Party of 1

The Honors program at school offers an opportunity where students can apply to conduct independent research anywhere in the world for up to four months. People go to South America to study health care, visit Europe to study economics, or even travel around the States to study history. I, the eternal adventurist, heard of this opportunity and decided I wanted to study Great White Sharks. I've always had a great interest in sharks...one that didn't just appear annually during Shark Week. I have always wanted to learn as much as I could about them and I have always dreamed of being able to go on cage dives to see them in their natural habitat.

I am working on a proposal that would let me do this. My project will focus on the effect increased ecotourism has on Great Whites' perceptions of humans. The more I learn about cage dives, the more I think that eventually, sharks are going to think that people are a food source. After all, dive leaders supposedly lure the sharks to the cages using bait and chum. Could this be a case of Pavlov conditioning? I really hope to find out!