sharks, Sharks International, marine biology, ocean science, shark research, taxonomy, chondrichthyans, marine conservation, Save Our Seas Foundation, Maldives diving, science communication.
Connect with us:
Website: https://bit.ly/37TMqeKInstagram: https://bit.ly/3eorwXZ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@beyondjawspodcast7591
Dave: Website: https://www.lostsharkguy.com/ Instagram: https://bit.ly/3q1J9Q5 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lostsharkguy
Andrew: Website: https://www.speakupforblue.com/ Instagram: https://bit.ly/37g5WkG YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SpeakUpForBlueTV
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