Long Beach Shark Lab needs $500K in donations to keep shark monitoring program afloat

California State University, Long Beach's Shark Lab will need about half a million dollars by the end of September in order to continue monitoring shark activity off the California coast, according to the lab’s director.

The money, which was slashed from California’s most recent state budget, would fund a shark monitoring research and public outreach program now used by lifeguards across most of California’s coastline.

The lab’s research

The university has long been at the forefront of shark research, from the discovery of suntanning in sharks to more recent studies of white shark behavior, breeding and habitat. The lab also hosts educational open houses.

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That research into white sharks has increased since 2018 as a result of the California Shark Beach Safety Program, which was formed in response to an increase in the population along the coast. It’s also the same program that found itself on the chopping block when Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state Legislature were confronted with a roughly $45 billion deficit earlier this year.

The $3.75 million in funds for the project were originally allotted as part of a five-year program to study white sharks in response to a population increase along the California coast.

Chris Lowe, director of the Shark Lab, said he stretched these funds out to six years until the end of September.

About the program under threat

The Cal State Long Beach Shark Beach Safety Program was started because the state wanted to increase public awareness and education around these sharks, not because the population increase posed a danger to beachgoers. (The sharks' diets don’t include humans, and you may have heard the statistic that you’re more likely to die because of a lightning strike than a shark attack.)

“The education program has been used to train lifeguards on how to use that scientific information because they're really on the front lines,” Lowe said. “We're using that information to make decisions on how to manage a beach. When should you close a beach? Under what conditions?”

The Shark Lab currently monitors about 600 miles of California’s coast, from San Diego to Monterey, and Lowe told LAist the monitoring program is a “model” because it has one of the lowest fatality rates from white shark bites in the world.

“We have 300 sharks swimming around with active transmitters,” Lowe said. “We tag about 60 sharks a year, and that actually is a lot of work, getting out and getting transmitters in those sharks. Plus, we have 100 acoustic receivers all along Southern California beaches, and it takes my crew about a month to download all those receivers and get that data to lifeguards. So all these things are very time consuming.”

Lowe maintains a staff of about 15-20 people, depending on the season, to stay on top of the work. But if more money isn’t raised, he said, he’ll have to start laying people off and taking monitoring equipment out of the water.

“Our goal is to kind of stay operational and hope that we'll get back in the state budget as it improves, and we expect that probably in a year or two,” Lowe said. “But in the meantime, we need to stay operational, and we provide a service to all the ocean lifeguards across California.”

Lowe said the Shark Lab itself is in not danger of closing down, just the monitoring program. But he still sees a need to continue their work monitoring and researching California’s white sharks.

“We're dealing with a changing ocean,” he said. “Water's getting warmer, sharks are moving to different places, so we're not quite done yet. There are a lot of things we have to understand, and the better we understand them, the safer people and sharks can share that same water.”

How to donate

With the late September deadline fast approaching, Lowe hopes that a donor will provide the $500,000 needed to keep the lab operating at the same level for another year.

Lowe said smaller donations are also welcome as they’ll help his students conduct research projects to better understand shark behavior.

To donate, visit the CSULB Shark Lab website.