Welcome to another episode of the Beyond Jaws podcast. And I'm your co-host Dave Ebert. I'm filling in doing what Andrew does to introduce an episode, a new episode. But today is kind of a special one for me. It's a bonus episode where I'm going to give a little bit of a talk about my former advisor, Dr. Leonard Campano, who is really a giant in the field of shark biology, shark ecology, shark taxonomy. It's a little bit of a celebration of life. It's sort of a little bit of a goodbye from me to Leonard. And so I hope you enjoy the show. I'm going to share some memories, some stories I've had with Leonard. Some of you may have heard of over the years, and you can now you have them for posterity. But anyway, I hope you enjoy the show and we'll get started right now. And welcome back to another episode of the Beyond Jaws podcast. I'm your co-host Dave Ebert. And here with my co-host, Andrew Lewin. And we're going to be talking a little bit. I'm going to be reminiscing a little bit of a celebration of life episode for my former advisor, Dr. Leonard Campano, who passed away on September 24th, 2024. And so I want to share some stories with you, talk a little bit about my experience with them. I knew Leonard for over 40 years. And going back to when I was a young master student, really starting out in the Bay Area, in California here. And so we'll get started now. So I talk a little bit about Leonard. He was an interesting character, and he's, I don't want to, not can't be overstated sometimes, but he really was a giant in the field of shark biology, shark taxonomy. He really is classification of how he classified sharks and rays and chimeras or ghost sharks. Back in his paper, he published back in 1973 called Interrelationships of Condrick, Thean Fishes, really laid the groundwork for how he classified sharks and rays. And that classification is still used today. And actually, molecular research done by Gavin Naylor and many others over the years have really found that he was, his classification really holds up well. And back when he did this, he didn't have a lot of modern tools such as genetics that we could use today. And so he was quite an interesting character. And he went, he grew up in San Francisco in the little Italy section. And he's born in 1943, December 4th. And a lot of people don't know that because he spent the last 35, almost 40 years in South Africa. And a lot of people thought he was South African. But he did grow up in the Bay Area. He went to San Francisco Community College and he went out to San Francisco State and from there to Stanford University. And some things that people don't often know is that Stanford University used to have one of the pre-ematet ichthyology collections in the world. And it was only in about 1979, 1980, they finally closed down the ichthyology department and sent all their specimens over the California Academy of Sciences. And it was kind of funny because most of the people that professors there had either passed away or retired. And here Stanford University had this whole department open for one guy who was still a grad student. Leonard, I think probably had the record for the longest, one of the longest PhDs. He was a student there for about 14, 15 years before he finally finished up his PhD. That's gonna be the longest for sure. Yeah, and he was just kind of squirreled away down in the basement there working away. And finally the biology department chair realized that they had this whole department open for a grad student and then a 15 year grad student. And so he went down and he just said, hey Leonard, we're closing up the department. You're going to need to finish up and get out or get out, but we're closing the department. And Leonard told me the story. So I'm just giving you a firsthand account on what he told to me. And so he went from there over to the Tiburon Marine Lab, which is just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco in Marin County. And over there they had some old Army barracks that had become a Marine Lab station for San Francisco State University. But it was really their old Army barracks and it was old Army buildings from going back to World War II because they basically had an Army group base there because they were concerned about people, Japanese ships coming into San Francisco Bay. And anyway, they sat vacant and Leonard took over one of these buildings. I mean, he literally took it over. And I remember, as a young grad student, I first started in the early 1980s, my professor at Moss Landing Marine Laboratory, is Greg Kaie said, you know, you got to talk up, talk, give Leonard Kappanyo a call and let him know you're going to be working up in San Francisco Bay because I was going to work on seven-gill sharks, which were very common in San Francisco Bay. So when I was a young 22-year-old, I didn't know anything, I thought, okay, great, I'll give Leonard a call. So I just kind of cold call this guy up and I get this answer in the phone like, yeah, who is this? And I said like, oh, hi, this is Dave Eber and I'm a graduate student at Moss Landing Marine Laboratory. Or is it I'm I'm studying seven-gill sharks in the band, like, you know, if I can come up and talk with you, he goes, I haven't got time for this and he hung up on me. And that was my first introduction to Leonard Kappanyo. How old were you at this time? I was 22 at this time. I was 22. That was your first, that was your first, like, any kind of response from any kind of interaction with him. First interaction with him. And I was like, whoa, that was a pretty cold and abrupt. And so I went back to Greg and I said, Greg, I said, this is what happened. I explained to him and Greg looks and he goes, well, Leonard can be a little eccentric. I thought, yeah, eccentric and go be kind of rude. But so I went about so I just was like, okay, well, Claire, you didn't want to talk to me. You didn't want to talk to anybody. But I knew nothing about him at the time other than what Greg had told me. So I went about doing my thesis project and probably about about a year later, it was the winter time. And I was using the boat at San Francisco State there, going out to fish. And so I kind of knew he was based there, but I didn't know where he was based at the time. And I came in one day, I didn't, you know, we're out fishing and we caught a few spiny dogfish, nothing big. It was myself, my brother and a good friend of mine out there fishing. We came in there and it was just, it was just pouring rain, just cats and dogs. And so we're trying to clean up the boat, pick up the gear. And this guy walks by, and he kind of looks in the boat, he sees these dogfish. I mean, nothing special. These are spiny dogfish. You know, and he says, oh, what do you do with those sharks? And I said, Oh, I am, you know, I'm from Moss Landing Marine Laboratories. I'm studying sharks here in the Bay. And he goes, Oh, really? I didn't know anybody was studying sharks in the Bay. And so clearly, he forgot about earlier idea. You saw no idea who this was. Well, at this point, I kind of knew I'd never seen Leonard. I didn't know what he looked like. Right. And I thought like, but I knew he was there and I thought like, I wonder if this is Leonard Campano. And then he just started talking. And we spent about the next hour. I mean, it was just raining. And he never said like, Hi, I'm Leonard Campano. He never said, Hey, let's go inside to get out of the rain. We stood there. And of course, I was like, that's probably might have been 23 at this time. And I was going like, this is my end with chance to talk to Leonard Campano. And so we stood there for about an hour. And then finally, my brother and my friend go, Hey, Dave, can we go get out of the rain? It's raining pretty hard here. We're silk like rats. And I was like, I was like, yeah, yeah, can I go? And then I go like, I'm by the way, my name is Dave Eber and he goes, Oh, I'm Leonard Campano. He goes, why don't you come over to my office? And I go, where is he goes? Well, it's that army barrack over there. And this guy would drive his his beat up like 1964 black beetle bug VW. Go look online, if you don't recognize it. Some people of a certain age know what I'm talking about. He had drive it in there. And he'd close it, you'd have no idea this guy was there. And so we went over there and I spent another like two hours talking with the guy, my brother and friend were there. And it was the most amazing experience I ever had, even though I was soaking wet, dripping. And we just he just went in there. And I really, I looked in there, I realized like, well, he lives here. He basically was living in there, had a cot. He had all these stations set up the workstations he was using. And for again, for those of you in the shark world, you'll know what I'm talking about. But he was working on the 1984 sharks of the world book that was published by the Food and Agriculture Organization FAO. It's a classic reference that was published in 1984. And this is probably about 1982, yeah, a winner of 8283, right in that timeframe. And at the time, I was like, well, that's kind of cool. He's working on this, you know, he told him about the project he was doing. He'd just been on like this round the world tour and everything. And so like had an amazing visit. And he said, Oh, come up, stop in anytime you're up here. Well, obviously I wasn't going to pass on that because he was just like a wealth and I was literally like having an audio version of the encyclopedia. At the time, this guy was just could talk non talk, talk non stop. And so I went up there and I met with, you know, I would go up there when I was up there and stop in and visit with them. And for me, it was, you know, and I've talked about this a little before in some of the earlier episodes. But, you know, when you're traveling kind of in your journey in life, you're really fortunate if you meet somebody who's a fellow traveler on the same road you're embarking on. And Leonard was that guy that, I mean, has some great people in my, you know, that had met, you know, great guys, the top of the list, John McCasker, but Leonard was that fellow traveler. He was that guy who was on the road that I was setting off on. And we just really connected very really well. And I just, it was just, it was an amazing experience. And so I got to know him over the next, you know, couple of years going up there and talking with them. And sometimes I just go up there and spend, like literally my, when I said, spent a few hours with him, they're more like anywhere from three to six hours just talking non stop. And it wasn't just sharks. It would, we talk on rays, we talk on chimeras. And I was just like, this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to learn. I was, was not focused on any one species, but I was looking, I was wanting to learn about everything. And that's really laid the foundation for my search for law sharks. And I really, this is going back the early eighties. This laid the foundation and really for where I went. Yeah, I can imagine when you were talking, when you were talking with Leonard about, about these different species, were you talking more about like the ecology distribution and that sort of aspect? Or were you talking more about where to find them, where they are, you know, like, like the search for them, like where they could be found or at the time, at the time, the whole field of shark research was just really, and it's a modern shark research, it was really the groundwork was being laid. And as I've mentioned before, like myself, Lisa Natanz and Chris Lowe, Greg Scalball, we were like really that, as I've said, the jaws generation of young shark researchers really started in the eighties. And we really laid the foundation for what came later in the terms of shark. So we talked, so a lot of the stuff people talk about like shark conservation, they throw that term around now. It wasn't even a term at that time. There was no, it wasn't even anybody's mind. It more had to do with fisheries at the time. But we talked about like sharks, we knew at that point that sharks were slow growing and long lived, but nobody really knew anything about, you know, how old they get or how many young they have where they go. And so all of that was we were starting to lay the groundwork for that. And Leonard was that guy, we could talk on all kinds of stuff. We talked on taxonomy, talked on ecology, life history. And I'll tell you a story in just a moment, just to give you an idea. But Leonard was that guy who would think outside the box. I mean, he really would think of things that people weren't even weren't even on the lexicon yet at the time. And during, as I got to know him and stuff, and he was, like I said at the time, he was looking for a job, he was in his early, early 40s at the time. And he got a job in South Africa, interestingly, at the South African, or actually it was nowadays, it's the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity. But the time it was known as the JLB Smith Institute of ichthyology. And for those of you to don't know, JLB Smith was the guy who discovered the acylacanth back in 1938, 04 lakes, it was called. And so he, he was, that was his sort of name recognition. And JLB passed away in 1968. But his wife, Margaret Smith, which is a whole story I'll tell in just a moment, she actually drove and got this whole funding everything for what was later called the JLB Smith Institute of ichthyology, which opened in about 1980, '79, '80, I believe it was. Or actually, I think it might have been a couple, you might have been 77, 78, say late, late 70s when it opened, when officially opened. But anyway, Leonard got a job at this place. And this is in about 1985. And, you know, I'd finished my master's and I was looking around what I was going to do, and I was working a few different jobs, but I was still going up there collecting data and still going up there to see Leonard. When he told me he was taking this job, you know, I went up there and saw him and, you know, kind of say goodbye. And I've, again, I've told the story before, but as I was kind of leaving and saying goodbye, I said, well, hey, you know, Leonard, if, if you need anybody to carry a suitcase or anything, give me a call. And, you know, it's a complete throwaway line. You think nothing, you'll never, that, you know, oh, well, you know, good luck on that, you know, maybe see him sometime in 20 years. Well, about eight months after he calls me up from South Africa and says, you know, hey, Dave, I have a Ph.D. position here at the, it was a Rhodes University, but it was, it was J.L.B. Smith Institute because I have a Ph.D. position. Would you like it? And, you know, it took me like a nanosecond to say like, hell yeah, I'm on the way. And so, and so it was just one of those crazy things. This is why it was this? This is, this was in 1985. He called me up and I went, I went to South Africa, I went to South Africa in '86. So it took, I had to, I had to go through and apply for, apply for the school. I had to get all the paperwork together, the visa and all that type of stuff, which took me about nine months to do. I'm actually closer to a year, actually. But I, so I finally went in '86. And it was the most transformative time of my life. And again, to kind of put perspective into people, certain age will understand this. But at that time, South Africa wasn't a place people were generally clamoring to go through because it was on the world stage. There's apartheid was going on. And there's a lot of stuff going on at the time. And here I am like, sure, I'm going to go to South Africa. And I, that was, all I knew is I'm going to South Africa, I'm going to go study sharks. That's all I cared about because I was really fulfilling a dream. And I had, again, I shared some of these adventures. I won't go into all of them today. But I, I have a number of adventures I had at the time that were very life, getting sort of life changing. And I kind of tell the story, like, it was on basically like a four plus year camping trip when I went to South Africa. And so yeah, I had not been there, nor anything about it, other than what Leonard told me. And so I just literally got on a plane and I went. And it was an amazing experience. And I got to Gramstown and then I got set up, got going right away, was out in the field looking for stuff. And kind of the funny story is that Gramstown is kind of a, I come from a small town in California, I thought, Oh, great. And I'm in another small town in rural town in South Africa. And the reason this institute was there is because J.L.B. Smith was based at Rhodes University. And, and so another, actually another side story, the whole thing is when I was first there, my first Christmas there, I was house sitting for Margaret Smith, whose husband J.L.B. Smith was the guy that did the seal account. And of course, Margaret was, Margaret was actually 20 years younger than him. And she was a young, she had been a chemistry student at his because he used to teach chemistry as well back in the thirties when they got married. And she, and so she recounted the whole story to me. She was house sitting for her and her sister Flora, who was a vaudeville performer. And I had a, you know, a separate room they had set up for people to live there. And, and I was just house, I was house sitting for some couple who lived there. And every night about seven o'clock, Margaret and her sister Flora would come next door, literally bring tea and crumpets, which is about how English can you get. And we'd sit and talk for about a half hour, 45 minutes, and she would share stories with me about, about J.L.B. and her, do studying fishes in Southern Africa. And some of the stuff people would be horrified to hear these stories now. But Margaret, when she was a young woman, she was a very good swimmer and stuff. And she would go out in the field and J.L.B. was older, 20 years older, and he had some health issues. And so stories that tell him, he's like, they'd go out on these pristine reefs, like in Mozambique. And this is how they used to do things that don't be horrified about this, but they would, he would dynamite the reefs. And all these fishes would float up dead. And so, Margaret, being a swimmer, she would swim around, she'd go swim around and collecting all the fish. And she asked me the question goes, you know, Dave, there used to be a lot of sharks would come in around, swimming around us collecting the fish. And I kind of look at, look at J.L.B. and I said, is it okay here? There's a lot of big sharks swimming around. He goes, I don't worry about them, they won't bother you. And so, the guy has his wife swimming around in the water collecting all these dead fish that were coming up. And he said, I don't worry because sharks don't bother, they won't bother or anything. And so, which is mostly true, I'm sure. I don't know what kind of sharks they were, but she said some of them are pretty big. But she'd shared some of those stories. And I really became to appreciate this thought like, here's this young woman in the 30s and 40s and 50s, really still going out and collecting stuff. And she made quite a name for herself. She was very accomplished in what she did. And she did, she illustrated a lot of the, the fishes that J.L.B. would describe. And, but it wasn't, it really, she was kind of in his shadows until after he passed away and set up this institute that she really kind of came into her own. But she's a very accomplished woman. If you ever, again, if you want to go look up some of the stuff she did, and she, she, but she really helped drive his legacy. So anyway, there was a little bit of a side story there, but this was the kind of opportunities I talk about like, you know, I went to look for lost sharks, but I had some amazing stories like, you know, meeting Margaret Smith. And I met several, a number of other people, you know, I talk about going to the grocery store and standing there, getting some groceries, and I got Desmond Tutu standing next to me, kind of standing in line at the checkout counter, just shooting the breeze, very casual and stuff. And, and, right, right, because I was, I was there at a very dynamic time in South Africa's history. And if people, if they know anything about it, you know, February 11th, 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and, and came down and gave a speech at the grand parade in Kita. I was there because I, and it wasn't, I just, because it was all the stuff was going on. I thought all this kind of interesting, kind of interesting to experience some of this stuff, you know, I was kind of outside making right where everybody knew that. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And I, and where I was based at the South African Museum, I used to look at Parliament was literally right right outside my front window. And so I would go, I have to walk by there every day to go to the gym I was going to at the time. And I would see all these guys, Mandela, Tutu, several other people, you know, declared, they could be going in and out apart for different parliamentary meetings at the time. And so I was very, very transformative time. And that was some of the big rewards I got out of that. Working with Leonard, you know, having the opportunity to go there and work with Leonard. But talk about working with Leonard, that was an interesting experience as well. Because Leonard was an interesting guy, like if you knew, like I knew him in California, he was a really good guy. If you got to know him, he very generous. He learned a ton of stuff from him. But when I was a student, it was a little different in the sense. And I won't go into all the details here, it'll be in my forthcoming memoirs. But he would, I could go to his office and I'd sit there and ask him some questions and stuff and I'd get like, uh huh. Yeah. Uh huh. Okay. That sounds good to me. Very little, very little interaction. But then him and I would go out and have dinner using two, three, four nights a week. And you know, this is when I was in town. And then I just wanted to like have a tape recorder going because it would just be a complete data dump. He'd just go on about this and that and just, and I was just going like, in one of the papers that I recommend, if you look on my Instagram posts and on Facebook, I was a 1990 paper he did on Alternate Life History Styles of Condrictly and Fishes through Time and Space. It is, if you're any kind of a serious shark researcher, conservationist, this is like a mandatory paper you need to read. And you can find it going to my Instagram, you can find the citation there. It's Environmental Biology of Fishes 1990. But it was him and I would spend hours there long after he'd finished a pizza and stuff and just talk about this because he was bouncing idea, I realized that he was bouncing ideas off me. And I was just like a young PhD student. And here's, he's asking me questions about, about different, different things. And so that was really an exciting time. And again, just reinforced with me like, this was the guy I needed to meet on my journey that made the huge difference. And one of the more direct things, so that was an amazing, like I said, going out and having a pizza, we'd have lunch. And it was just like, we'd spend hours. I mean, literally like three, four hours would go by. They'd be closing out the pizza place. And I just, and then we'd kind of go for a walk, walk back to the lab. And he was just at that point, he was real chatty. For me personally, one of the coolest things I experienced there was one of the things that people got to know me early on was I did, I did a lot of observational field studies on foraging, hunting and sharks. And one of the things I came on was that big sharks will hunt in packs. And the main one was seven gill sharks. But I've seen other white sharks and other sharks, people don't realize, but they will hunt in groups, in coordinated groups. I refer to social facilitation. And I was just trying to, and this is again, the beauty of working with Leonard was that I was talking with him, you know, a couple nights, we're having out having our pizza. And I said, like, you know, Leonard, I'm watching these sharks feed us seeing this all over the world, California, South Africa, Namibia. And I go, they're not just randomly, you know, random killing machines is, you know, the Jaws movie suggested. But there's a coordinated effort was going on. And it wasn't just this one lone Marauder shark that certain types of prey, like, for example, if they were taking a sea lion, that this, that these seven gills would gain up on them. And he said, I got a couple books for you to read. And this is where Leonard was, he's known as a shark person, but he could talk to you about wildlife in general, birds, all kinds of stuff. And so he said, I got a couple books for you to read. So he went back, went back to his office and he gave me a book called the the Spotted Hyena by Hans Crook, and another book called the Serengeti Lion by George Shaller. And I could, I literally went back to my office and I couldn't stop reading. I just read through these books in over a couple days, I just couldn't stop reading them. And I was just like, went back to Leonard, said, Leonard, this is it. Because in those books, it talked about how lion prize and hyena groups work cooperatively within the group. And it talked about how they got into a lot of how they hunt as a group, and, and, and just their all the strategies. And I was just like going, this is what these sharks are doing. Just the problem is because they live in a marine environment that we can't watch them all the time. We can't, you know, you can watch like hyenas and lions, feet, because you sit in the land or over in a distance and watch what they're doing, how they hunt. And I was just like, this is what, and again, lions and hyenas, depending on what they're hunting, they will work in a cooperative group to take down large prey. And I'm like, this is what the seven gills will do. And other large sharks that if we're, if you're taking on a large species that one couldn't do, they'll work in a cooperative group. And so that was one of the most just amazing experiences I had learning stuff. And that was just one example of, of several I could give where Leonard was just thinking outside the box, which is where I was going. We're like, okay, here's some cool stuff. And he asked about like the, where I got onto the lost shark stuff, it was all during these, my informative years, grad school. And because besides people knowing me for doing a lot of X, my background was really in ecology, you know, feeding ecology, reproduction, but you know, looking at how these sharks hunt. But one of the other things people got to know me for is I was the guy to find these weird sharks. We didn't use the term lost shark at the time. That came later. But I was, I was like, if you want to find the weird of the unusual, the little known sharks just followed Dave. And because I would go out in the field and I'd find these things. And I didn't know initially at first I'd find these sharks. Well, this guy have an interesting one. And I'd bring it back to the lab and show Leonard and Leonard would go like, Oh geez, we haven't seen this shark in like, you know, 80 years, we haven't seen this shark in 100 years. And so, you know, getting us back in sort of the, you know, late 1980s, I was people are already, I was, so I was, you know, like, Oh, wow, this is kind of cool. I got on to this like, okay, so there's this need out here that people are, you know, these where I'd go, we're catching sharks that people weren't aware of. And again, there was no real field of shark conservation at the time. And so, again, people kind of got to know like, Oh, if you want to go find some weird sharks, go follow Dave. And people would go to like Namibia, people go to Taiwan, you know, California, they'd go like, Where's Dave been? Because they knew wherever I'd been, that was where they were going to find the weird sharks, if I haven't found them already. And so, that's kind of how he's really how the whole lost shark thing started was just, was just me going out finding these things. And Leonard saying, Oh, we haven't seen this shark for 100 years. And then, then also, you know, I bring back a lot of species that Leonard would look at and go, well, this is an entirely new species to science. So I thought, well, this is kind of cool because it was totally something nobody was doing. And nobody really does today still goes and looks for these law sharks. They don't really long just, I mean, it's been a process you you pick up over years, you know, decades really to learn this type of stuff. So that was real, that was a very, you know, really informative thing to do. And kind of during the course of this thing, I talked to Leonard about villages, I'd go to a place I'd travel around Africa. And about different, about, you know, I was trying to explain to some of these people, like, how to identify things. And of course, this is in the 1980s, so you didn't have resources like you do now, like PDFs and email and cell phones. So I ended up writing, if I had some like keys, if I had some identification keys that may or may not have been up to date, right? Right. So we had, so there really was nothing to use. So there was this book shark guide to the sharks and rays of southern Africa, that kind of really sprung from this need for this field guide. And Leonard being a birder set that we set the book for like a bird guide, to make it simple and easy for the average person to be able to look key through it and to be able to identify the sharks. And they're in, and heck to his wife of another advisor of my key person, Tom Heck, who said the department, you know, did all the illustrations, which at the time, yeah, they were really, they were really, really, really amazing. And again, the thing in this book, because it was published in 1989, I mean, I'm a grad student, I'm writing my first book, I'm still in my 20s. And I've talked about this. The one thing made was so good working with Leonard was that on my own, I probably wouldn't have the confidence at that age to do with my own book. But working with him, I learned how to do a book. And I really gave me confidence for later on when I went and did my next book, which was I ended up being a solo effort years later. But we're doing that book. And again, this was like Leonard thinking outside the box, we start with him and I'd be having these discussions. And we've gotten this whole area of talking about like, you know, I go to these different villages and places in Africa, and I would see things like sharks being finned, you know, sharks being that liver's being taken for oil. And right, you know, nobody was even thinking about shark, you know, you know, they've been Chinese been using shark fins for soup for generations, like literally like hundreds of years. But nobody thought about it. And Leonard grew up in San Francisco. He grew up near Chinatown. So he'd wander around as a young boy. He saw he saw the fins. Basically him and I arrived at the same place, just in different routes and different paths. But we were, but we thought I was kind of curious. And this led to a whole discussion on like, well, how many, how many sharks are killed a year? So we got in this whole discussion. And like, you know, nobody, I mean, who nobody in the 1980s was thinking about like, how many sharks are caught in by catching or killed? Nobody. And so I ended up right in a section. And I've posted this before on social media. But I'll just hang it up. I'll show it up here again. If I can find it here somewhere. Let me see here. I should have marked this before he came on the air. But anyway, in this book, no worries. Now anyway, I have it here. Just one second. I got to find this thing. Yeah, I don't know if I'm. Let me see here. Here it is. Sorry. There's a section in the back of this book. If you get a copy of it, it's a classic book down page 143 called conservation and management. And yeah, that was the first time that I can, I didn't know this at the time, but that was the first time anybody'd ever written anything on the conservation of sharks and rays. And in that section, and so I mean, that was, I can't explain how revolutionary that was. Nobody'd ever done that. And I've talked with Sarah Fowler, who's been on our podcast, and she was really one of the really founders that laid the foundation for future conservation and shark and sharks and rays. And she was kind of heading in that direction at the same time, but I don't believe anybody had ever published that. And in that section, I commented on like, well, how many sharks and rays are caught a year and Leonard, being Leonard, went home after our pizza night and wrote up this whole thing, give you some calculations. And we estimated that between 10 and 63 million sharks a year were caught in bycatch fisheries. And we figured on average, there's probably around 38 million somewhere in there. Well, this is 1989. It was in the early 2000s, like 12, 15 years later that colleague, Shelley Clark actually did a more quantitative estimate and calculated that about 73 million sharks were caught a year. Average was around, you know, I think she came up with a similar average of thus around 38 million or so as well. I don't remember the exact number, but I know her numbers were almost spot on with what Leonard Knight calculated back in 1989. And so that was pretty good. But that was really the first estimate ever published on the number of sharks caught a year. And that was in 1989. Again, people weren't even, I can't even explain this to young people. It wasn't even on the radar. And also in that section, we talked about the whole shadowy, we referred to as a shadowy fishery of shark finning. And again, nobody was really talking about that until 20, 30 years later. Nowadays, people talk about shark finning and shark liver oil, but here we were writing on this. And it was more from a, how is this impacting shark populations? We didn't know, but we put it out, there's a question, and we wrote up that this was going on. And species like, again, I would see these like sawfish, for example, you know, they were kind of a nuisance if they were caught in African villages, but also at the same time, you know, it'd be food for the, for the community. But also like, they could, they, you know, they have these Chinese buyers who go around buying up the fins. And so with the fins, with these fins that were being landed, they impacted because then there's worth a lot more money. And so that was, again, that was some of the stuff with Leonard. I'm sharing a lot of these different stories, but that was the, that was the uniqueness with Leonard. That's what set him apart. And that's the kind of stuff that really made him a giant in the field. And I don't say that lightly. He really was a, okay, he was a big guy personally, but physically he's a big guy, but he was, but he was just really that guy that's thinking in a different plane. And, you know, I finished, I finished, I finished at my PhD. We did a lot, a lot of stuff at Leonard's one of the, I've very heavily published with Leonard and kind of a cool thing years later, as I mentioned earlier, when he was doing the sharks of the world, the FAO guide and was published in 84, I always thought like, well, that'd be kind of cool to do a, do my own book on the sharks of the world. Well, then 2013, you know, Leonard and I co-authored a book with Mark Dando and Sarah Fowler on the sharks of the world. And so that was kind of brought my journey full circle in a way with Leonard. At that point, Leonard was kind of on his way out in his career, and he didn't really do a heck of a lot, but he was pretty much retired. He was starting to have a lot of health issues at that time, but it was just kind of nice to have that one little thing, you know, having done that. And of course, I've gone on a lot of other things now, but it was nice and have just a lot of good memories. It was a lot of funny stories that are probably a little off-color to tell on the podcast, but I'll put that somewhere else. Catch me at a conference over a beer. I'll tell you some some other ones, but he had, he had some some interesting stuff. One story I will share. I think I've shared this before. I know Andrew's heard this one, but Paul Callie, and I want to make give a mention to Paul Callie, who was kind of my partner in crime with the time we were co-grad students together, and Paul and I just had some amazing experiences with Leonard and stuff, but one of the things I talk about some of my public presentations is Paul and I'd go off to Namibia, and at that time there was nothing there. There's no communications, no GPS, no cell phone, and so I'd tell Leonard, which was a little sketchy, and tell other people that we're going to be gone for eight weeks. And if you didn't hear from us in 10 weeks, you might send somebody to look for us, and off we'd go. Well, again, this is back in the late 80s, and you didn't have things like, you know, like if you, when you had your, you know, student bursary would come through each month, it would be automatic, nowadays it's automatically deposited. Well, back then you had to physically go pick up your check. Well, when you're gone for eight weeks in the field, there's nobody there to deposit your check. And on our first trip to Namibia, we litter, we wound up in a place called Luderitz, which is literally like the end of the world. If you want to get lost, go to Luderitz. And it was a, at that time, it was a wild west town. Literally, it was like a while, they'd be like drunken bar fights. There'd be people passed out in the street. It was, it was a wild west town, but there's a, there's thousands of seven gill sharks in the lagoon there. And so we spent some time there, and we ran out of money. I mean, literally neither of us had a penny in our accounts. And so I had to, and we had like 3000 kilometers to get home. So I bumped some money off one of the guys there we knew. And, you know, just like, it was like three rand, which was like, you know, two US dollars at the time. And I made a phone call back to ask Leonard if he could put in a couple hundred, like literally like 300 rand, so he had gas to get home. And I got to hold a letter to ask, you know, of course, you know, Leonard, you know, brevity was not synonymous with Leonard. He could talk. And so he would share all the, he'd say, Oh, how's it going? Blah, blah, blah. I say, oh, yeah, it's going really good Leonard. But you know, we ran out of money. Can you, um, put some money a few hundred rand me, 300 rand, so I can get home just for gas, not even for food. And he's like, well, you know, money's kind of tight. And he hung up on me. Another second time he hung up on me. I told the story earlier. And so here you got a couple of your two grad students at the time, 3000 kilometers from home in the a hole of the world place. And I don't want to say that to be disrespectful, but it wasn't, it was a tough place to be. It wasn't a nice, that was a rough place. No, it was a rough, it was a rough place. And so I, here I have to go back and bum another few rand. And I called Tom heck back. He was the head of the department at the time. And said, Hey, Tom, I, um, I need some money to get home. And he's like, well, did you talk to Leonard? I said, yeah, and he said, what happened? I said, well, he hung up on me. And you know, Tom being German, he's like, there's silence at first. He's like, no, no problem, Dave. I'll put up, I'll put 500 bucks in your account tomorrow morning, you'll be able to withdraw it and you know, welcome home, have a safe drive. And so yeah, but that was like, that was like Leonard. He just had didn't have like a lot of empathy like, Oh, well, you're stuck. Yeah. You know, oh, well, you know, good luck. See you back. See you sometime. Hope you get home. Hope you get home. And, um, but I had, yeah, that was kind of the, some of the funny stories we'd have. Paul and I just had an amazing experience. We go, Leonard and I would go out. We used to go a lot of times out in just wildlife looking. We go out to game, take, you know, we take a couple days. Yeah, Leonard liked to bird. I like to look at the game animals. We'd go out to a lot of the parks, national parks, they'll explore kind of thing. Yeah, we're, we're definitely fellow explorers. And, uh, as I say, it was just, it was an amazing time in my life. And we let her and I remain, you know, good friends, you know, but the last sort of 10 years of his life, he declined a lot, uh, health-wise, physically and mentally. And, uh, so I, you know, I didn't get, we kind of really lost touch there just because he was just, he was in South Africa and wasn't in good health. The last time I saw him was about 10 years, years ago. Um, but you know, even though he's, he's gone now, I have just a lot of very fond memories working with them. We published a lot together. Um, we co-authored about 10 species together. And, um, it was an amazing, it was an amazing time. And it was just, you know, I kind of, if I had to impart anything to often any, any young people there, you should be so lucky in your, in your career to find someone who's that real fellow traveler because, you know, he, he just, he, he wasn't just an advisor. You know, he was a mentor and above all, he was a friend. And, um, you know, his, his late, his late wife, Martina, probably one of the biggest compliments I ever received was we're, uh, out, I was showing him, he had her out visiting California one time before she passed away in 2006. And, um, we're talking at a restaurant, and Leonard went to go use the bathroom. And I, I kind of apologize to her because she was, a cephalopod biologist, but I kind of said, oh, I'm really sorry, Leonard and I are just blabbing away nonstop. And she goes, Dave, don't worry about it. She goes, Leonard, everybody to context Leonard wants something from him. You're like his, one of his few true friends out there. And, um, I just, that really touched me a lot and it was very, you know, very nice to hear that because, you know, and that's true. Leonard had a lot of people were not always looked out, you know, for his best interest. Um, and just hearing that from him was very much, was very, it was very genuine. Um, and I know it, you know, and there, and I know other people could share similar stories. I have a whole bunch of stories. One of the things I think we got a little clip we'll have, uh, with Gavin Naylor here and Gavin was a young PhD student. In fact, he'd Gavin had finished before me and he'd come to South Africa when I was still there, which I won't go into the stories today because it was just a bonus episode, male sharing some other future episodes, but he came to South Africa in 1989. He was there for about six weeks and we had, it was in a, we had just this incredible experience with Leonard and Gavin and I still to this day laugh at some of the stories that took place that time work with Leonard because I say he was, Leonard was a character. If you, if you had the chance to meet him, he was a character is the best way I can describe it. And, uh, you know, as I say, Gavin, we're both young students at the same time and I know he had also had a profound effect on him as well. And in fact, Gavin's done a lot of the genetic work that showed that Leonard's 1973 classification really has held up over the last 50 years. And so, um, yeah, anyway, I just, um, appreciate people listening stories. I should also go ahead, go ahead, Andrew. Okay. I was just going to say before, before we kind of end off here, like, you know, from the, some of the stories, as you mentioned, I didn't know, uh, you know, with the relationship you had with him, but also, uh, he's the reason why you're the lost shark guy. I think that's pretty cool. You would go to him to like bring back the specimens that you had and you would be like, what is this? Like, and he'd be like, oh, we haven't seen this in like 10 years. And it's, it's kind of interesting because before we were recorded, we were talking about how people come to you now to be like, to be that person, that, that authority to come in and say, hey, I found this. What is it? And you're like, oh, well, we actually haven't seen that in five years. We haven't seen that in 10 years, or we haven't seen that in 20 years, or this is a new species. Like let's work on this together. And, and I think that's, that it just goes to show that you're kind of like continuing the legacy that, that Leonard had, you know, in terms of just knowing the species so much and being so interested in all the species, not just, you know, the, the iconic sharks, not just the great white shark, not just, which there's nothing wrong with that. It's just he just had this impeccable knowledge of and detailed knowledge of all the sharks. Hence, the book, the sharks of the world and what you have lived on in terms of that, like it continued on with that legacy and built your own legacy as the lost shark guy for a reason, because you're the one, you're the one who continues on that curiosity that you both had and you both shared. And I think, you know, it's, it's really funny because there is this relationship with a supervisor and a student that a lot of people have. And sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad, but you got to see him in two lights. You got to see him at work and in the office, but you also got to see them outside of work where he was seemed to be a little bit more relaxed and a little bit more like he's interested in talking about science. He's interested in talking about sharks, like he'd had a genuine interest, birds, whatever species, game species. And I think that's, that's really interesting to, to hear, to see like a supervisor who has that kind of relationship with student where you guys were not only colleagues or not even student, like mentor student, but you were genuine friends. And I think that's, that's really cool to see. Yeah, no, he, he laid the foundation for, to say, we didn't, back in the 80s, I didn't think about the term lost shark guy or any or lost sharks, but he really laid the foundation. And if I, if I impart some of the young people listening to shows like, be knowledgeable about all the sharks and rays, don't focus on one species. You know, just be knowledgeable, you know, the, the wider, the broader width of knowledge you have, the better, you know, the, the more you'll know, and the more you learn, the more questions you could ask. And as I say, I just, you know, I mean, I never thought I was going to, you know, the direction I've gone. I'm kind of a direction I never thought about. But when he, as I learned more about all the different species, and I started bringing back these different things that people had and see, I thought, well, that's kind of a cool thing. Nobody else is doing this. And it just was, literally, I've been started doing that and I started focusing, I didn't focus in on them because I just go look for what was there and document stuff. But then when letters started telling me like a number of these species had not been seen for decades. And you know, 20, 30 years or more, then I started like going like, okay, I started paying attention to and started, you know, keeping a database of like, well, how long have these of some of these sharks haven't been seen? And there were sharks that I'd saw, I can tell you there were sharks I found back in the 80s that haven't been seen since I found them. I mean, I know where to go back to find them. But you know, it's like, you know, because I know where they are. And I think that they call them loss. But I think if you just bought it, if someone bothers to go look for them, you know, where to go. But I've just kind of carried on with that. And that led to my sort of moniker, my brand now the lost shark guy. Yeah, you know, over the expertise, really, is what it is. Yeah, my my expertise over the last couple decades. That's really what it was led to. And you know, I get, I have such a network now, I get, I get people all over the world contact me every week. I go a few days a week, I get emails from people asking me to identify stuff from them. And you know, a lot of times it's like, Oh, this is, this is, this is that and stuff. But sometimes they get some really cool stuff that, Hey, we haven't seen this species in 40 years, literally in this in their show, in their show up here, I think. So then I can, I can help them out and provide them some more information. So it's kind of cool. And you know, one other thing with Leonard is like, he always, and I think people listen to the podcast or hear me talk, you know, I still have that enthusiasm that passion I had when I was five years old. And Leonard was the same way. He was like, Leonard was, he would have been 81 this December. But he was, he was, he was just that perpetual kid, where he was just, he never lost his enthusiasm. And I had that same thing where I still feel today, like, you know, I'm going to keep going till I can't, which, you know, will probably be when they drop me in the ground and I love it, you know, and not anytime soon. That's for sure. Not anytime soon. Well, if you listen to the recent podcast, he did on my trip to Indonesia and Timor Lesti, you can, you can tell that, you know, and I have a, I think one thing with a lot of shark stuff now is I really, I enjoy working with a lot of young people, you know, like the crew I was just working with in, in Indonesia and Timor Lesti. I love work with young people and passing along because now it's my turn to pass on the information. All these young people know, hopefully be the new law shark guys and gals in the future. And that would be my biggest legacy is to leave, to leave, in part, my knowledge. There's a lot of these really up and coming people, many of whom we've had on the podcast. So I just, yeah, if I, yeah, keep going on and all that was instilled with me with Leonard and, you know, Leonard, some of these days, we'll, I'll see in that big shark park in the sky one day and we'll, I'm sure we back having a pizza and a Coca-Cola, even though I don't really like Coca-Cola. I was talking, didn't talking. So, but yeah, it was, it was a phenomenal experience and, if you're, and I'll just, one last shout out, I've ever seen, you guys, particularly young people, if you see me at a conference sometime, just come up and say hi, I'm pretty approachable and just want to talk about Leonard stories and some of the stuff. I'm quite happy to share sharks sharks and sharks. Yeah. And just, um, talking about stuff. And so, um, so anyway, Andrew, I appreciate it. I, uh, everybody, I just listened to the show and thanks for having a chance to, uh, part of some of my stuff because it was a really a big thing in my life, uh, met Leonard and getting the no Leonard and, um, I just, uh, hope to see him again sometime in the, sometime in the next life. So, anyway, thank you very much. Thank you everyone for listening and, uh, um, keep on trucking, baby. As Leonard would say. So, I love it. Well, Dave, thank you so much for sharing these stories. I know this is a hard time for you. Um, you know, you can tell in your voice, you can tell that Leonard had such an impact on your life as well as others. You know, when you posted in the American Lasberg ranked society, the notice of that he had passed, uh, there are so many amazing things that people have said about him, you know, recounting stories and how much of a legend that he was in this industry and in this field. Um, so you're, you're not the only one who feels this, but definitely you had a different relationship with him because you were his student, um, and, and you did his PhD with him and obviously a lot more than that. So we appreciate you, you being vulnerable with us and you letting us know more about Leonard and I appreciate it, definitely as a friend and, and, um, you know, we hope for the best. And like you said, one day, you'll be reunited and having a, having a coke, having a pizza and talking, it's awesome. So, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Yep. Thank you. Davey, but has asked me to comment on the contributions of Leonard Campano who passed away last week. I've known Leonard since I was a graduate student and he's certainly a very unusual person. He was frankly obsessed with sharks and rays. He wanted to understand everything about them. He wanted to understand their anatomy, their behavior, their life history, their taxonomy and he would pursue any avenue to learn more about them. We're familiar with Leonard because of his influential publication record. But I put it to you that that really is the tip of the iceberg. What Leonard published was a tiny fraction of what he knew. Instinct is nothing more than a capacity to access a huge amount of context sensitive information. And it seemed that Leonard had tremendous instinct for understanding these animals. And that's because he had huge knowledge about these animals from all of his work on a daily basis. He would be trying to find out more about them. As a person, he was fairly diffident, fairly shy and really uncomfortable in public settings. But if you were somebody who was interested in the same things as Leonard was, he was amazing. Whenever I would meet with Leonard, I'd really look forward to it because just a few minutes with Leonard would provide tremendous insights. He would make these casual observations about sharks and rays as if everybody knew about them. But they might be casual for Leonard, but they'd be profound statements to the rest of us. So I'm particularly sad that Leonard passed away because he carries with him so much knowledge of these animals. And also, I don't think that he's as widely appreciated by young scientists as he is by all the colleagues. Many young scientists I've talked to never even heard of Leonard, but he's somebody to look up to, to aspire to be like. He was primarily deeply curious. And I, for one, will miss him. It's a huge loss to a theology and a personal loss to me.
