The Shark That Swims in Rivers: Protecting the Winghead Sharks of Papua New Guinea

SHOW NOTES

From childhood memories of coral reefs, to learning she is ancestrally tied to the very animals she studies, Yolarnie Amepou’s journey is one of science, heritage, and guardianship. It begins with a childhood spent by the ocean in northern Papua New Guinea [05.71]. Her playground was a vibrant coral reef that fringed the shoreline; a place that came to life when Yolarnie donned a snorkelling mask for the first time. “The colors of the reef… there’s lime green and yellow and pink and purple and all the colors that you can imagine, plus a little bit more… you go into a different world”. It was a world so captivating that it was often hard for her mother to get her to come home. “There’s been times when I’d find home at eight o’clock at night. And I think if you’re a mother of a girl who doesn’t come home at eight because she’s still swimming in the sea…it’s not a very happy memory for mothers, I think,” Yolarnie laughs. “My mother would not share these happy memories with me.”

As a teenager, Yolarnie wasn’t sure what career she wanted — until a David Attenborough documentary changed everything [08.34]. Watching divers on the reef, she realised there was a profession that combined her love of the outdoors and the ocean: “Look at them! There’s this job that takes you outside…I found a job that keeps me doing what I want to do, and pays me to get lost with my corals and the life around them”. That moment set her on the path to become a marine biologist, and ultimately to dedicate her life to conservation in Papua New Guinea.

But Yolarnie’s connection to the natural world goes even deeper [11.00]. In Papua New Guinea, she explains, everyone is born with a responsibility to be guardians of the people of their clan, and the place that they are born into. Yolarnie’s career trajectory – specifically, the animals she chose to work with – mirrors her ancestral heritage. “On my mother’s side, we come from the sea turtle,” says Yolarnie. “My father’s heritage is connected more to the river system and the forest. Our ancestral animal is – we have two for my father – the forest is the kingfisher bird of paradise and the river is the sawfish.” Yolarnie’s work specialised in both turtles and elasmobranchs, but it was only after she had already been working with these animals for many years that she discovered the link to her ancestry. “We started doing bio-cultural work, so it’s looking at the relationship of people to the natural environment and how this influences culture,” Yolarnie recalls. “And so I had to go back through my ancestry. And then I got to sit down with my elders, with my cousins, to talk about where I came from, [and I was told] a lot of stories that they assumed I knew that I didn’t know.” It was a striking realisation that Yolarnie’s tie to both turtles and sharks and rays went far beyond scientific research.

Papua New Guinea is a place rich in diversity, both ecologically and culturally speaking [17.19]. Despite making up less than 1% of the world’s surface area, Papua New Guinea accounts for 7-10% of its biodiversity. Sitting on top of some small tectonic plates, the country is “a geophysical jigsaw puzzle”, reflected in a huge variety of habitats and climates – from volcanic islands and humid tropical rainforests to arid savannas and alpine ecosystems at higher latitudes. “We have places that are very cold and get hail, we get places that are very hot…you get a lot of different physical environments and then on these different physical environments you get all our biodiversity,” explains Yolarnie. She also describes Papua New Guineans as “place-based people”, meaning that this diversity is also reflected in the culture: “we call ourselves the ‘land of a thousand tribes. We’ve got over 840 different languages just on the eastern side of New Guinea alone. That’s the most linguistically diverse place in the world per square kilometre of land.” Because Papua New Guineans are very used to interacting with different languages, body language is key. “We are masters of micro expressions and body language…and so a lot of times people react to the aura that you bring in your body language, more than the words that you say.”

Much of Yolarnie’s work now centres on the Kikori River Delta, a vast and remote mosaic of rainforests and mangroves in southern Papua New Guinea [23.57]. Here, biodiversity flourishes: from cassowaries and endemic freshwater fish, to 25% of the nation’s sharks and rays. It is also home to ten different tribes, each with their own languages and cultural rules. Yolarnie co-founded the PIKU Biodiversity Network (PBN) in 2017 to create a more sustainable, community-led model for conservation. She had seen too many “stop-start” projects run by outside scientists, where communities were left behind once the researchers departed. “They came, they stayed, they took, they left… I couldn’t allow myself to be another extractive scientist,” she says. Instead, PIKU combines Western science with the unwritten traditional knowledge of Papua New Guinean communities: “How do we put these two really cool knowledge systems together and build the world that we want to live in?”.

One of Yolarnie’s earliest conservation focuses was the pig-nosed turtle, a living relic from the time of the dinosaurs [25.30]. It was once so numerous that “you’d walk onto a sandbank and think there was an earthquake….it was just pig-nosed turtles, nesting in such large numbers,” she says. But the species is now in decline, due to harvesting pressures and habitat change. Through the Piku project (Piku is the local name for pig-nosed turtle), Yolarnie and her colleagues worked tirelessly to engage with the communities of the Kikori delta, raising awareness of the turtle’s plight and empowering local people to get involved in their conservation. This included a school program, where children got to go back to their villages and monitor how many turtles and eggs were consumed during nesting season. The decline didn’t just seem like a crazy idea that scientists came and made up just to look important. People started collecting data themselves and realizing that we’re eating more than we think we are eating. So the turtle is actually still in decline. And it’s mostly due to the human harvest” explains Yolarnie. This has shifted the perspective of the turtle, a food source to something that’s very much connected to the culture, and local communities have been volunteering to protect the turtle nests as a result.

Then, in 2018, the work of the PBN expanded from turtles to sharks and rays when Dr Michael Grant reached out for help with his PhD research [31.00]. He was looking at the distribution of sawfish in Papua New Guinea, and needed help with its southern rivers. Over the course of five weeks, Yolarnie and her team accompanied Michael up and down at least three different rivers seeking sawfishes, asking local people if they knew what one was, and if they had seen one. “Papua New Guinea is one of six countries that still has healthy populations of sawfish,”says Yolarnie. “The Gulf of Papua, where the Kikori Delta is, has documented four of the five species.” During their search for sawfish, Yolarnie and Michael also confirmed a staggering diversity of other shark and ray species: “We ended up confirming… 45 species. And that makes up 25% of Papua New Guinea’s sharks and rays found in this river system”.

Among these species is the winghead shark, or “plane shark” as it is known locally [40.00]. Yolarnie laughs as she describes it: “It’s got wings on its side and it’s flat. So it’s a shark with the head of an aeroplane”. But despite its unique appearance, almost nothing is known about the species’ biology. What is known is concerning: levels of by-catch are significant. In one fishing season, Yolarnie and her team estimated that more than 10,000 wingheads were caught in nets in the Kikori alone. But, as with the pig-nosed turtle, Yolarnie and her team at the PBN, along with Dr Michael Grant, have been working closely with the local communities of the Kikori delta to learn more about this unique species. Although the findings are yet to be published, Yolarnie is able to share some early insights: “So in November you’ll start to find a lot of mums with baby wing heads in their tummies just getting ready to come out. And then when you are in around February and March you have a lot of the young in the water.” This arrival of young wingheads is synchronised with the surrounding nature; occurring alongside the ripening of the fruit trees, the emergence of pig-nosed turtle hatchlings, and an explosion of life and productivity.

For Yolarnie, sharing her findings with the local community, and involving them in the research and conservation of species, are key: “Yes, nature I think might have been better off if human beings weren’t on it. But human beings are not human beings without nature. There is no such thing as a human being without nature. Nature is part of your humanity.”

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Yolarnie Amepou is the Director and Co-founder of the Piku Biodiversity Network (PBN), the only registered and active environmental NGO in Papua New Guinea’s Gulf Province. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science from the University of Papua New Guinea in 2011 and began working in the Kikori River Delta the following year—initially as a volunteer, then later as a researcher and community conservation advocate. She deferred a Master’s in Applied Ecology at the University of Canberra to dedicate herself fully to community-led conservation in the Gulf of Papua, Kikori River Delta.

Since 2017, Yolarnie has helped lead PBN’s work in biodiversity conservation, biocultural preservation, and climate action, supporting grassroots initiatives across the Gulf. PBN’s early focus on the conservation of the freshwater pig-nosed turtle (Carettochelys insculpta) has since expanded to include elasmobranchs. In 2018, PBN supported Dr. Michael Grant’s PhD research on sawfish in southern Papua New Guinea, allowing Yolarnie to work alongside him to document distribution, presence, and social significance of these species. While Dr. Grant led the scientific research, Yolarnie facilitated community engagement, local access, and the integration of place-based knowledge. Together, their collaboration laid the foundation for PBN’s ongoing work on sharks and rays in the region. To date, PBN has confirmed the presence of 43 species of sharks and rays in the Gulf of Papua, including four species of critically endangered sawfish, wedgefish, and guitarfish, as well as the endangered winghead shark. Thirty of these species are listed on the IUCN Red List.

Yolarnie’s work is deeply rooted in her cultural identity. Her mother’s ancestry is linked to marine turtles, while her paternal heritage is connected to elasmobranchs—especially the sawfish, which holds ancestral significance for her father’s clan.

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