Credit: David Mariuz
When Charlie Huveneers was 11, his primary school teacher told him he could do a presentation on any animal he wanted. When his mother suggested sharks, and bought him a book on the much maligned animals, he was captivated. “What struck me was how little we knew about them,” he says.
Now 30, Huveneers is a biologist specialising in shark ecology at the South Australian Research and Development Institute and Flinders University in Adelaide. His research often brings him face-to-face with some of the ocean’s most enigmatic predators.
Swimming with and tagging sharks (in the case of white sharks, from inside a protective cage) to observe their behavioural interactions is more than just a thrill. These relatively small tags send acoustic signals to a network of more than 1,000 underwater receivers around Australia and help scientists monitor sharks’ movements and migrations.
Back in the lab, Huveneers examines the stomach contents, embryos and DNA of various shark species to gain a better understanding of their diets, growth rates, life expectancies and reproductive cycles.
“If we can figure out how long sharks live, when they reach maturity, how many pups the females produce and how often, then we can begin to determine the reproductive rate of these sharks and how their populations can be affected by [human] impacts,” says Huveneers.
His ultimate goal is to create more sustainable fisheries and effective conservation practices. This is important considering sharks are usually more vulnerable to overfishing than other fish species due to their slow reproductive rate.
One of the challenges about working to protect sharks is coming up against the misconception that they are inherently bloodthirsty, says Huveneers. Still, he’s hopeful: “attitudes are beginning to change and people are increasingly starting to realise that sharks are an integral part of the ocean system.”
Having grown up in Belgium, where there is a mere 60 km of coastline, Huveneers had to look abroad to pursue his research. There were stints in England, the Bahamas, the Gulf of Mexico and Australia, where he has spent the last eight years, completing a PhD at Macquarie University in Sydney along the way.
“Coming to Australia was definitely the right career move,” he says. And it seems the beach life has its own attractions: an avid scuba-diver, Huveneers also loves surfing and wakeboarding.
