Sighting of sharks off northern Newfoundland are a big deal for researchers

Well, it has been amazing to see how active the white sharks have been around Newfoundland this particular season. We've seen them all the way up to the very northern end of Newfoundland. This is the normal white shark range. When you look up the historic range of white sharks, all of Newfoundland is in the main range of white sharks, going back since we began collecting data. But what we have been through is we went through the 70s and the 80s and the 90s, where we decimated our white shark populations. We wiped them out down to about 9% of our population in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Post jaws, shark fin soup in Asia, overfishing for shark products. So we woke up around 1990 and we're like, oh my God, we're seeing our fish populations collapse because we've lost our sharks. And we started protecting our sharks and bringing them back around the early 1990s. What they're doing is they're guarding your fish stocks from the seals. So when these white sharks come in, they're hunting seals, putting pressure on your seals. So they're going to be near the beach. And one thing that's good about that is, is we know when the white sharks are doing that, they're preventing the seals from eating all of our fish. When the white sharks aren't present, we know our seals are eating four times more per day than they're supposed to, and they wipe out our fish stocks. So the main purpose of these white sharks up there is actually to guard our fish stocks from all the recovering seal populations. But Newfoundland is supposed to be surrounded by white sharks putting pressure on seals. It's just that we wiped out the ocean so much, none of us have seen it. And now the ocean is returning to abundance. And we are in the midst of this wonderful experience where we're going to be delivering an ocean that's full of much more life to our children than the one we grew up with.