so we're using drones to fly along the beach to look for sharks that we see

close to shore and if we see them from the video we can use that to estimate

their size and determine what species most of the sharks you see here are juvenile

white sharks and we believe this is a really good nursery habitat for them my

name is Chris Lowe a professor of marine biology and the director of the shark

lab at Cal State Long Beach so this new project that we've embarked on is a

survey study where we're shooting video transects along the beach so the goal is

to come up with what we'd call an encounter assessment who's most likely

to encounter sharks and under what conditions and then we can also use that

same video footage to look at how sharks behave when they're in close proximity

to people are attacking aggressively are they attracted to people are they

repelled by people or do they just ignore people so we have hours of

footage of people in the water surfing swimming sharks swimming right by them

sometimes right underneath them and completely ignoring them they don't

change their speed they don't change their heading they don't turn around and

come back when we show that video footage to people they're astounded

because it doesn't match what they think of as encountering a shark so we're

right in the middle of a two-year study and hopefully by the end of this study

we'll be able to answer those questions

so one of the challenges of doing a large-scale study like this is you end

up with hundreds of hours of video footage that somebody would have to

screen through so by working with engineers computer scientists we're

developing machine learning algorithms that will go through and identify

surfers stand-up paddleboarders boogie boarders swimmers waders and then the

software will automatically identify those and then measure their distance to

the wave break into the shore line so to my knowledge this has never been done at

this scale so if we can develop those predictive models here the goal should

be we can do this anywhere in the planet

we've been studying juvenile white sharks in Southern California for about

15 years now we've tagged over 80 sharks right now that have active transmitters

we have listening stations all along the shoreline from Santa Barbara all the way

down to San Diego so anytime the tagged shark swims within 300 yards of one of

our underwater receivers the receiver will log the time the date of the ID

number and then all the lifeguards or our partners can become subscribers to

that alert system so they will get text alerts or they'll get email alerts and

then they will use that information at their own discretion to decide whether

they want to pull people out of the water or not we also have an autonomous

underwater robot that we use to characterize the water column around

these beaches where we know the sharks are hanging out the robots also have

video cameras on them so as they're moving up and down through the water

we're videotaping the seafloor what's in the water column there's also on the

robot a receiver so it's listening for tag sharks while it's swimming along

doing its transects so this new technology coupled with our aerial

surveillance coupled with our tagging is doing something nobody else has ever

done before and giving us really high resolution information about why the

Sharks are here at this Beach and not that Beach and not that Beach so the

idea there is maybe with enough data we'll be able to predict why they're

here and where they're gonna be next

you