Dr. Catherine Macdonald

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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.

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Science Friday · Tracking shark populations, one shark at a time · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

So if you've been fishing within that fishery for decades with a net that has a particular size mesh and then NOAA decides that to avoid bycatch or because it's going to be more effective, they want to change the mesh size.

All of a sudden, your past data and your future data can't accurately be compared anymore.

anymore because your method has changed.

Yes, there've been amazing projects, including one called Global Finprint that used baited underwater cameras to study shark populations around the world.

Increasingly, shark scientists are using drones to

to answer questions about sharks and their habitat use.

But there are always going to be questions that you really need to get hands on to try to answer.

Well, one of the things that's tricky about that is it's really hard for us to answer the question of whether they weren't there or whether we weren't seeing them.

Because 20 years ago, even if you went to the beach and you saw a shark, you'd get out of the water and you'd tell someone you saw a shark and they'd be like, yeah, okay, maybe.

And these days there's people flying pretty high resolution drones at thousands of beaches around the country.

And so-

There are questions about whether there are more of them or we're just seeing them and detecting them more often and in ways that are more definitive.

But certainly in some parts of the country, we are seeing population recoveries and animals moving into habitats where they haven't previously been seen, at least not in recent memory.

Like where?

Massachusetts has certainly seen an uptick in its white shark population alongside an uptick in its

seal population, if you recover sharks prey species, the sharks themselves are very likely both to benefit from that and to turn up where there's an easy meal.

What about in Florida?

What trends are you seeing?

I would say that it's very species specific here in Florida.

So we have some species where we are seeing population recovery.

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