“It used to be protected 6 miles around every island,” said Mauricio Hoyos-Padilla, who took part in shark-tagging research as a Ph.D. student with Mexico’s Centro Interdisciplinario de Ciencias Marinas. “But thanks to all the information we gathered about the connectivity between all these islands, we were able to protect 40 square miles around the islands.”

Between 2009 and 2010, UC Davis adjunct professor Peter Klimley, postdoctoral scholar Alex Hearn and Hoyos-Padilla joined a tagging expedition to place acoustic receivers on the area’s sharks with National Geographic, which chronicled the work in the documentary Shark Men.

Hoyos-Padilla and James Ketchum, a UC Davis graduate student in Klimley’s lab, formed the NGO Pelagios Kakunja in 2010 to continue the shark-tagging effort.