Sal Jorgensen, PhD
SALVADORE “SAL” JORGENSEN is a Senior Research Scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, California. His job is primarily a research position studying white sharks in the wild, trying to understand these sharks in California waters, their place in the ecology, and how their numbers are changing.
Sal was born in Seattle, Washington, but he grew up a little bit all over the place – Seattle, California, Africa, Canada and then back to California. At age nine he moved with his family from Canada to Mozambique off the east coast of Africa and lived there for five years. His parents, who were university teachers, participated in Canadian University Overseas, which is like a Peace Corps for university teachers to teach in developing countries. When they returned from Mozambique the family settled in Montreal, Canada. Sal notes that while it is a beautiful inland city, it is an island on a river and very cold in the winter. As a teenager he was counting the days to finish high school and community college and go explore warmer areas that were coastal.
After meandering through Central America and Mexico, Sal ended up in California again and liked it here. He’d always considered himself a West Coast person by birth, and he and his parents lived on the West Coast of North America from southern California to Seattle, Washington to Canada. After living in Africa, he became very much drawn to the ocean.
Sal got his undergraduate degree at Sonoma State then applied to graduate school at the University of California at Davis. At the time he was working at the Bodega Marine Lab, so had already started to put his roots down in the coastal California area.
After graduating with a PhD in Marine Ecology from UC Davis, where he studied the movements and population dynamics of fishes, there was a job offering at the Monterey Bay Aquarium to study white sharks. That was around 2005 when the Aquarium had been the first to successfully display a white shark. A lot of people would come to visit, and the Aquarium saw this as an opportunity to invest extra funds into studying this enigmatic species. Sal was intrigued by the idea of studying white sharks, applied for the position and was hired.
Like every diligent nine year old, Sal had done a lot of research on white sharks and scared his mother a lot. When he first had the opportunity to study sharks as a biologist before getting the position at the Aquarium, he called his mother and said, ”Hey I’ve got this great opportunity to study schooling hammerhead sharks at a seamount in Mexico, and I’m going down with a world-famous shark scientist Dr. Peter Klimley to dive in the water and count the sharks.” There was a long silence on the other end. “Mom, are you there?” “Maybe I could get you some shark repellant,” she replied. He explained that Jane Goodall didn’t wear chimpanzee repellant when she was out in the field.
As a marine ecologist Sal has always been interested in movement, and how movement affects population dynamics, and why animals move. He has studied rockfish movement, and he studied movements of fish around seamounts in the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. Those studies included hammerhead sharks and communities of species such as tunas and jacks. Studying sharks through the Aquarium was a way to continue following this path.
Sal realized during college that he was studying declines. As a kid, he didn’t know and don’t think anyone knew that much about whether we could deplete the oceans. As he started learning about this, he realized it’s a real problem for sharks, because they take so long to reproduce and have so few young that they’ll have a hard time recovering.
Sal notes that the problem with sharks is they have this bad reputation. Getting people behind shark conservation is not as easy as, say, asking people to save the whales.
But Sal’s job at the Aquarium is good because they’re dealing with the white shark, which is kind of a poster child of this perceived threat sharks pose to people. When Sal started the position, he and his colleagues were excited that they were going to learn a lot of new stuff about sharks, and Sal thinks they’ve done just that.
