David William Sims (born 1969) is a British

marine biologist Marine biology is the scientific study of the biology of marine life, organisms in the sea. Given that in biology many scientific classification, phyla, family (biology), families and genera have some species that live in the sea and others th ...

known for using

satellite tracking A satellite or artificial satellite is an object intentionally placed into orbit in outer space. Except for passive satellites, most satellites have an electricity generation system for equipment on board, such as solar panels or radioisotop ...

to study wild behaviour of sharks and for the Global Shark Movement Project. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Laboratory of the

Marine Biological Association The Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom (MBA) is a learned society with a scientific laboratory that undertakes research in marine biology. The organisation was founded in 1884 and has been based in Plymouth since the Citadel H ...

(MBA) in

Plymouth Plymouth () is a port city and unitary authority in South West England. It is located on the south coast of Devon, approximately south-west of Exeter and south-west of London. It is bordered by Cornwall to the west and south-west. Plymouth ...

, and a Professor of Marine Ecology in the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton at the

University of Southampton , mottoeng = The Heights Yield to Endeavour , type = Public research university , established = 1862 – Hartley Institution1902 – Hartley University College1913 – Southampton University Coll ...

, U.K. He works in the field of

animal ecology Ecology () is the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their biophysical environment, physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community (ecology), community, ecosy ...

researching movements,

behaviour Behavior (American English) or behaviour (British English) is the range of actions and mannerisms made by individuals, organisms, systems or artificial entities in some environment. These systems can include other systems or organisms as wel ...

and

conservation Conservation is the preservation or efficient use of resources, or the conservation of various quantities under physical laws. Conservation may also refer to: Environment and natural resources * Nature conservation, the protection and manageme ...

shark Sharks are a group of elasmobranch fish characterized by a cartilaginous skeleton, five to seven gill slits on the sides of the head, and pectoral fins that are not fused to the head. Modern sharks are classified within the clade Selachimo ...

s. Research has estimated global spatial overlap of sharks and

fisheries Fishery can mean either the enterprise of raising or harvesting fish and other aquatic life; or more commonly, the site where such enterprise takes place ( a.k.a. fishing ground). Commercial fisheries include wild fisheries and fish farms, both ...

climate change In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to E ...

impacts on fishes, identified common patterns of behaviour ( scaling laws) across

phyla Phyla, the plural of ''phylum'', may refer to: * Phylum, a biological taxon between Kingdom and Class * by analogy, in linguistics, a large division of possibly related languages, or a major language family which is not subordinate to another Phyl ...

and informed

threatened species Threatened species are any species (including animals, plants and fungi) which are vulnerable to endangerment in the near future. Species that are threatened are sometimes characterised by the population dynamics measure of ''critical depensa ...

Background

He gained a PhD in

animal behaviour Ethology is the scientific study of animal behaviour, usually with a focus on behaviour under natural conditions, and viewing behaviour as an evolutionarily adaptive trait. Behaviourism as a term also describes the scientific and objectiv ...

in 1994 under the supervision of

Quentin Bone Quentin Bone FRS (17 August 1931 – 6 July 2021) was a British marine biologist. In 1971, he pioneered the application of electron microscopy to marine life. Biography Quentin Bone was the son of Stephen Bone, a painter, writer, broadcaster ...

FRS at the

. Between 1994 and 1995 Sims did postdoctoral research on

physiology Physiology (; ) is the scientific study of functions and mechanisms in a living system. As a sub-discipline of biology, physiology focuses on how organisms, organ systems, individual organs, cells, and biomolecules carry out the chemical ...

of fish behaviour with Paul L.R. Andrews and J. Z. Young FRS after which he was lecturer in marine biology at the University of Plymouth. Between 1998 and 2000 he was

lecturer Lecturer is an List of academic ranks, academic rank within many universities, though the meaning of the term varies somewhat from country to country. It generally denotes an academic expert who is hired to teach on a full- or part-time basis. T ...

in the Zoology Department at the

University of Aberdeen The University of Aberdeen ( sco, University o' 'Aiberdeen; abbreviated as ''Aberd.'' in List of post-nominal letters (United Kingdom), post-nominals; gd, Oilthigh Obar Dheathain) is a public university, public research university in Aberdeen, Sc ...

before becoming a Research Fellow at the

Laboratory in

in 2000.

Awards

* 2001

The Times ''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper ''The Sunday Times'' (fou ...

Novartis Novartis AG is a Swiss-American multinational pharmaceutical corporation based in Basel, Switzerland and Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States (global research).name="novartis.com">https://www.novartis.com/research-development/research-loc ...

- Royal Institution of Great Britain "''Scientist of the New Century''" Award * 2001 Life Membership of the Royal Institution of Great Britain * 2007

FSBI Medal The FSBI Medal is an international fish biology and/or fisheries science prize awarded annually for exceptional advances by a scientist in the earlier stages of his or her career. Medallists have made a significant contribution to the field of fi ...

of the Fisheries Society of the British Isles for "''exceptional advances in the study of fish biology and/or fisheries science''" * 2008 Stanley Gray Silver Medal of the

Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology The Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology (IMarEST) is the international membership body and learned society for marine professionals operating in the spheres of marine engineering, science, or technology. It has registered c ...

* 2016 Elected a Member of Academia Europaea, the Academy of Europe. * 2019

Zoological Society of London The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) is a charity devoted to the worldwide conservation of animals and their habitats. It was founded in 1826. Since 1828, it has maintained the London Zoo, and since 1931 Whipsnade Park. History On 29 ...

Marsh Award for Marine and Freshwater Conservation "''for fundamental research which has had significant impact on marine and freshwater conservation''". Sims is also a recipient of an advanced grant from the

European Research Council The European Research Council (ERC) is a public body for funding of scientific and technological research conducted within the European Union (EU). Established by the European Commission in 2007, the ERC is composed of an independent Scientific ...

Research

David Sims is known for research on the

ecology Ecology () is the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere level. Ecology overlaps wi ...

and

of sharks studied using remote tracking technology (

telemetry Telemetry is the in situ data collection, collection of measurements or other data at remote points and their automatic data transmission, transmission to receiving equipment (telecommunication) for monitoring. The word is derived from the Gr ...

), for studying

impacts on fishes, and for making advances in the field of animal movement ecology.

Basking shark conservation

Beginning in 1995 Sims studied the

behavioural ecology Behavioral ecology, also spelled behavioural ecology, is the study of the evolutionary basis for animal behavior due to ecological pressures. Behavioral ecology emerged from ethology after Niko Tinbergen outlined four questions to address when ...

of the

plankton Plankton are the diverse collection of organisms found in Hydrosphere, water (or atmosphere, air) that are unable to propel themselves against a Ocean current, current (or wind). The individual organisms constituting plankton are called plankt ...

-feeding basking shark, the world's second largest fish. He showed from long-term field studies of behaviour and

that basking sharks feed on specific assemblages of

zooplankton Zooplankton are the animal component of the planktonic community ("zoo" comes from the Greek word for ''animal''). Plankton are aquatic organisms that are unable to swim effectively against currents, and consequently drift or are carried along by ...

and do not

hibernate Hibernation is a state of minimal activity and metabolic depression undergone by some animal species. Hibernation is a seasonal heterothermy characterized by low body-temperature, slow breathing and heart-rate, and low metabolic rate. It most ...

in winter, overturning an understanding which had stood for nearly 50 years. Sims' satellite tracking of basking sharks were some of the first long-term trackings of any shark species and contributed directly to successful conservation proposals to list basking sharks on Appendix II of th
Convention for International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES)
(Feb 2003) and th
Convention for the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS)
(Nov 2005). Basking sharks were also studied to find out how fish actually respond to variations in

prey Predation is a biological interaction where one organism, the predator, kills and eats another organism, its prey. It is one of a family of common feeding behaviours that includes parasitism and micropredation (which usually do not kill the ...

density Density (volumetric mass density or specific mass) is the substance's mass per unit of volume. The symbol most often used for density is ''ρ'' (the lower case Greek letter rho), although the Latin letter ''D'' can also be used. Mathematical ...

gradients in the ocean, showing basking sharks were useful as 'biological plankton recorders', results which were published in the journal ''

Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physics, physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomenon, phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. ...

''. Results have demonstrated the biological significance of ocean fronts to predators, which have potential as candidates for high-seas protected areas.Sims, David W. (2008)
"Sieving a living: A review of the biology, ecology and conservation status of the plankton-feeding basking shark ''Cetorhinus maximus''"
''Advances in Marine Biology'' 54, 171-220.

Climate change impacts on fishes

Since 2001, Sims has also made significant contributions to understanding of

impacts on fish populations, including how climate-driven warming has altered migration timings, dramatic community changes of European marine fish, and vertical habitat compression of sharks due to ocean deoxygenation which can increase vulnerability to

longline fishing Longline fishing, or longlining, is a commercial fishing angling technique that uses a long ''main line'' with baited hooks attached at intervals via short branch lines called ''snoods'' or ''gangions''.scaling laws that describe movement paths and behaviour patterns of marine predators.Sims, David W.; Southall, Emily J., Humphries, Nicolas E., Hays, Graeme C., Bradshaw, Corey J. A., Pitchford, Jonathan W., James, Alex, Ahmed, Mohammed Z., Brierley, Andrew S., Hindell, Mark A., Morritt, David, Musyl, Michael K., Righton, David, Shepard, Emily L. C., Wearmouth, Victoria J., Wilson, Rory P., Witt, Matthew J., Metcalfe, Julian D. (2008)
"Scaling laws of marine predator search behaviour"
''

'' 451, 1098-1102.Humphries, Nicolas E.; Queiroz, Nuno, Dyer, Jennifer R. M., Pade, Nicolas G., Musyl, Michael K., Schaefer, Kurt M., Fuller, Daniel W., Brunnschweiler, Juerg M., Doyle, Thomas K., Houghton, Jonathan D. R., Hays, Graeme C., Jones, Catherine S., Noble, Leslie R., Wearmouth, Victoria J., Southall, Emily J., Sims, David W. (2010)
"Environmental context explains Lévy and Brownian movement patterns of marine predators"
''

'' 465, 1066-1069. It is argued that Sims' work has provided the strongest empirical evidence

Mark Buchanan Mark Buchanan (born October 31, 1961 in Cleveland, Ohio) is an American outreach physicist and author. He was formerly an editor with the international journal of science ''Nature'', and the popular science magazine ''New Scientist''. He has been a ...

(2008)
"Ecological modelling: The mathematical mirror to animal nature"
''

'' 453, 714-716.Viswanathan, Gandhi M.; da Luz, Marcos G.E.; Raposo, Ernesto; Stanley, H. Eugene (2011)
"The Physics of Foraging: An Introduction to Random Searches and Biological Encounters"
Cambridge University Press. for the existence of movement patterns that are well approximated by biological Lévy flights and Lévy walks, a special class of random walk that theoretically optimise random searches for sparsely distributed resources. It is said that Sims' work has shifted the debate on biological Lévy walks from whether they exist, to how and why they arise. He also conducted the first empirical field tests of the

Lévy flight foraging hypothesis The Lévy flight foraging hypothesis is a hypothesis in the field of biology that may be stated as follows: ''Since Lévy flights and walks can optimize search efficiencies, therefore natural selection should have led to adaptations for Lévy flight ...

. In the boo
''Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do''
the physicist and best-selling author Albert-László Barabási writes: "''Yet if a Lévy flight offers the best search strategy, why didn’t natural selection force animals to exploit it? In February 2008 David Sims showed that it did, in fact''." Sims' 2008 ''

'' paper announcing the discovery o
''Scaling laws of marine predator search behaviour''
is a Web of Science ''Highly Cited Paper''. Since then additional evidence for biological Lévy walks has accumulated across a wide range of taxa including microbes and humans and in fossil trails of extinct invertebrates, suggesting an ancient origin of the movement pattern. His work contributes to the emerging understanding in animal movement ecology that normal diffusion is insufficient for describing natural movements such as searching behaviour but that anomalous diffusion is required. His studies published in ''

'' on Lévy and Brownian searches in ocean predators inspired the optimal-foraging decision process used in an optimisation algorithm – the "Marine Predators Algorithm" – a high-performance optimizer with applications to engineering and medicine, including electrical modeling of photovoltaic power plants, renewable-energy systems design, and

COVID-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by a virus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was COVID-19 pandemic in Hubei, identified in Wuhan, China, in December ...

x-ray An X-ray, or, much less commonly, X-radiation, is a penetrating form of high-energy electromagnetic radiation. Most X-rays have a wavelength ranging from 10 picometers to 10 nanometers, corresponding to frequencies in the range 30&nb ...

image classification.

Spatial overlap of sharks and fisheries

In 2016 Sims led an international team tracking

ocean The ocean (also the sea or the world ocean) is the body of salt water that covers approximately 70.8% of the surface of Earth and contains 97% of Earth's water. An ocean can also refer to any of the large bodies of water into which the wo ...

-wide movements of sharks. They found

pelagic The pelagic zone consists of the water column of the open ocean, and can be further divided into regions by depth (as illustrated on the right). The word ''pelagic'' is derived . The pelagic zone can be thought of as an imaginary cylinder or wa ...

sharks like the shortfin mako aggregate in space-use "hotspots" characterized by fronts and high

biomass. Data showed

longline Long line or longline may refer to: *''Long Line'', an album by Peter Wolf *Long line (topology), or Alexandroff line, a topological space *Long line (telecommunications), a transmission line in a long-distance communications network *Longline fish ...

fishing vessels also targeted the habitats and efficiently tracked shark movements seasonally, leading to an 80% spatial overlap. The work suggests current hotspots are at risk from

overfishing Overfishing is the removal of a species of fish (i.e. fishing) from a body of water at a rate greater than that the species can replenish its population naturally (i.e. the overexploitation of the fishery's existing fish stock), resulting in th ...

and argued for introduction of international catch limits. The results were reported widely in the media including in ''

'' newspaper and the journal ''

Science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...

''.

Global Shark Movement Project

He initiated the Global Shark Movement Project, an international collaboration of research groups across 26 countries. The database assembled contains over 2,000 satellite tracks of sharks and is use
"''to find out where sharks aggregate, how distributions are influenced by environmental variations, and the global overlap with anthropogenic threats such as fisheries''"
In 2019 th
team
published its first results in ''

'' reporting a global spatial risk assessment of sharks. They showed nearly one quarter of shark space-use hotspots overlap with

fisheries each month, rising to over 60% each month for commercially valuable sharks (like shortfin mako) and internationally protected species (like

great white shark The great white shark (''Carcharodon carcharias''), also known as the white shark, white pointer, or simply great white, is a species of large mackerel shark which can be found in the coastal surface waters of all the major oceans. It is nota ...

). Shark hotspots were also associated with significant increases in fishing effort, leading the team to conclude that pelagic sharks have limited spatial refuge from current levels of fishing effort in marine areas beyond national jurisdictions (the high seas). They suggest large-scale marine reserves centred on shark hotspots could help to limit shark exploitation on the high seas. The paper was reported worldwide including by the

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and NPR. It has been commentedBaum, J.K. (2019
"Industrial fishing boats leave few safe havens for sharks on the high seas"
''

'' 572 449-450 that the paper has "''provided a much-needed blueprint for conservation actions that could be used to provide sharks with safe havens in our increasingly crowded oceans''".

Science and media

Sims' research on basking shark behaviour was the subject of an award-winning documentary
"Email from a shark"
by the Cornish film compan
Shark Bay Films
that aired on Sky in December 2004. The film won the British Council Youth and Science Award at the Helsingborg Film Festival,

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic country located on ...

, in 2004. Sims' research has received media attention, including articles in ''New Scientist'',

, ''Science News'', ''Physics World'', and in documentaries programmes for

BBC Television BBC Television is a service of the BBC. The corporation has operated a public broadcast television service in the United Kingdom, under the terms of a royal charter, since 1927. It produced television programmes from its own studios from 193 ...

, such as

BBC1 BBC One is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network owned and operated by the BBC. It is the corporation's flagship network and is known for broadcasting mainstream programming, which includes BBC News television bulletins, ...

"Animal Camera" with

Steve Leonard Stephen Leonard (born 4 September 1972 in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland) is a Northern Irish veterinarian and television personality. Early life Leonard's family moved to Cheshire from Northern Ireland when he was six weeks ol ...

(10 March 2004),

BBC Radio 4 BBC Radio 4 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC that replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. It broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history from the BBC' ...

Natural History Programme, Channel 5 " Nick Baker's Weird Creatures" episode 5 – the basking shark (16 February 2007), and

br>''Inside Science''
(25 July 2019) presented by Adam Rutherford.

References

External links

*
University of Southampton faculty page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sims, David 1969 births English biologists English marine biologists Living people People from Worthing British ecologists English ecologists Alumni of the University of Plymouth