The Shark Conservation Lab is an educational non-profit organization that aims to study the intricate science and the way sharks have evolved to help conservation efforts. This operation is meant to study the evolving sharks, rays, and skates regarding their reproductive habits, habitat, population, and speciation using ecology, genetics, and molecular biology.
This organization is led by Dr. Toby Daly-Engel, who graduated from the University of Hawaii. She also appeared on Discovery’s Shark Week in 2018! Dr. Toby’s goal for the Shark Conservation Lab is to research genes along with ecology to understand shark and ray reproduction. She believes that this study will help us understand female shark and ray behavior can change populations, species, and the shark genome. All research is conducted in her own lab, the Daly-Engel lab.
Currently, the Daly-Engel lab is attempting to discover how organisms interact with their environment when faced with climate change and overfishing. The Shark Conservation Lab ultimately aims to determine how a keystone species such as a shark will respond to its changing environment, and how the disappearance of this species could cause irreversible and dramatic damage to marine conservation.
The students of the Daly-Engel lab use techniques involving molecular biology, bioinformatics, and field research to determine how marine life is adapting to climate changes and overfishing. This type of research has concluded that male and female sharks will have a genetic advantage if they mate twice during a breeding season, and they have also found that sharks and other elasmobranchs are at risk since they are unable to move out of their degrading habitats since they thrive in shallow waters.
The Shark Conservation lab’s current projects are determining how white sharks are genetically similar, and this is taking place in Pacific Baja, California. Another project aims to discover diversity in sharpnose and deep-water dogfish sharks. These projects use advanced laboratory techniques involving genomes and molecular biology to determine how a lack of conservation is affecting not just the sharks themselves, but the genes they pass down to the new generation of the species.
The students of the Daly-Engel lab work hard and put in great effort to aid in shark conservation, and you can help too! Click here to donate to the Shark Conservation Lab, or check out their website to see how you can help even more!
Click here to view their most recent news regarding their lead researcher, Dr. Toby, and how she has paved the way for conservation and other women in the field.
#NGO #sharks #rays #marineconservation #sharkconservationlab #research
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