Successfully defended my PhD dissertation yesterday! Such a crazy feeling once you realize you’ve accomplished your dream from 10 years ago in one of the best research institutions in the world and being advised by such amazing scientists!

Attending #ESA2025 and never heard of serial exploration for luxury seafood products? You’ve heard of this but want to know more? Come check out my poster later and learn all about it!

I’ll be at panel 129 from 5:30 to 6:30 🧪

New research out @ConLetters led by Trisha Gupta and Reshu Bashyal!

We gathered at Oxford in 2023 to discuss the widespread uncertainties in the legality of wildlife trade and created a summary of them across scales and a framework to resolve them

conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

For heavily fished species, we predict the retention ban to cause minimal decreases in mortality because they have inherently high AVM and PRM, low population growth rates, and suffer a substantial fishing mortality. 6/9

Our results show that retention bans could reduce mortality by three-fold on average while still allowing stocks to be at FMSY. Some threatened species could substantially benefit from this policy too. No species experience a PMAX/FMSY ratio < 1, which denotes decreases in mortality from the ban 5/9

While crocodile, thresher, and sand tiger sharks had the highest longline AVM. We further predict bamboo, dogfish, and Port Jackson sharks to have the highest PRM. 3/9

All of these estimates and the other datasets produced are available at:
doi.org/10.5061/drya...

It's Carnival Tuesday in Brazil and I'm happy to share the newest #SharkScience paper we just published at Fish and Fisheries!
@allieamc.bsky.social and I co-led this analysis on the at-vessel and post-release mortality for sharks caught in longline and/or gillnet fisheries 1/9

tinyurl.com/2v2rjwmd

When we evaluated the neonate multi-element signatures across all species, we observed that samples from the daggernose and shovelbill sharks collected 40 years apart clustered together. We consider this could be evidence of repeated use of parturition areas by these species in the BAC.

We did find significant differences in element:Ca concentrations between species, with the wingfin stingray being the most distinct of all of them. We associate this difference with its strictly benthic and shallow (> 50 m) water habits.

By analyzing the element:Ca concentrations in the vertebrae of each species, we demonstrate that most species seem to fulfill their entire life cycles in the area, with little to no difference in habitat use between neonate, juvenile, and adult life stages.

We sampled over 100 vertebrae from scalloped and smalleye hammerheads, the recently described shovelbill, and the critically endangered daggernose shark, as well as the American cownose ray and wingfin stingray across eight of the main landing sites in the BAC

When we model prices as a function of supply and species having catch hyperstability (schooling behavior) and/or price flexibility (higher price as stocks decline), extinction becomes even more likely, even if pop. growth rates are extremely close. 7/12

We also extend this analysis decreasing costs by 25% to simulate a fishery subsidy. We find that the pattern remains the same, but the parameter space allowing for coexistence shrinks. On average, a 1% decrease in costs, shrinks the coexistence window in 1.2%. 5/12

2: keeping the most productive sp. price constant and increasing price for the least productive leads to lower biomass at equilibrium, but no higher risk of extinction. We name this “synergy of overfishing”, shown by the vertical dashed line (bottom). 4/12

We found 2 main synergies.
1: as the most productive (- vulnerable) species price increases, the range of vulnerability ratios (catchability/population growth) enabling both to coexist shrinks exponentially regardless of the least productive sp. price (synergy of endangerment) (top) 3/12

Surge of new followers + #WorldFisheriesDay = new post!

My 1st thesis chapter “Synergies between price and life history enhance extinction risk in open-access fisheries” recently came out at @ Fish & Fisheries 1/12

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

New #OA research just published today in Science!
We show that despite increases in regulations governing #shark fisheries, shark mortality has actually increased from 76 million in 2012 to 80 million in 2019, 25 million of these comprising threatened species
doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Hi! I’m Leonardo Feitosa, Brazilian PhD student at the Bren School, UCSB. I do research mostly on fisheries ecology, management, and conservation, especially applied to critically endangered species of 🦈 and rays.

I’m currently expanding into bioeconomics and luxury seafood trade for my PhD thesis.