INTERVIEW: SharkFest returns, and this time the sharks have gone viral
Photo: A-bel Gong is one of the voices featured on this year’s SharkFest. Audiences can catch them on Sharks Gone Viral. Photo courtesy of Nat Geo / Provided by press site with permission.
National Geographic’s ever-popular summer program SharkFest has returned with new shows and many stories about the beloved (and sometimes feared) marine creatures. This year there’s a whole host of programs to enjoy, including Sharks Gone Viral, a new special featuring behavioral ecologist A-bel Gong, who is affiliated with Minorities in Shark Sciences, or MISS.
For the unbeknownst, MISS is an important organization that promotes representation in the shark sciences. “We hope to advance the field of shark, ray and other marine sciences by challenging the status quo of underrepresentation of gender minorities from historically-excluded communities of color and the Global South and providing accessible and equitable pathways to research, conservation, and education,” according to the MISS mission statement.
“I’m affiliated with Minorities in Shark Sciences, which is a nonprofit aimed to uplift gender minorities of color in the shark sciences,” Gong said in a recent Zoom interview. “It was founded in 2020. I think in 2021 is when they started their official partnership with National Geographic to bring more representation on screen, so actually I’ve been in contact with this production house specifically since 2021. And so I got connected with them. I think they were doing a call for experts in the SoCal area, which is where I’m located. It was really easy for me to get to L.A. after all the traffic and stuff, but it was mainly through Minorities in Shark Sciences [that I became connected to this year’s SharkFest].”
Gong is also the host of the podcast LGBTQ+ STEM, which highlights LGBTQ+ voices in the sciences. They offered more context on the MISS mission and how the organization first started a few years ago. For them, the organization is important because it provides so many professional sources to aspiring and established scientists.
“MISS is a 501c3 nonprofit that was founded in 2020 by four amazing Black women scientists in the shark sciences,” they said. “It was sort of over Twitter. One of them was expressing their frustrations about how they didn’t see a lot of people like them in the shark sciences. And it sort of started as a conversation almost as a joke, but [the four scientists] quickly realized that there was this need for a community and a network of shark scientists who identified as women or nonbinary, but also as people of color, too. [They would] get together, share successes and commiserate together, professional resources, career development, all that good stuff, and so it must have caught the eye of National Geographic.”
For Gong, as a nonbinary person of color, the opportunity to represent their community on screen is a cool part of the job. They are always thinking about the next generation of scientists and considering what type of messages on SharkFest would work for younger viewers looking for a possible career path.
“What would I want to see when I was a kid,” Gong asked. “What would make me believe that I could do whatever I wanted to do basically? Because I think there’s a lot of people who tell people who look like me or tell people who look like a lot of MISS members, ‘No, you can’t do that. You’re not smart enough. Scientists don’t look like that. You don’t have the physical ability to do something like this.’”
Gong added: “I was sort of in this position where as a kid I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I didn’t really have people telling me no. But I didn’t really have people telling me yes either. I was in this limbo of what to do, and so in high school, I had to do this school project. And I interviewed actually a shark scientist at the California Academy of Sciences who studied sharks, and that’s what propelled my interest for shark sciences. Once I got into college, I actually had a couple of professors telling me that shark sciences was too competitive. ‘You should focus on something that will bring in money,’ things like that, but it just so happened that Andy [Nosal], who is featured in this TV segment as well, he had just started working at the University of San Diego, which is where I was going to school at. And he does shark research in San Diego, and so I asked to do some research with him and finally got my ‘yes’ moment.”
Gong’s shark research occurred during their undergraduate and graduate career. Specifically, they focused on shark movement ecology, trying to answer questions about migration patterns under the banner of behavioral ecology. Gong was interested in how sharks would behave in comparison to other species in the environment and warming temperatures.
“I don’t do a whole lot of formal shark research anymore, but what I’ve heard from surfers in the San Diego area is that there are a ton of sharks that are coming earlier,” they said. “I feel like the season for leopard sharks in San Diego has been elongated slightly just because it’s been so much warmer, and these other sharks travel here when the water gets warm. But also at the same time, it’s really interesting, my master’s adviser was actually just telling me about this … the water is getting a little too warm. They’re starting to disperse a little bit more than their usual condensed aggregation spot, so that’s pretty interesting. I think we’re seeing that across the board for a lot of places.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
SharkFest continues throughout the summer on National Geographic, with additional programming on Nat Geo WILD, Nat Geo Mundo, Disney+, Hulu and ESPN2. Click here for more information.
