Hello Women in Ocean Science! My name is Brooke Anderson and I am a marine biologist that studies sharks and other fish.

Elasmo Week is a virtual event about sharks, skates and rays - a group of fish collectively called Elasmobranchs. Real scientists will be talking about the various and mind-blowing ways they study elasmobranchs while celebrating as many species as they can! It is a free week-long event, and if you miss out on any of the live talks, they will be available on the MISS YouTube channel for future binge-watching.

Catherine Cushenan, also know as Cat Sharks, has spent the past six years travelling the tropics, studying shark behaviour - with a little bit of tourism action and videography on the side. She is a shark ecologist, drone pilot and freediver from the U.K. whom has dedicated her life to saving the ocean and its inhabitants. Read below to find out about her enviable relationship with sharks.

Northern Ireland is a small part, of a small island, off the west coast of the United Kingdom. If you’ve heard of my home country then you’re likely to know us for the Giants Causeway (a bunch of basalt columns), the Titanic (the most famous ship that sank), or The Troubles (our troubling history). But there is a valuable part of our heritage that has been lost in cultural memory – our sharks, skates and rays (elasmobranchs).

When I was little I would always tell people that I wanted to be a veterinarian. I even went to college on a pre-vet track. However, the ocean had always been a wonderful and mysterious place to me. I spent countless days fishing with my dad and several summers visiting family in Myrtle Beach, SC, but I had no idea that you could study the ocean and its inhabitants as a job.

In June of 2020 we, the soon-to-be co-founders of MISS, connected/reconnected on Twitter through #BlackInNature, a hashtag that went viral after @BlackAFInSTEM launched Black Birders Week. As the hashtag grew we slowly increased our ranks. Suddenly, four women who had felt completely isolated now had a community of scientists that looked like them.

Skates, together with sharks and rays, are the only extant vertebrates that possess a cartilaginous skeleton. Although it hasn’t been explicitly tested in other species of skates (and there are about 150 species described!), we have a good understanding that they all share the same genetic machinery necessary for formation of cartilaginous skeleton.