Internship opportunities give students a chance to get up close and personal with some of the planet's most feared creatures
BY ANDREW VOWLES
“The fact that I've been in shark-infested waters is just awesome to me,” says Kelly McNichols, a lab technician in the Department of Zoology. She admits, however, that “awesome” wasn't exactly the word she might have used one day this summer during an internship at the Bimini Biological Field Station in the Bahamas.
While netting lemon sharks there, McNichols had to wade through waist-deep water to free captured sharks from a gill net. She had pulled one shark free when it tensed its body, then thrashed out of her hands and into the murky water. It didn't help that her feet were mired in the mud, hampering her movement.
“It's one of the scariest feelings,” she says. “You can't see the shark, but you know it bumped into your leg.”
She's back at Guelph, safely inland, with not a free-swimming shark for thousands of miles. But like the handful of other U of G students — and graduates — who have had a taste of working with sharks and related marine animals, McNichols says she wouldn't hesitate to get back in the water.
All current or former students in the marine and freshwater biology program at U of G, they have been able to put shark researcher on their résumés largely due to internship opportunities arranged through the Department of Zoology and specifically Prof. David Noakes.
“There's still a lot that's not really known or understood about sharks because they're not easy to follow,” says Noakes, whose ichthyology course at Guelph includes a couple of lectures on the animals.
Never mind the sharks. What explains the fascination these students have for some of the planet's most feared if misunderstood creatures?
“I always wanted to work with sharks,” says fourth-year student Rebecca Dolson, who volunteered twice last year at the Bimini field station's shark lab. She learned to net and catch sharks and practise telemetry used to track sharks fitted with transmitters. She also had a chance to swim with young lemon sharks that had been caught and tagged for studies of growth and development.
Better yet, says Dolson: “Swimming with a 10-foot tiger shark caught on a long line was absolutely exhilarating.”
At Bimini, up to 80 sharks ranging in length from 70 centimetres to about one metre are held in nursery areas before being released. Station staff members have to swim around the pen twice a night to make sure no captives are stuck in the netting.
Although lemon sharks are dangerous, Dolson says she relied on her training to keep her distance from them and avoid provoking them.
She was still a high school student in Kitchener when she completed a co-op term with Noakes in U of G's Hagen Aqualab. She's now helping him with a study of killifish and hopes to study shark ecology in England after graduation. Whales and dolphins are OK, she allows, but “they're just too cuddly.”
McNichols, a U of G graduate, has worked in both Bimini and the Marquesas Islands. (She and Dolson will discuss their Bimini fieldwork as part of the Axelrod Institute of Ichthyology's fall seminar series Nov. 30 at 12:30 p.m. in Room 168 of the Axelrod Building.)
McNichols says there's an added urgency to the work in the Bahamas, where sharks and other marine organisms were threatened by plans to fill in a shark nursery area and build a large floating casino. Those plans have been halted because the location has been designated as a marine protected area.
Her interest in this field was sparked in elementary school after she saw a woman portraying a marine biologist in the movie Jaws III. Since graduating in 2001, she has been doing research with now-retired zoology professor Gerald Mackie. She also worked with him as a student, looking at the life cycle of endangered species of freshwater clams.
Other students who have worked with sharks include Andrea Bernard, who's just beginning a master's degree. She spent most of the 2003 fall semester on an internship at the Mote Marine Laboratory's Centre for Shark Research in Sarasota. She worked with the sawfish team, learning to measure and sex the fish and fit them with acoustic or satellite tags.
During an earlier internship with the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, she worked on fish habitat in the Bay of Quinte. At Guelph, she's working with Noakes on populations of whitefish in eastern Lake Ontario.
Whale sharks, the world's largest fish, have fascinated Milena Palka since she first read about them while growing up in Kitchener. The fourth-year student got a chance to study them this summer while working with the Marine Conservation Society of Seychelles in the Indian Ocean.
Little is known about the lives of these plankton-eating creatures, including their migration patterns. Palka flew in an ultralight aircraft used to spot migrating pods and snorkeled with the sharks. But she kept a respectful distance from the animals, which can grow up to 20 metres long and weigh several hundred tons.
“You don't want to get hit by them. I spent a lot of time either chasing them or running away from them.”
She also studied sea turtles and beach erosion rates. Having worked the previous summer at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium in Florida, she says she may pursue a career in animal rehab or rescue.
Allowing that her mother was initially worried about her swimming with sharks, Palka says: “I had to explain that, yes, they're huge, but they have no teeth. They've never eaten anybody. Maybe you could fit in their mouth, but they would spit you out.”
Alex Wilson had even more explaining to do about his “life-changing” experience two summers ago while working for a photographer and naturalist who runs a shark eco-tourism company in South Africa. The company has gained fame for its documentaries about great white sharks, particularly the so-called “flying sharks” that leap above the ocean surface while hunting seals.
“It was a dream come true,” says Wilson, who says he's wanted to work with sharks since he was about six. Now in his second year of a master's program in zoology, he was still completing his undergraduate degree when he went to South Africa.
Along with studying the ecology of the great whites, he helped run tours, which included driving the tour boat and managing bait lines used to lure in the sharks. He remembers how one shark grabbed a line that failed to snap immediately, causing the boat to list and take on water.
“I thought it was just regular practice,” he says — until he saw the looks on the faces of his crewmates.
He got a close-up view of one of the beasts — nicknamed Night Rider — during a 20-minute Jaws-style descent in a shark cage.
“It was incredible,” he says, describing how he circled constantly inside the cage to keep the shark in view. “Suddenly, there's a shark an arm's length away, its pupil following you as it goes by.”
For his master's degree, Wilson is studying foraging behaviour and brain activity in brook char with Prof. Rob McLaughlin. His dream career? Studying shark behaviour.
