Swimming With My Sharks Jaw-Some Job!

Dangerous? No way! Louise just loves these fin-tastic creatures

- Sebastian Van Der Zwan

Jumping into a tank full of hungry sharks with a bucket of dead fish might sound like a moment fit for a horror movie, but for Louise Greenshields, it’s an average day on the job.

The Auckland woman, 29, works as an aquarist at Kelly Tarlton’s Sea Life Aquarium, which sees her diving with the fearsome-looking finned creatures on a daily basis, making sure they’re fed and keeping their home clean.

Although she felt “cautious” when she first hopped into the tank two years ago and some of her friends still think she’s “a little crazy”, Louise insists the sharks are completely harmless, even if they do have “big chompy-looking teeth”.

“They mind their own business and keep swimming along,” she insists. “Stingrays are a bit more interactive – they’ll glide up on top of us to say hello, which is good fun. They’re almost like dogs. All they want is attention!”

The aquarium’s 15 sharks get fed twice a week. Two divers enter the 1.1 million litre tank with 40kg of mullet, much to the astonishment of visitors in the viewing tunnel below. Louise tells, “We feed the sharks with sticks and all four species have different feeding techniques. The most impressive are the broadnose sevengill sharks, which have serrated teeth. They’ll bite down on the fish, shake their heads around and rip off a good-sized piece.”