Manuel Dureuil

I am currently a PhD candidate of Dalhousie University and the Transatlantic Ocean System Science and Technology (TOSST) school, under the supervision of Dr. Boris Worm. Boris is a full professor at Dalhousie University, focusing on the conservation of marine biodiversity worldwide. He has authored over 100 publications on these topics, many with a focus on large marine predators, specifically sharks, tuna and billfish. Our scientific papers can be found here.

My topic is the conservation ecology of North Atlantic shark populations. I am also the principal investigator of this project.

I love nature and my life passion is to help conserve sharks worldwide. I am convinced that protecting nature is one of the most critical challenges we have. Growing up far away from the sea, observations of birds and the local fauna in my childhood had to replace sharks. Although I was always fascinated by sharks, at the time I was doing my undergraduate in Biology, things became more concrete. I read Boris’s first articles showing that sharks might be in deep trouble.

What got me in particular is that sharks, which have been on this planet for more than 400 million years and survived several mass extinctions, can become threatened in only a few decades, by us. I therefore decided to make scientific shark research that aids their understanding and protection my priority.

I have been researching sharks since 2009, ranging from the conservation of white sharks in South Africa to shark conservation and life history studies in the North Atlantic. I have a BSc in Biology from the University of Marburg and an MSc in Biological Oceanography from the University of Kiel. I have extensive training in working with sharks and I am holding a certificate on the Care and Use of Fish, was trained by our University Veterinarian and conducted external passive tagging, satellite tagging and surgically implanted acoustic transmitters in several shark species.

May 2016