Talks

Kings in the North: Great White Sharks in Canadian Waters

Alanna Canaran is an ocean educator, science communicator, PADI scuba diving instructor, and PADI mermaid instructor trainer based in Halifax, NS, and born in Toronto, ON. Her work focuses on helping people build a curious, confident, and reciprocal relationship with the ocean. With a BSc in Marine Biology from Dalhousie University, she brings a scientific foundation to her storytelling, making complex marine science feel accessible, engaging, and rooted in conservation. 

Alanna has spent the past decade working in and on the water, teaching diving, leading marine education programs, and developing multimedia educational content about the ocean. As a PADI scuba diving instructor and PADI mermaid instructor trainer, she blends safety, skills training, and ocean stewardship, using time in the water to spark awe and care for marine life.  

Alanna has appeared in programs such as CBC’s The Nature of Things "Jawsome: Canada’s Great White Sharks”, and is a host on “Jump In”, a TV show about women and water on Eastlink TV.  

Across her roles in ocean education, event coordination, and instruction, Alanna’s mission is to inspire people of all ages to live with the ocean in mind, one story, dive, and coastal experience at a time. 

Dr. Heather Bowlby is a research scientist who has focused on conservation and fisheries biology for more than 20 years. Her research interests relate to how populations respond to threats, the factors that cause them to change in size, and how different types of data can be combined to generate new ecological knowledge. She has worked on numerous species in both marine and freshwater environments, primarily studying lobster, Atlantic salmon, gaspereau, and sharks.  Currently, she leads the Canadian Atlantic Shark Research Laboratory at Fisheries and Oceans, Canada, with on-going projects on blue, porbeagle, shortfin mako, basking and white sharks. She is also an adjunct professor at Dalhousie University, serves on the Marine Fishes species specialist subcommittee for the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC), and is the Canadian science delegate to the sharks working group at the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). 

Tonya Wimmer With over 20 years' experience studying a variety of cetacean species at university, and with government, industry, and non-industry organizations, her primary focus has always been on protecting marine species and reducing impacts from human activities. To do this, she has worked side-by-side with other researchers, government, industry, First Nations, as well as within communities. Tonya strives to help MARS achieve its goal to provide effective and safe response while contributing valuable data and research to assess and mitigate the impacts from human activities to marine animals. In 2017 and 2019, she helped lead the response to, and investigation of, the mass mortalities of right whales in Eastern Canada. Tonya is a member of the Canadian Right Whale Recovery Network, a board member of the Right Whale Consortium, a Steering Committee Member for the Entanglement Working Group of the Canada-US International Advisory Committee for Right Whale Recovery and a member of the International Whaling Commission’s Stranding and Bycatch Initiatives.