In my presentation on Day 4, I shared my work on Pacific leatherback bycatch. This work began with a scientific literature evaluation, which implies that I searched the entire web to attempt to examine each occasion a fishing boat had interacted with a leatherback turtle within the Pacific Ocean. This ended up being 514 data from 1982 – 2024, from revealed scientific articles, to experiments, to surveys of fishers at fishing ports, to governmental stories, to logbooks from observers on fishing boats. We centered on the interactions that resulted within the demise of the ocean turtle (mortality) and tried to determine patterns which may clarify increased mortality, akin to the scale of the fleet – industrial or small-scale, the kind of fishing gear, the goal species, the nation fishing, and the area they had been fishing in. What this evaluation actually taught us is that some nations and a few fishing gears are extra harmful than others, and that we have to preserve this work going and make the most of present know-how to account for all of the interactions that haven’t been reported in revealed literature. I’ll be engaged on all of this over the last 12 months of my PhD!

The tip of Day 5 was the Closing Banquet and Awards Ceremony, and I used to be so stunned and very honored to win the Archie Carr Conservation Award for Finest Scholar Oral Presentation. It was much more particular that I bought to share that second with my PhD supervisor (and Upwell Government Director), George Shillinger.