All right, this is Ellen Weatherford, and I am here with our brand new friend, Dr. Catherine

McDonald. Say hi, Dr. McDonald.

Hi.

Hey.

So we have been chatting for a minute here, and you study sharks and teach other people

how to study sharks.

And I'm really, really excited to talk about that

because we haven't really focused a lot on sharks here on Just the Zoo of Us, but I think that

they're underappreciated and could really use some public education. So I'm excited to talk

sharks. So if you could, I would love it if you could

kind of introduce yourself and give us a little bit of an idea of who you are. My name is Dr.

Catherine McDonald, as you just said, but please, Catherine. And I am a interdisciplinary marine

scientist working in South Florida and the Southern Caribbean, mostly on coastal sharks

and rays. Together we call sharks and rays elasma brinks. Awesome. My work is really varied. I'm interested

in how human communities interact with shark populations. So I study fisheries in the Southern Caribbean.

And I'm also interested in

deepening our knowledge of shark life histories, especially for understudied smaller species of

shark like bonnet head or black noses that don't tend to attract the amount of research attention

that the big guys do. Yeah, because I think that when a lot of people think about sharks, they think about the big ones.

So they think about the Great White shark or maybe even like the whale shark or the big guys.

So can you introduce us a little bit to the kind of coastal species of sharks that you're looking at down there in South Florida?

Absolutely.

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