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= Alison Towner =

Alison Towner is a British shark biologist specializing in the study and conservation of South African great whites. Most notably she has appeared on Discovery's Shark Week as part of multiple episodes in the Air Jaws saga that began in 2001. She has also been featured in shark educational and conservation programs on National Geographic, BBC and other networks in addition to Discovery. She has travelled with the likes of Bill Gates, Philip Schofield and Ben Fogle to raise awareness for conservation through wildlife observation or shark cage diving. She has also spoken about her advocacy for female participation in shark research and Shark Week.

Biography
Alison Towner is a shark biologist and conservationist born in Ramsbottom, Lancashire, England in 1986. The daughter of late Manchester journalist Eric Towner, in interviews she has stated that she began scuba diving at age 11 and continued her training to work on her dive master certification in Greece in her teens. She publicly attributes her passion for sharks and marine science to her father, who displayed a similar appreciation of nature as a fisherman and a novelist, as well as to Jacques Cousteau and shark researchers Ron and Valerie Taylor. Towner then attended Bangor University in Wales, where she graduated in 2006 with a Bachelor of Science in Marine Biology. She has stated that she went on to work as a scuba instructor for PADI in both the Greek Islands and the Red Sea, before joining the Dyer Island Conservation Trust in Gansbaai, South Africa in January of 2007 where she currently resides. During this time Towner described developed her Master's thesis on great white activity and coordinating research through the University of Cape Town using observational data collected for local great white sharks to investigate population dynamics, migration and movement patterns, and diet studies. She is noted to currently be a PhD candidate using tracking data for Cape Town white sharks to understand the drivers of their movements in the area, whether they be ecotourism, food supply or environmental factors. She also works as a shark biologist and guide for shark cage diving research company Marine Dynamics in Gansbaai.

Research
One of Towner's most prominent contributions to white shark research is with regards to predation on great whites by killer whales in South Africa, which is also the subject of her doctoral thesis. She has been tagging and tracking sharks in the area for over a decade, and using the data collected from the tags to study their movement patterns and identify threats to their survival.

Towner is also a project leader for the Save Our Seas Foundation, which is a philanthropy-based marine conservation organization based out of Geneva, Switzerland. The project she heads investigates the impact of cage diving and other ecotourism activities on white sharks in Gansbaai using acoustic tracking and observational data.

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic Towner has been studying how white sharks and their behavior have changed. Some of the major findings from her team, both positive and negative, include a decrease in enforcement of protected shark habitats due to government shutdowns, devastation of shark ecotourism businesses, loss of budgetary allotments for shark conservation and research, removal of shark safety nets, and a drastic increase in education and awareness for shark conservation needs.

Shark Week
Towner was featured in the 2018 Shark Week program called Air Jaws: The Hunted in which she led a research team investigating the causes and manner of the deaths of five adult great whites, who had been preyed upon by killer whales and washed up on South African beaches. At the time that this program aired in July it was rated one of the most watched and downloaded in the history of cable television in the United States, with 1.9 million views and 3.5 million streams from the first night alone.

In 2020, Towner headed one of three research teams competing to capture the most spectacular breach of a white shark off the coast of Seal Island in South Africa, coming in second place overall using a drone to capture footage. The program was filmed during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the goal of studying how a loss of marine activity and ecotourism had affected white shark behavior and population dynamics.