Please join us for the seminar – “Ecological importance and conservation ecology of white sharks” – on the topic of advancements in understanding of the roles of macropredatory sharks in marine food webs and modern ecosystems, presented by Dr. Jerry Moxley (Florida International University). Faced by a suite of stressors and widespread depletions, there remains debate regarding the role of shark interactions in marine ecosystem functioning, particularly outside the realm of direct top-down predation. In a global review, Drs. Moxley, Dedman, and collaborators elucidated the global breadth of shark ecological roles and threats to their functioning, and synthesized empirical understandings of their importance to modern ecosystems. Focusing on white sharks and their behavioral ecology interacting with other marine predators, Dr Moxley’s research examines how indirect interactions amongst marine megafauna, and risk-sensitive behavioral patterns, can strongly modulate the ecological importance of white sharks in marine food webs. Through animal tagging and biologging, population and behavioral monitoring, and multi-predator cross-collaboration, his research has demonstrated risk-sensitive foraging and behavioral patterns in pinniped prey, atrophic disruption of sea otter functioning in a macroalgal trophic cascade, and insights into surprising revelations still emerging from dramatic intraguild interactions with killer whales. Such studies into multi-trophic linkages of sharks are emerging now, both identifying remaining knowledge gaps in the ecological understanding of shark interactions while elucidating context-dependencies that mediate the importance of shark interactions to overall ecosystem functioning.
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