Swimming with sharks MY JAW-SOME JOB!
Dangerous? Noway! Louise just loves these fin-tastic creatures
Jumping into a tank full of hungry sharks with a bucket of dead fish might sound like a moment fit for a horror movie, but for Louise Greenshields, it’s an average day on the job.
The Auckland woman, 29, works as an aquarist at Kelly Tarlton’s Sea Life Aquarium, which sees her diving with the fearsome-looking finned creatures on a daily basis, making sure they’re fed and keeping their home clean.
Although she felt “cautious” when she first hopped into the tank two years ago and some of her friends still think she’s “a little crazy”, Louise insists the sharks are completely harmless, even if they do have “big chompy-looking teeth”.
“They mind their own business and keep swimming along,” she insists. “Stingrays are a bit more interactive – they’ll glide up on top of us to say hello, which is good fun. They’re almost like dogs. All they want is attention!”
The aquarium’s 15 sharks get fed twice a week. Two divers enter the 1.1 million-litre tank with 40kg of mullet, much to the astonishment of visitors in the viewing tunnel below. Louise tells, “We feed the sharks with sticks and all four species have different feeding techniques. The most impressive are the broadnose sevengill sharks, which have
serrated teeth. They’ll bite down on the fish, shake their heads around and rip off a good-sized piece.”
Despite their reputation as ravenous carnivores, Louise says, “The sharks don’t actually need very much food and won’t all come in every feed. We have someone down in the tunnel observing them who can tell them apart by their markings and they’ll record who’s eating what, so we can make sure they’re all healthy.”
Although she won’t go so far as to say they have personalities, Louise concedes, “They have different natures. They’re all a lot more cool, calm and collected than the stingrays, but some of them are more inquisitive than others and will come a lot closer to us.”
Asked if she has a favourite shark, Louise struggles but eventually settles on “Number Two”, a female sand tiger shark who, at three metres, is the largest fish in the tank. However, she also has a soft spot for Wobby the wobbegong, a colourful carpet shark who has been at Kelly Tarlton’s for more than 30 years, making her the aquarium’s longeststanding resident.
“She can be a bit aloof,” smiles Louise. “She’s like a cat in that she’ll pay you attention only when she wants. When we feed her, because she’s an ambush predator, we shake a piece of mullet in front of her
like it’s alive and she’ll usually launch upwards to get it. But sometimes she just turns around and swims off. It depends on her mood.”
December 7 to 13 is Shark Week in New Zealand. Louise wants to share the message they’re a much-misunderstood creature bearing no resemblance to the monster in Jaws.
“There’s a lot of fear spread about them being man-eaters, but when I’ve seen them in the wild, they usually swim away as soon as they see a human – they’re not as interested in us as we are in them. In fact, about 100 million sharks are killed by humans each year, which makes the number of humans taken by sharks look like nothing in comparison.
“The scariest thing is that shark populations are so slow to recover after a culling and as an apex predator, they’re a really important part of keeping the ecosystem in balance.”
Deep at traction
Born in Brighton, England, Louise has loved visiting aquariums ever since she can remember. Her fondness for sea creatures grew after a snorkelling holiday on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, but she never imagined her passion could become a career.
She laughs, “Both my parents are teachers, so we all thought I’d be a teacher too, then I did my dive master’s course in Bali and got hooked, so I became an instructor. It’s still teaching, but not quite what Mum and Dad imagined!”
It was in Bali that she met her boyfriend Russell, who’s also from England. Soon afterwards, in 2012, the scuba-mad pair moved to Playa del Carmen, in Mexico, where they worked as instructors, diving in caves and alongside large schools of breeding bull sharks.
The following year, the couple relocated to Aotearoa. Louise explains, “I was here for five weeks when I was 18, backpacking around and throwing myself off bridges, and I’d always wanted to return. It’s a giant adventure playground – and the diving’s great too!”
While studying for a degree in environmental science two years ago, Louise landed the job at Kelly Tarlton’s and she’s since received residency. “I’ve got no plans to go back to the UK,” she grins. “I can’t think of a job I’d rather be doing. I get to dive with sharks and feed turtles every day. Anything else might be too boring!”