Melissa Cristina Márquez

Meet the marine biologist who is standing up for sharks.

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"I have always had this fascination for not only sharks, but just misunderstood predators as a whole,” Melissa Cristina Márquez tells The Week Junior Science+Nature, “Snakes, wolves, coyotes, bears… anything that has a bad reputation I’ve always been really interested in.” Márquez is a marine biologist (someone who studies life in the sea) with a particular focus on sharks. Márquez researches the areas where sharks live, and has been studying how people’s attitudes towards them affect the way they’re treated in the wild. Sometimes she’s even lucky enough to swim with these magnificent, but unappreciated, creatures.

At one with the ocean

Márquez has always felt at home in the sea. “I was born on an island and my first memories are of me being in the ocean,” she says. Not long afterwards she fell in love with sharks. Her family had just moved from Mexico to the US, and while watching TV, she stumbled upon Shark Week – a series all about these fierce fish. Márquez says she was in awe, and “that night at the dinner table, I was like, ‘I’m going to be a shark scientist’.”

It wasn’t until she was around 14 years old that Márquez had her first interaction with a shark. She was in the sea off the coast of the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean when she spotted a nurse shark, a slow-moving shark that lives near the sea bed. Márquez remembers being so excited that she screamed. “I still feel that way every time I see a shark,” she admits, “Doesn’t matter their species, I get really, really excited. But now I just scream in my head.”