Sharks play a key part in the marine food system, keeping populations in check and our oceans healthy. They are often misunderstood and are under threat from overfishing, pollution and loss of habitat.

Oceanic pelagic sharks have declined globally due to overfishing. Conservation and management actions are hampered by basic knowledge gaps about movement patterns, migratory routes, drivers of aggregations, impacts of climate change, and precisely where they overlap with fishers across population ranges. Without knowing where sharks go and when, and what they do in different habitats, it will remain a challenge to understand the impacts of future environmental changes on populations, in the face of continued human impacts.

In this talk, Professor David Sims will describe his team’s research to understand how pelagic shark movement patterns alter in response to variations in environment, and what this means for understanding habitat selection and their interactions with fishing vessels. He will describe how this knowledge can help conserve shark populations, especially in the light of climate changes such as ocean deoxygenation, because interaction of human exploitation and climate change will have important consequences for how sharks are managed in the warmer oceans of the future.

Professor David Sims is a Senior Research Fellow and Leader of the Sims Lab at the Marine Biological Association. He is Professor of Marine Ecology in the Ocean and Earth Science school at the National Oceanography Centre Southampton (NOCS) at the University of Southampton. David’s research focuses on the movement ecology and conservation of marine predators, notably the sharks, skates and rays.