Swimming with sharks
Swimming with sharks is all part of a normal work day for Riley Elliott and Amber Jones.
Swimming with sharks is all part of a normal work day for Riley Elliott and Amber Jones.
The Coromandel Peninsula couple recently swam with Blue Sharks near the Aldermen Islands, about 20km east of Tairua, to carry out shark research in the area.
Jones photographs the sharks while Elliott tags them for research as part of his marine biology PhD at the University of Auckland.
Elliott said he wasn’t worried about swimming with sharks and had never had a close call.
‘‘There are far more dangerous things going on in our every day lives than sharks,’’ he said.
There were only about six fatal shark attacks around the world each year, he said.
‘‘Knowledge is how I’ve learnt to stem dangers and understand dangers to make an educated decision.
‘‘I’ve spent my whole life learning how to free dive with sharks and I’ve learnt how to respect them as a wild animal but also predict their behaviours to a point where I can co-exist with them.’’
Free diving, where a diver held their breath for an extended period of time, was more dangerous than swimming with sharks, he said.
‘‘It is a dangerous sport with a lack of knowledge, I went to learn it from a professional,’’ he said.
The islands off the coast of Tairua was a natural birthing and breeding ground for the sharks. This was one of the reasons why the couple decided to move to the Coromandel Peninsula town, an area Elliott grew up visiting for holidays from his home town of Hamilton.
Elliott wanted to empower people with knowledge about sharks, ‘‘so we can understand and respect them rather than fear and hate them’’.
He has been studying his PhD part time for the past five years, identifying the migration routes and habitat use of the Blue Shark, which is the animal that’s the most widely shark finned in the world. He discovered as part of his PhD research that New Zealand was one of the worst shark fin exporters, so he mounted a campaign to expose shark finning, leading to the practice being banned in New Zealand waters in 2014.
Elliott has so far tagged 26 sharks for his research – most of them around islands off the Tairua coast, costing more than $200,000 plus $100,000 in satellite time. ‘‘It’s an extremely expensive thing and that’s what a PhD generally is therefore your issue has to justify the grand expense, which I then have a responsibility to share with the public and the government and all so often that ends up in a great result for the sharks,’’ he said.
Choosing to study sharks left him with funding issues.
‘‘You don’t get funding in the most conventional way in shark research, which usually comes from fisheries, because I was taking away money from fisheries,’’ he said.
His solution was a public engagement campaign.
‘‘To grow that exposure and awareness, I did a lot of media work that related around getting people to fund [shark] tags and naming them after their kid or sister or wife, or even a corporate business.
‘‘We tagged these animals and showed people the live feed on the internet where these sharks went and what they did and what they meant for the ecosystem.
‘‘It’s scientifically proven that more sharks mean more fish and a healthier ecosystem.’’
‘‘There are far more dangerous things going on in our every day lives than sharks’’
Riley Elliott