By Jonathan Bell
Published May 1, 2014 at 8:00 am
 

Research boost: Ten-year-old Lara Backeberg and her friends have raised $1,000 for Neil Burnie’s
shark tagging project. Pictured from the left, front row, are Naomi Burrill, Ariana Lowther, Neil Burnie,
Taylor White and Caroline McPhail. Back row: Lara Backeberg, Emma Kiddleson and Nerea Aitken.
Photo by Akil Simmons

A group of young students who collected more than $1,000 for shark research will name the next animals tagged by the Bermuda Shark Project.

The group of seven at the Bermuda High School for Girls presented veterinarian and diver Neil Burnie with a donation raised over months of collections and a poster campaign.

“It started when I bought my shark books into school,” explained Lara Backeberg, with friend Ariana Lowther adding: “We learned about how to save them from that book.”

Naomi Burrill came up with the idea of fund raising for the cause of local sharks.

Caroline McPhail made rainbow bracelets to sell with Ariana and ten-year-old Taylor White.

Emma Kiddleson chipped in with Nerea Aitken. The girls collected around their neighbourhoods, while Ariana also drew up a poster campaign.

And, for her tenth birthday, Lara asked for people to make donations to the cause instead of giving her gifts.

All of the students, who are either nine and 10 years old, are familiar with sharks from Bermuda’s aquarium, and Lara has even touched one of the endangered fish at the Georgia Aquarium.

“This is amazing ­— a team of ten-year-olds have raised over $1,000 for shark conservation,” said Dr Burnie, on hand to collect the donations at BHS.

“It’s going to the Bermuda Shark Project, which is a privately funded institute who have been tracking and studying sharks now for about eight years.”

The money will go toward acoustic transmitters which are implanted harmlessly in the sharks’ abdomens.

The group plans to put transponders on two or three of the small dusky sharks that frequent Bermuda’s waters. Dr Burnie said they would soon tag more from Castle Harbour.

“I’ll make you a deal — come up with four names, two for a boy and two for a girl, and you can name them,” he told the students.

“This will be filmed for an episode of my show ‘Ocean Vet’, which is currently in production — we will feature the tagging.”

The money raised by the BHS team will cover the cost of two transponder devices, Dr Burnie said.