Last fall, Science Today’s Barbara Tannenbaum caught up with Dave Ebert and his grad student, Paul Clerkin, as they brought deep-sea shark specimens from the Indian Ocean to their new home in the Ichthyology collection here at the Academy.

Tannebaum’s article, “Fantastic Voyage,” captured their work expanding the Academy’s collections, and Ebert, an Academy research associate and director of the Pacific Shark Research Center in Moss Landing, has been tirelessly working ever since. We caught up with him by phone this week to hear the latest.

Earlier this year, Ebert traveled to Mauritius, east of Madagascar, searching for new and unknown shark species in the Indian Ocean. Ebert also attended a workshop put on by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, or FAO.

“We’re working on an identification catalog for sharks in that area to understand what’s being caught there,” Ebert explains.

In May, Ebert was part of a research cruise off of New Zealand, seeking more undiscovered sharks. His work was captured on film by the BBC for a segment that will air in early 2015. They hope to film him more on other expeditions in the coming year, too. “They’re doing something a little different,” Ebert says. “Kind of a day in the life of a researcher. They send us to a couple of different places to do some field surveys that will likely result in finding new or lesser known species.”

Ebert is pleased with the upcoming documentary because he’s hoping it will bring public awareness to little known shark species. “Everyone knows the white sharks and hammerheads, the charismatic species. These high profile sharks get a lot of attention and protection. But there are a lot of other species out there that for whatever reason are not known. Some of these have much higher conservation needs.”

He mentions the honeycomb cat shark (Holohalaelurus favus) off east Africa. The species was very abundant in the 1950s and 1960s, but hasn’t been seen for 40 years. “The shark didn’t even have a formal scientific name until 2006,” Ebert says. “We should know more about sharks like these and look out for them in fishery by-catch.”

When Ebert isn’t traveling, he works tirelessly on naming and describing these unknown and recently discovered shark species. The sharks he and Clerkin discovered were shipped here to the Academy for further examination. They will also find a permanent residence in our collections. “Several specimens just arrived from Taiwan and several more are due from South Africa this week,” he says.

Speaking of South Africa, Ebert will be a keynote speaker at next year’s Sharks International Conference in Durban, South Africa. The event occurs once every four years, and Ebert will be presenting on the biodiversity and conservation of sharks and rays, mostly African species.

And for true shark fans out there, Ebert is lead author on a new guidebook, Sharks of the World, due out next week.

Ebert is a busy scientist with much work ahead in discovering, describing and protecting sharks. Stay tuned for more updates on his important work.

We’ll give you the same update here each month, in the same order Ryan does, starting and ending closest to our home city, San Francisco.

Where’s the Snow?
Some of us were looking forward to sledding down our great neighborhood hills… On February 23rd, the San Francisco Chronicle reported “there is a good chance for snow at sea level in San Francisco for the first time since February 1976, the National Weather Service opines.” But on February 25th, it declared a “love-hate relationship with weather predictions.”

But everyone else got snow, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory:

January 2011 was marked by a series of crippling snow storms across the United States. By January 12, about 71 percent of the country had snow on the ground, the fifth-largest snow cover extent in the last 45 years.

While the snow-pack in the Sierras has been good for California, other states are not so lucky:

With all the snow, it would be easy to think that the United States received plenty of winter moisture, but snow is deceptive… January 2011 was the ninth-driest January in the United States in 117 years. The southern half of the country was particularly hard hit. New Mexico experienced its driest January on record.

Expedition to the Philippines
We mentioned this in Earth Update last month, but head Academy researcher Terry Gosliner outlined his plans, hopes and dreams for the upcoming Hearst Expedition to the Philippines at Nightlife last night. Academy scientists, working with Filipino researchers, will explore three research arenas in the country: shallow-water reefs, deep-sea,  and terrestrial and freshwater. The expedition will take place from April 25th through June 10th– look for updates here.

Australia and New Zealand Updates
Australia, land of floods, droughts and cyclones. Tropical Cyclones Diane and Carlos both hovered off the coast of Western Australia last month and Atu approached the north island of New Zealand. (Click on the links for more stunning images from the Earth Observatory.)

The 6.3-magnitude earthquake that struck Christchurch last month was surprising in the amount of damage it amassed. From Earth Observatory:

Besides striking closer to a major population center, the 6.3-magnitude Christchurch earthquake had a depth of just 5 kilometers (3 miles). The New Zealand Herald reported that, whereas the Darfield quake [September 2010] happened in the early morning hours, the February 22 quake struck at the “worst possible time” of day—at the lunch hour when city streets were crowded with shoppers, diners, office workers, and school children. Moreover, some of the buildings that collapsed may have been weakened by the September 2010 quake.

It’s also possible that the quake could have been magnified by volcanic rock.

Let’s look to some beauty of the area. The image above is not a painting; it shows the annual summer phytoplankton bloom, taken February 10th.

Goodbye Glory
Ryan reported on the Glory satellite launch to his NightLife crowd last night. Sadly, only a few hours later, early this morning, the climate-data gathering spacecraft failed to separate from the Taurus XL rocket and plunged somewhere into the South Pacific. We saw this same thing only two years ago with the Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite. You can read more here.

If you’re in the area, come visit the Academy for NightLife on April 7th for the next “Earth Update,” when Ryan and Tim will give you more of the latest news on Academy research and our home planet.

NASA image by Norman Kuring