Phil Jacobson: I feel like I’m still an optimist at the end of the day, and I think that being an investigative journalist, it just feels so good to feel like you can do something about all these problems in the world. I’m not under an illusion that I’m going to fix all these problems or anything like that, but just the fact that I can do something, I don’t feel totally powerless. I can drag some hidden phenomenon out into the light or expose some bad practice. It just feels really good. It gives me purpose and I feel like my skills are being put to good use. So I’m very happy to be an investigative journalist. I hope to keep doing it.

Mike DiGirolamo: Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your co-host, Mike DiGirolamo, bringing you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists and activists working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet, and holding people in power to account.

This podcast is edited on Gadigal land. Today on the Newscast we speak with Mongabay senior editor Philip Jacobson, who along with his colleague Karla Mendes and Kuang Keng Kuek Ser from the Pulitzer Center, published a year-long two-part investigation which found state governments in Brazil were procuring shark meat and feeding it to nearly 6,000 public institutions and potentially millions of school children.

This two-part series caught the attention of the Brazilian government and sparked a conversation about safety. Shark meat is very high in mercury and arsenic, which are harmful to human health, particularly children. It also sparked a discussion about the potential to halt this procurement.

Jacobson explains how the story came across his desk, what he and his colleagues found, what happened, and what happened after it was released. Additionally, he explains why he chooses to work on deep-dive stories such as this, what his first gig as a reporter was, and how it landed him in Indonesia and eventually Thailand.

While this conversation starts by examining the shark meat trade in Brazil, Jacobson shines a light on the many unanswered and understudied questions about the marine world and what he thinks is worth examining.

Phil Jacobson, welcome back to the Mongabay Newscast. It’s good to see you again.

Phil: Hey, it is great to see you too, Mike.

Mike: So we want to discuss a recent Mongabay investigation that you, Karla Mendes and Kuang Keng conducted, which found that Brazil, the world’s top importer of shark meat, was feeding much of it to children as well as people in prisons, hospital patients and military staff. And being that shark meat is very high in mercury and arsenic, that presents a pretty bad public health problem.

Tell us what this investigation found. How widespread was this consumption of shark meat?

Phil: Yeah, so this was a really interesting story for me. It’s a procurement story. It’s an environment story. It’s a wildlife trade story, and, as you say, it’s a public health story because shark meat tends to be high in heavy metals.

We found that shark meat was quite widespread in Brazilian public institutions. We scoured these online databases for procurement records all across Brazil, and we found more than 1,000 tenders, instances where a public agency purchased shark meat for schools, hospitals, prisons, military bases, police stations, fire departments, homeless shelters, government offices, everything under the sun.

So, more than a thousand tenders, totaling, I think it was 5,400 metric tons of shark meat, being served in almost 6,000 individual public institutions, potentially. The tenders we identified, a lot of them were schools, as you say, so it’s quite widespread.

Mike: Yeah, I think I read that millions of children likely consumed this shark meat in thousands of schools. That’s what I read.

Phil: Yeah. For example, the biggest tender that we found was the state government of Paraná state in southern Brazil, and they bought, I think it was 600 metric tons of shark meat in 2022. It was something like a thousand, maybe 2,000 schools.

We talked to the state government. They confirmed that all of the schools got shark meat. So it’s quite widespread, and that’s just one state. I think we found shark meat tenders in 10 states and shark meat being procured for more than 500 municipalities.

Mike: Wow. And much of the shark meat that entered the system was unspecified, and people were consuming it largely unaware that it was shark meat due to the labeling. So can you tell us what happened there?

Phil: Yeah, so that’s one of the really interesting things about the shark meat trade. Everybody knows about shark fins, right? Shark fin soup going to China. That’s been a big industry for some decades now, ever since China’s middle class exploded in the eighties and nineties, driving up demand for shark fin soup, which drove shark fishing.

But shark meat is also quite widespread and it’s a growing industry. It’s really boomed since the early 2000s. But the thing is, most people who eat shark meat in Brazil don’t know that they’re eating it.

The reason for that is because it’s not sold as “shark.” The Portuguese word for shark is tubarão, but that’s not what shark meat is sold as in Brazil. It’s actually sold under a generic name, which is cação. And for English speakers out there, it’s like a common suffix in Portuguese, “-ção,” so it might sound like vacation, education, sensation. So it’s this kind of generic name.

Many fishes are sold under these generic names. Surveys in Brazil have shown that most people who buy cação don’t know that it’s shark. And in our research, our reporting, we found that sometimes that extended to the government officials who were procuring cação for these public institutions. In some cases they were buying cação and they didn’t even know it was shark.

Mike: There was, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I read that one of the justifications for purchasing shark meat is that there’s no bones in it and therefore it’s safer for children. And this was a huge justification about the safety of children. What was that all about?

Phil: Yeah. So that’s one of the really interesting findings from the story. Of course we asked, why are these government officials, these government nutritionists who work for these public agencies, procuring shark meat in such large volumes and seeking it out to serve to school children and prisoners, et cetera?

And as you say, one of the main reasons that people told us was because it’s boneless. I come from the US, and we eat a lot of fish, and people just aren’t that concerned about bones in fish where I come from, so it wasn’t something I really expected to hear going in. But I guess in some countries where people don’t eat very much fish, there’s a fear of choking on fish bones.

Shark is a cartilaginous fish, right? There are kind of two kinds of fish: there’s bony fish and cartilaginous fish. Sharks are cartilaginous fish. I think they’re called elasmobranchs — that’s the group — I might be mangling some of the scientific stuff here, but shark is a cartilaginous fish, it doesn’t have a bony skeleton.

Therefore it’s seen as preferable to serve to children, especially babies and infants, if you’re a nursing mother worried that your young child is going to choke on a fishbone. That’s something that we heard from education departments in multiple parts of Brazil.

Mike: But also, correct me if I’m wrong, there was pushback, as I recall reading. Some internal employees in the system were trying to raise the alarm to higher-ups about the contaminants, and the smell of it apparently is also very bad. Like the fish does not smell good. So can you talk about that?

Phil: Yeah. So, shark meat — sharks are apex predators, right? So shark meat tends to be high in heavy metals like mercury and arsenic, and this is due to a process called bioaccumulation.

In short, sharks are at the top of the food chain. So they eat other animals that eat other animals that eat other animals, and the heavy metals in all of these, at the very bottom of the food chain — maybe the plankton — bioaccumulate through the different trophic levels up to the predators at the top. That’s why sharks tend to have high levels of heavy metals.

That’s not to say that every single shark meat steak is going to have more mercury than the government levels. At the end of the day, every shark is an individual. It depends what this particular shark ate, what waters this particular shark swam in. But there have been plenty of studies: they’ll test like 400 sharks and half of them will have mercury levels higher than what the US Food and Drug Administration recommends, for example. So it’s an issue.

As we started doing this research, we became aware that in one municipality on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, a place called Duque de Caxias, there is a woman who’s an educator in the school, and she’s also the president of the School Feeding Council of that municipality. It turns out this woman, Solange Ama — she’s been trying for years to get shark meat taken off the menu in her school district.

The way that started was, initially she noticed that the kids in her school weren’t eating shark. So every week they would have cação day and the kids would scrape their cação into the trash. They said that it smelled bad, it tasted bad.

That can happen with sharks. I’m not going to say that shark meat necessarily smells bad. I think if you prepare it correctly, it won’t smell bad, from what I understand. But it can be difficult to prepare. You have to do certain things on the boat and in processing, so if you don’t know what you’re doing, then I think that’s where you get that bad smell.

In any case, she goes home and she starts to research: what is this cação? Because she didn’t even know what it was. That’s where she realizes firstly that this is shark meat — whoa — and then she starts reading about the heavy metals issue, and she becomes very concerned about the health of the children.

In her capacity as head of the Municipal School Feeding Council, she tries to ask the city to procure a different kind of fish. But according to Solange, they wouldn’t do it. They just kept saying that cação is boneless, therefore it’s better for the kids.

She complained to various levels of government, and even the last we checked with her, which was when the story came out, they were still serving cação in her school and in her school district. The bonelessness is a big appeal. Also, it’s cheap. It’s a cheap meat.

Mike: So there has been an impact from this investigation. What happened after it was released? What was the response to it?

Phil: Yeah. So a few things. For one thing, a member of Brazil’s national parliament called for a parliamentary hearing to discuss the findings, which is encouraging. This is a person named Nilto Tatto. He’s the head of the environmental caucus in the parliament. He has actually put forth a bill to ban federal procurements of shark meat.

Our story focuses on state and municipal-level purchases, which we find are way more extensive than the federal purchases. So he’s trying to raise the findings up to that level of discussion. I think it’s up to the environmental committee of the parliament whether they want to move forward with the hearing. They haven’t responded to us when we’ve asked them what they’re going to do.

So that’s definitely a big impact. Another one was, this wasn’t just one story. This was a series of articles. We actually published a second article, which was co-authored with Fernanda Wenzel, who’s a really great Mongabay reporter in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul.

That story focused on angel shark procurements in Rio Grande do Sul. Not only did we find cação being procured by these government agencies, but also a different kind of fish called peixe anjo. Peixe anjo directly translates as “angel fish,” but we found that this “angel fish” is actually angel shark, which is endangered everywhere in the world. Sometimes it’s critically endangered.

When Fernanda called up the 10 cities and towns in her state that we found had procured cação anjo, some of these government nutritionists were shocked to learn from Fernanda that cação anjo is angel shark. They said, we definitely won’t be buying that in the future.

To me that’s a pretty strong impact. Whatever happens at the national policy level, there are people who are behind these decisions who are not trying to do anything nefarious or make money, which is often what, I think, we end up covering as investigative journalists. This is just a broad societal trend where a lot of these government officials don’t realize that cação anjo are angel sharks.

These people get trained, they go to nutrition school in Brazil, but they don’t learn about toxicology from what I’m told, and just learning that cação or cação anjo are sharks is enough to change things. So that was really encouraging.

There were some other impacts too. There was a lot of debate. The industry really responded strongly to our story, and that caused some debate, which I thought was really interesting. It seems to be making waves, so we’ll see what continues to happen going forward.

Mike: That’s encouraging. Yeah, I was going to ask you, because speaking of conservation and sharks being endangered, they’re one of the world’s most threatened vertebrate groups. Amongst the people that you interviewed and talked to, what were the conservation implications of this event?

Phil: Yeah. So sharks are heavily overfished. As I mentioned, it started with the boom in shark fin soup demand in China in the eighties and nineties, but then the shark meat industry has taken on a life of its own since the 2000s.

Sharks are in trouble. They’re, as you say, one of the most threatened vertebrate groups. There was a study that came out in 2021 that found that over the past 50 years, shark abundance in the open ocean had declined by, I think, 71%, and many shark species today are endangered or critically endangered. So there’s a major conservation issue here.

What our story contributes is it reveals that government procurements of shark meat are a significant factor behind demand for shark. Before we published the story, there was no article or NGO report or anything anywhere that showed that government procurements of shark meat were a major thing, not in Brazil.

That’s why we decided to take this article on in the first place. It took many months of really onerous data research to build this database that underlies the story, which we share as part of the article. Anyone can go download the database. It’s got 1,012 tenders in this big spreadsheet.

Public procurements of shark meat seem to be a hidden driver of the overfishing of sharks. And it’s not just Brazil. Our article focuses on Brazil, but I can tell you from what I’ve heard talking to people and a little bit of preliminary research I’ve done that there are some European countries that are procuring shark meat for schools and other institutions: Portugal, Italy.

Portugal has a procurement database that I looked at the other day and I could find some shark meat tenders on there. I don’t think it’s at the same scale as Brazil. Brazil is actually the number one importer and consumer of shark meat in the entire world, which was pretty shocking to me when I learned that. But it’s certainly an issue.

Mike: Yeah, it’s pretty wild to learn about, I must say. This was a shocking find to me as well. Can you talk about — there appeared to be some potential possible unintended consequences of banning shark finning that led to an increase in the sale of shark meat. Do I have that right?

Phil: Yeah. So what you’re getting at is, why did shark meat become such a big industry in the first place? I think I saw a statistic that the value of the global trade in shark meat is actually more than the trade in shark fins, which was pretty shocking to me.

Shark fins are more valuable pound for pound, it’s the most valuable part of the shark. But the overall value of the shark meat trade is actually higher — I think that’s a WWF figure from a few years ago. So it’s a big industry, and one wonders, how did we get here?

The trade is very murky. Scientists are only just starting to try to wrap their heads around it. But the most common theory that I’ve heard from scientists, and it seems to make sense, is what you’ve just described: these rules put in place that you could call “fins attached” or “fins naturally attached.”

So what does that mean? During the boom years for shark fin soup, many fishers would go out and engage in a practice called shark finning. So what shark finning means is you pull up the shark onto your boat, you slice off the fins, and you throw the rest of the shark back into the ocean.

The reason fishers do it is because on these boats there’s only so much hold space, very limited hold space that you can use to store the fish that you catch. So it makes sense economically to use all that space for the most valuable part of the shark and just fill it up with fins, get rid of the meat. The meat is cheap, it’s not very valuable.

That’s what was happening for a long time. As people started to wake up to the plight of sharks in the mid- to late-90s especially, this practice of shark finning came under the crosshairs. Governments around the world, starting in the late 90s, going through the 2000s into the early 2010s, took measures to ban shark finning.

What they did was they created rules where they said, look, you can still trade the fins, but if you want to trade the fins legally, you have to bring the whole shark back to port. You can’t just come back with the fins; you’ve got to bring the whole shark back.

Those rules — the fins have to be attached to the shark — so “fins attached,” or “fins naturally attached.” Fins attached is, you can cut off the fins, but they have to be tied around the carcass with zip ties or whatever. Fins naturally attached means they still have to be physically attached to the carcass; you can’t cut them off at all. There are different formats, but that’s basically a ban on shark finning.

What many scientists believe and have hypothesized is that these fins-attached rules inadvertently created a whole new supply of shark meat that needed to be sold somewhere. While the shark meat is cheap, not worth very much, it still has value. So somewhere down the line it started being exported, traded internationally, and you can see in the mid-2000s Brazil’s shark meat imports really start to skyrocket.

So you have that push factor with the fins-naturally-attached rules. There are also some pull factors from Brazil. During the first Lula administration in the 2000s, one of Lula’s main policy platforms was expanding school lunches to, I think, every elementary public school student, if I’m not mistaken.

All of a sudden you have all of these municipal and state education agencies that need to procure cheap protein for their students. It doesn’t have to be cheap, but they’ve got limited budgets. At the same time, his administration is promoting fish consumption in Brazil as a healthy alternative to processed foods.

These factors also drove increases in fish consumption, which rose like 40% in the 2000s under Lula. Cação, the shark meat, was there, it was cheap. You had traditional fishing communities in Brazil that were already eating shark meat. I think that was probably an important part of the equation.

So you have this traditional consumption and this kind of niche consumption, but the shift that we see is that it became industrialized: big Taiwanese and Spanish fishing companies exporting shark meat to Brazil. In our data, we see that there are hundreds of Brazilian companies involved in the distribution and supply of shark meat, whether it’s to grocery stores — where cação is very common in the frozen food section, go have a walk around São Paulo and stick your head into any grocery store there, it’s going to be the cheapest fish in the frozen food section — or the companies selling to the São Paulo Municipal Education Department.

Mike: Hello listeners, thank you for tuning in. The year is almost complete, but we still have a couple more episodes to publish. In the meantime, we encourage you to let us know what you think of our audio reporting by filling out our podcast survey for 2025. It only takes a few minutes. Let us know what you think.

You can find the link in the show notes. Don’t forget to also check out the two-part investigation on which this conversation is based, which is also linked in the show notes and the episode summary on mongabay.com.

Now back to the conversation with Phil Jacobson.

Wow. So Phil, what is next for this entire investigation? Do you plan to do any follow-up reporting on this or any other marine-related issues?

Phil: Yeah. I dug into this global shark trade. It was part of a Pulitzer Center fellowship. One of the co-authors, Keng, he’s the data editor of the Pulitzer Center, so he was really instrumental in the data aspect of this story.

But I got to spend a year on the global shark trade, and this was the primary story that came out of that. But it’s really a rich vein, this global shark trade, not just sharks but also rays.

There are deep-water sharks that are traded for their liver oil, which is used in cosmetics, wellness products, as an adjunct in vaccines. Shark skin and cartilage is also something of an industry. Shark meat and cartilage is used in pet food. There are actually a lot of things that sharks are traded for.

So I’d like to explore some of that in future reporting. There are other stories we’re looking at with shark fishing. I think we’re probably going to have something out middle of next year that could be significant about shark fishing.

Yeah, it’s a rich vein. And CITES just happened — which is the global wildlife trade regulator treaty organization — they just listed at the CITES conference, like a week or two ago, gulper sharks, which are a deep-water shark. They listed them on CITES Appendix II, which means that trade in them can’t be unregulated internationally.

Countries have to start issuing permits for export of gulper shark parts and prove that the fisheries are sustainable in order for the permit to be issued. These fish are being traded for their liver oil, and as part of the CITES resolution they’re going to launch this three-year study on deep-water sharks to try to understand this very murky trade.

That’s an article I’m working on right now. You get all these kind of lesser known species that escape people’s attention, but they’re really part of these global economies. I think that’s worth digging into.

Mike: Phil, we are looking forward to seeing what you find. I’ve worked with you for a long time and I’ve always known you to be someone who’s really dedicated to investigative work, which I appreciate, and I’ve enjoyed speaking with you about things like the Tamaraw project — which is highly recommended for listeners, if you haven’t heard our conversation about that, I’ll link it in the show notes.

What draws you to investigative journalism, Phil?

Phil: Yeah. Thanks, Mike. I appreciate you saying that. I’ve been an investigative journalist for a long time now. I was on my high school newspaper. I had a great advisor, Mr. Lehr. He was the advisor of this high school newspaper for, I think, 50 years, and I got to be his student around year 40.

That’s why I went into journalism in the first place. But investigative journalism… I was talking to my dad — he’s visiting me here in Thailand right now — and my girlfriend, and I was like, I feel like I know too much about a lot of the bad things in the world. I’m becoming like a caricature of myself sometimes. I’m joking when I say that, but you know, talking about all these bad practices happening in supply chains, and I’m reading this book Oligarchy, which is great, I highly recommend it, by Jeffrey Winters.

I feel like I’m still an optimist though at the end of the day, and I think that being an investigative journalist, it just feels so good to feel like you can do something about all these problems in the world. I’m not under an illusion that I’m going to fix all these problems or anything like that, but just the fact that I can do something, I don’t feel totally powerless.

I can drag some hidden phenomenon out into the light or expose some bad practice. It just feels really good. It gives me purpose and I feel like my skills are being put to good use. So I’m very happy to be an investigative journalist. I hope to keep doing it. Yeah, that’s my answer.

Mike: That’s a great answer, Phil. I have to say I empathize completely. Although I’m not an investigative journalist, as a reporter, I find that I’m often not fun at parties, so to speak.

Phil: Yeah, you gotta be careful about that.

Mike: “Oh, did you know about what happens at this thing…” It’s not great to listen to. But yeah, I feel the same way. I feel like it gives me purpose as well.

What drove you to get interested in the environment specifically, though?

Phil: Yeah. So when I was graduating college, I wanted to live and work in journalism in another country. That was my goal. I was just looking for jobs on the internet and happened to find a job advertisement for a copy editor at the Jakarta Globe newspaper in Indonesia.

I applied for the job, happened to get it, went to Indonesia for a year-long thing. I had never been to Indonesia before, and I really loved the experience. I was working in this big newsroom with all these Indonesian reporters and editors. It’s just such a great way to get to know a country: sit on the copy desk of a newspaper for a year, because you’re reading all the news articles every single day — not only reading them, but really engaging with them. You have to rewrite them sometimes, as a copy editor.

After that year-long experience, I thought, this has been great, but if I could get out of Jakarta, I could really do some great reporting. And if I could learn to speak Indonesian, I could really access… there are so many great stories happening around the country — not necessarily “great,” but stories that should be told — and many of those stories were environment-related.

Indonesia is largely an extractive economy. They’re a major producer of coal, palm oil, these days nickel, a lot of these raw materials whose production has all kinds of environmental impacts. There’s land grabbing, there are Indigenous peoples. So I started reporting on that.

I think it was early 2015, there was a job advert for a position at Mongabay, and I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. I met all the requirements, which were journalism, speaking Indonesian, and having some knowledge about the environment. By that point, just covering Indonesia, I’d done stories about the palm oil industry.

I got hired at Mongabay and continued to deepen my knowledge of these issues. I think it’s a really great beat. It’s really broad. It doesn’t feel limiting. You cover the environment, especially in a country like Indonesia, it just touches all aspects of society.

I feel like I’m oftentimes more of a business reporter than an environment reporter, just because there’s so much overlap. I’ve done investigations about corruption in the issuance of plantation permits, where you’re scrutinizing corporate records, tracking down these kind of shady figures whose names appear on these corporate documents, stuff like that.

I just think being an environment journalist is not limiting in any way. It’s so enabling. And it’s good to have a little bit of focus sometimes. So I just think it’s a great fit for me.

Mike: Yeah, obviously it shows. You’re a fantastic reporter.

Phil: Thank you, Mike.

Mike: Yeah, no worries. And so you just attended the Global Investigative Journalism Conference, on a related note, in Kuala Lumpur, and Karla Mendes was there with you as well. Are there any highlights from that event that you wanted to share with us?

Phil: Yeah. So this is the Global Investigative Journalism Conference, put on by GIJN, I think every two years in a different part of the world. This year they had it in Malaysia, in Kuala Lumpur. I was fortunate to go.

It’s a great conference. I always see people from around the region that I know and usually haven’t seen in a long time and don’t have another chance to see. They put on a lot of panels, so you can learn a lot in these panels too — a lot of journalists talking about techniques they use or stories that they’ve done. Those can be great.

It’s great for networking. I think I went to one of these in 2017 in Korea, and I met some Korean reporters from KCIJ, the Korean Center for Investigative Journalism, that we later ended up collaborating on a story with about a Korean-Indonesian palm oil company. So these conferences can lead to partnerships among journalists down the line, which is great.

One of the panels I went to was about building an AI agent. That was a theme at this conference: AI and LLMs and all this kind of stuff. I’m obviously skeptical of AI in a lot of ways. I joke around with my dad — there was a South Park episode where Randy Marsh is asking his ChatGPT about everything, and he gets down some rabbit hole with his business idea and starts doing all these crazy things. My dad also has this business idea he’s talking to ChatGPT about, so I’m like, “Hey dad, maybe you should watch the South Park episode.”

But I think it also does have utility for journalists, so there was a lot of discussion about that. I went to one panel about how to build an AI agent. It was put on by the head of ABRAJI, which is, I think, the Brazilian investigative journalists’ organization.

The guy who was leading the workshop, it was really interesting. He was showing us how you could use ChatGPT agent mode to automatically scour Brazilian public gazettes on a daily basis for things. He wasn’t using it for procurement records, but I think you could set something up to scour the procurement records every day. Maybe you could automatically notify me of new shark meat purchases — I don’t even have to do anything, it just sends a message to my inbox.

Stuff like that, I think journalists should learn how to do. Obviously there are resource issues with water and power consumption with AI — we’re covering that.

Mike (note): At the GIJN conference, Mongabay Latam won the Global Shining Light Award for their investigation uncovering drug-trafficking airstrips in the Peruvian Amazon, which used an AI tool similar to what Phil just described here, which scanned satellite images of deforestation patterns and helped uncover the narco airstrips.

Phil: But in journalism, I think we need to take every edge we can get. There are so many problems in the world and the industry of journalism is in so much flux that we should use the tools that are available to us as best we can to hold those in power to account.

So that’s something I’ve been playing around with the last few days, actually. For example, Indonesia has these online court case databases where you can look at court cases. I’m like, all right, what if I searched for pangolin crimes in Indonesia? I know how to do that, but it would take a really long time to do it manually. So can I use ChatGPT agent mode to try to automate parts of that process?

Yeah, I think: experiment with it, play around with it, see what you can do and how it can automate parts of the rote tasks of reporting, to allow us to just do more and more stories.

Mike: Phil, is there anything that you want to direct listeners’ attention to — any new stories or things coming out that you’d like to plug here?

Phil: Yeah. I went to Greece recently and I did a story about this really interesting research project that these conservationists are doing in an extremely beautiful part of Greece called the Ambracian Gulf.

This is a place that’s really understudied, but it’s actually home to a lot of rays. There are nine species of rays there and also a species of shark. These researchers are going out with fishermen and tagging these rays. It’s really interesting how they do this data collection; I won’t get all into it here.

But there’s a broader issue about government agencies — they tend not to know very much about sharks. They don’t really have good data on sharks or understand very much about many shark species. You have this idea, or at least I had this idea, that it’s 2025, we know everything about everything, science has figured everything out. But there are actually so many aspects of the natural world that we just know nothing about.

It’s interesting to see the research in action and to understand how it works, and a lot of it’s really manual. For example, there’s a species of ray that we don’t really know much about. So they put these barcodes in the ray. We’re on the boat, right? The fisherman’s pulling in his net, he’s trying to get the fish that he’s targeting, but every now and then some ray comes up, plops on the boat.

The conservationists grab it and put the tag in. This ray is flapping its wings — it’s like you’re flipping a pizza, but the pizza’s alive and it’s flapping. That’s what these rays are like. They put this little tag in there, but it’s not a satellite tag. It’s not electronic in any way. It’s just got a little barcode.

What happens is, they keep doing this project where they go out every day with these fishermen and maybe in a year or two they pull up the same ray and they see that it already has a tag. They can tell from the little numerical code on the tag that it’s the same ray as before. Then they measure it and compare the measurements from a year ago: this is how much it grew in this amount of time.

That’s how they figure out the rate at which these species grow. It’s like, huh, it’s just so manual. It’s so analog. That, to me, was surprising.

So yeah, I’ll publish a story about that hopefully this month, latest next month. There are hopefully some nice photos that I took. If you are interested, check it out on Mongabay.

Mike: Nice. Also nice to know that there are still places in the world where analog is necessary.

Phil: Indeed.

Mike: Phil Jacobson, thank you so much for speaking with me today. It was a pleasure talking to you.

Phil: Likewise, Mike. Always a pleasure.

Mike: If you want to read the two-part investigation on the shark meat trade in Brazil, please see the links in the show notes.

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