Dr. Catherine Macdonald
speaker
130 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 28 Jul
Dr. Catherine Macdonald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I'm just your backup in case you need it.
That's about 130 days a year of life for my team.
And if we're doing it right, it's not terribly dramatic.
We sample about 600 animals a year.
We can use those samples to answer a really wide range of questions, from questions about population genetics in species that are threatened with extinction to questions about what that tiger shark might have eaten in the last couple of days.
Yeah, okay, so what kinds of species are you working with?
We catch 12 species really regularly here in South Florida, and those are mostly going to be species that are coastal and subtropical.
We see a lot of black noses, black tips, bonnethead sharks, which are a small member of the hammerhead family.
We catch quite a few nurse sharks every year.
We do see some of the species that you might catch.
catch on TV, the hammerheads, the bull sharks, the tiger sharks, but our more cold water friends like the white sharks are only passing through our area.
I'm having a good day when something doesn't surprise me on that particular day.
But we did have a tiger shark vomit up a complete pig's foot on us a couple of years ago.
And that one I still remember.
Where did it come from?
My best guess is that some of our lobster and crab fisheries here in South Florida use pigs' feet as bait.
And so somebody dumping out their traps after finishing fishing probably left a treat that a tiger shark found.
At the largest scale, shark scientists broadly are trying to answer questions about what's happening to shark populations over time.
And that requires something called fisheries independent monitoring, which is what we're doing.
One of the difficult things about studying fish populations, if you're relying on data from fisheries, is that the regulations for those fisheries can change or the amount of effort can change really substantially depending on the value of the fishery at a particular time.
Showing 1–20 of 130 · page 1 of 7
Next →