After the summer we had, most people in Sydney have an opinion on sharks. Rob Harcourt has data. The national tracking network he leads is how we know where tagged sharks are along the NSW coast, and it is part of a much bigger idea: that the animals themselves are the best instruments we have for measuring the ocean. A research ship can only be in one place at a time. An elephant seal dives to 2,000 metres, swims under the Antarctic ice in winter, and comes back. Attach a sensor and you get ocean data from places a ship would struggle to reach, at a fraction of the cost.

This is what Rob Harcourt has spent a good part of his career on, and it is the subject of his talk on 26 October, “Are animals the new oceanographers?” He will cover his work with Australia’s Integrated Marine Observing System, how animal-borne sensors are filling in gaps in the ocean map, what the data shows about our effect on the oceans, and what it all means for the animals doing the carrying.

Rob did his PhD at Cambridge (St John’s ‘95) including two years in Peru studying fur seals from a guano mine. After that he ran a marine mammal lab in Baja, California and spent five years in New Zealand with fieldwork in Antarctica. He has been at Macquarie University since 1997 and is now Emeritus Professor of Marine Ecology there. He leads the IMOS Animal Tracking Facility, has published more than 320 scientific papers and three books, has written species recovery plans for the Federal Government, and has given expert evidence to government agencies and the UN Environment Program. He also knows a lot about sharks (& took the above photo), so there will be time for questions on that.