Hammerhead Sharks: Predators with Perspective
SHOW NOTES
When Kelly Kingon describes her most magical dive, it sounds like a scene from a documentary [5.43]. Off the coast of Florida, diving on a boat wreck called One More Time, she slipped beneath unusually clear Gulf waters and was immediately greeted by Goliath groupers, a loggerhead turtle, and a nurse shark. But it was what followed that made the dive unforgettable: a procession of eight to ten enormous nurse sharks swimming past in single file, a vast school of jacks surging around her, and finally, the sudden appearance of a bull shark.
“All of a sudden I saw this big like shadow swimming towards me… it was a huge nurse shark. And right behind it was the next one. And the next one. And the next one swimming in a single file line… there was like eight or 10 of them. It was the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen,” Kelly recalls. “It made me feel like this is what the oceans looked like, you know, a long time ago… every dive probably looked like this.”
Her fascination with sharks truly took root as an undergraduate student at the Bimini Biological Field Station [8.00]. On her first day in the field, sharks swarmed the boat in a feeding frenzy orchestrated by the legendary Dr. Samuel “Doc” Gruber. He encouraged the new students to get in the water. “We all looked at each other like, no, are you crazy? What’s wrong with you?” Kelly laughs. “But he was serious and he was basically pushing us off the boat… And it was amazing.”
That early spark led Kelly into a career path that’s taken her full circle — back to Bimini, now as an Assistant Professor. Today, her research focuses on one of the ocean’s most distinctive predators: hammerhead sharks [15.15]. With their odd, flattened “hammer” heads — or cephalofoils — these sharks are instantly recognisable. But behind the strange shape lies important functions. It provides lift while they swim, like the wings of an airplane. And, as Kelly explains, “by having their eyes placed farther apart, they can actually see more degrees around their heads… once they start moving their head side to side, they can actually see almost 220 degrees around themselves.”
Across the 12 known species, hammerheads range from the small bonnethead to the massive great hammerhead, which can grow over four metres long [25.20]. Trinidad and Tobago, remarkably, hosts seven of these species — making it one of the most diverse places for hammerheads in the world. Yet hammerheads are also among the most threatened. Unlike many shark species, they are fragile when caught and often die quickly, even if released. “They’re not very hardy. If they get caught, they die very quickly. Even if you unintentionally catch one… that could lead to their mortality,” Kelly explains.
This vulnerability is why Kelly’s Save Our Seas Foundation-funded project focused on scalloped hammerheads in Trinidad and Tobago [35.25]. Visiting fish landing sites revealed an alarming trend: large amounts of scalloped hammerheads were being caught, and mostly Young of the Year (YoY) and neonates. In other words, young sharks that wouldn’t grow into adulthood to reproduce. Kelly and her project co-leader, David Portnoy, wanted to identify important habitat and areas that baby hammerheads preferred, and possibly used as nurseries, so that they would be able to protect these havens from external threats like fishing.
This research involves lots of time in the field catching, aging, measuring and tagging sharks [45.00]. Sounds fun, but in reality, fieldwork was far from straightforward. Despite deploying longlines and working with local fishers, catching scalloped hammerheads alive for tagging proved nearly impossible: “It seems like it should be easy, right? All the fishers are doing it en masse. Like, how hard could it be? But the trick is catching them alive. It turned out to be really difficult.” Add to that seas nicknamed the “washing machine” for their relentless motion, volunteers laid low by seasickness, and pandemic restrictions — and the challenges were immense.
Yet persistence paid off, with valuable data collected through surveys, tissue sampling, and collaboration with fishers [50.00]. Kelly’s research has revealed critical insights. Scalloped hammerhead nurseries span much of Trinidad’s coastlines, with pupping occurring seasonally in multiple regions. Genetic data showed evidence of site fidelity, with females returning to the same areas to give birth, and even hinted at hybridisation with the Carolina hammerhead. These findings suggest Trinidad’s waters are not only important locally, but may be key to the species’ persistence in the wider Caribbean. Without protection, however, the dominance of juveniles in the catch risks the long-term survival of scalloped hammerheads.
Building trust has been central to Kelly’s success [55.12]. “Working from the ground up is really the way to go… educating fishers and the public about the importance of sharks,” she says. “Now I do have fishers that’ll send me, ‘Hey, here’s a picture of a shark I released today instead of keeping it.’ So it’s having an impact.”
From awe-inspiring dives to frontline conservation in the Caribbean, Kelly’s journey shows how passion, persistence, and partnership can help secure a future for one of the ocean’s most iconic shark families.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Researchers, it is often said, can be either divers or surfers. Divers go deeper and deeper into a subject, while surfers stay at the surface looking broadly for connections, diving down only when needed. Dr. Kelly Kingon identifies as a surfer who periodically dives — both metaphorically and in reality. She gravitates towards overarching conservation issues such as rebuilding threatened species populations, limiting habitat destruction, and managing overfished species. She enjoys mapping and tracking, observing and measuring, and then sifting through the data to find patterns and the processes that drive them.
Her research projects reflect this wide-ranging curiosity. She has worked on identifying nursery habitats for scalloped hammerheads, documenting pollinators for seagrasses, finding ways to harness sargassum blooms, studying drivers of parasite infestations in reef herbivores, and exploring the ecology of introduced species. She has also examined the distributions of goliath grouper, patterns in deep-sea coral reef communities, low-cost mapping of nearshore habitats, the contributions of artificial reefs, scarlet ibis nesting areas, and most recently, Bahamian rock iguana conservation. A naturalist and lover of all living things, Kelly embraces every opportunity to study, protect, and share knowledge about the natural world.
Her academic and professional journey reflects her diverse research interests. She earned a bachelor’s degree with a double major in marine science and biology, alongside a minor in chemistry. Following this, she spent six years working across multiple environmental fields, including positions in government, consulting, non-profit organizations, and academia. During this period, she contributed to projects on freshwater quality monitoring, wetland delineation and restoration, seagrass monitoring, terrestrial endangered species surveys, fisheries monitoring, artificial reef deployment, and reef fish ecology.
Kelly then pursued a doctorate in Geography, a relatively new field for her at the time, where she honed her mapping skills and expanded her knowledge of spatial analyses. Her doctoral research focused on the seascape ecology of hardbottom habitats and marine habitat classification systems. A postdoctoral position followed, where she studied deep-sea communities and compared fauna between natural and artificial reefs.
She went on to spend ten years as a faculty member in Marine Sciences at the University of Trinidad and Tobago before moving, just over a year ago, to the Bahamas. She is now an Assistant Professor at the University of The Bahamas, North Campus, working in Small Island Sustainability. While her research spans ecosystems and taxa, sharks remain a special focus — a piece of the puzzle that has stayed with her since her first encounters with them in Bimini as an undergraduate student.
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