15th Annual European Elasmobranch Association Conference

By Akira Biondo – PangeaSeed International Coordinator

After a year abroad, mostly in Japan and in the very realm of sharks within Southeast Asia, I’ve made it back to the Old Continent, only to continue working towards a bright future for our friends with fins.

Up next – October 28-30 -  was the 15th Annual European Elasmobranch Association Conference in Berlin where elasmobranch scientists from countries as far as the United Arab Emirates, Angola, Costa Rica or Australia joined the European pool of experts to discuss their new scientific findings. During the three conference days, topics ranging from ‘Elasmobranch Conservation & Fisheries Management’ and ‘Fisheries’ over ‘Taxonomy’, ‘Anatomy & Morphology’ and ‘Behavior’ to ‘Biology, Ecology & Population Dynamics’ gave me a glimpse into what the scientific shark-arena was like.

I was also looking forward to the poster session where even more works were presented. But I was particularly interested in the collaborative work done by my friend, shark expert Michael Scholl, and the University of Bristol, UK on new methods of identifying great white sharks digitally. – ‘Towards fully Automated Biometric Identification of Individual White Sharks using Computer Vision on Dorsal Fin Images’.  It was wonderful to see all the valuable data he had collected over years be the heart of an innovative identification tool that may well be valuable for conservation purposes in the future.

Keynote-speaker Shelley Clarke emphasized the need to “keep the science in shark conservation”, addressing the countless “shark-saving” groups and organizations that have been sprouting up in the past several years and “cuddlifying” sharks, as she puts it. It is often the case that campaigns boil down to slogans as “Save Sharks!” or “Stop Finning!” which are legitimate ways to attract public attention after all, but let us not forget that translating scientific gobbledygook and making it more accessible to laymen also falls into the scope of a conservation group’s responsibilities.

Sitting in the auditorium at the Natural History Museum of Berlin, I felt that PangeaSeed should, could and therefore will do more in order to bridge the divide between the scientific and popular domains.

All in all, the weekend was very, let’s say, sharky and interesting. Looking forward to next year’s conference…

Fins up!

For more information:

European Elasmobranch Association

15th Annual European Elasmobranch Association Conference

Conference Booklet & Abstracts