E&E PhD Exit Seminar: Examining behavioural patterns and social structure in sharks using acoustic telemetry

ABSTRACT

Social encounters and behaviours shape the lives of all animals. The degree in which sociality is expressed varies widely across species, resulting in profound ecological and evolutionary consequences. Due to the cryptic nature of the aquatic environment, sharks were long considered non-social, forming only occasional aggregations. While observational studies have since disproven this assumption, their highly labour-intensive nature has restricted the research to relatively small study areas and timeframes. Acoustic telemetry enables fine-scale and continuous tracking of shark movements over long timeframes. Substantial acoustic telemetry data is publicly available, making it a valuable and accessible resource. However, the inherent spatial inaccuracy of acoustic telemetry setups makes them difficult to use for sociality research. Within this thesis I examine how the confidence in collecting and using available acoustic telemetry data can be enhanced to better reconstruct social networks and behaviours. I focus on evaluating available methods to extract social networks from tracking data as well as developing new approaches to get better insights into social behaviours. Within my PhD I demonstrate how impactful acoustic telemetry can be for improving the understanding of social behaviours in sharks, while highlighting how study design and method choice can affect conclusions. With the vast amount of data already collected, acoustic telemetry offers a unique pathway to examine sociality in sharks and enhanced approaches can improve future data collection while also adding value to already collected datasets.

BIOGRAPHY

I’ve always dreamed of becoming a marine biologist working with sharks. To pursue this dream, I completed my BSc. at Kiel University in Germany, followed by an Erasmus Mundus master’s programme specialising in marine biology enabling me to study at four different universities in Europe. During this time, I had the opportunity to work for the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and for an NGO helping to study the movement of whale sharks in the Philippines. The first year after my MSc. I worked for a federal agency in Germany advising a federal ministry in marine conservation. This was followed a stint as an independent consultant in the science-policy interface before I started working as a research engineer at a Limnology field station in Sweden. I commenced my PhD at the ANU in March 2023 with a research focus on better understanding social behaviours in sharks and how these can be obtained from tracking data.