Featured Image Credit: Ocearch / R. Snow
By: Kira Krall
Great white sharks are the Moby Dick of the elasmobranch world. Massive, mysterious, and capable of migrating thousands of miles in a single season, these sharks have always been leaving researchers wanting more.
Now, the “lost years” of great white shark juveniles have been discovered in the Northern Atlantic.
South Africa, East Australia, and South California all have known great white shark nurseries for the Pacific and Southern Atlantic populations of great white sharks. Now, The OCEARCH team has discovered a Northern Atlantic nursery.
There have been reports of small great white sharks in the area from fishermen and researchers alike for decades. OCEARCH, NOAA, and other institutions confirmed the reports by catching and tagging 9 baby great white sharks off the coast of Long Island.
Image Credit: Ocearch / R. Snow
Hydraulic platforms on the OCEARCH vessel (like the one pictured above) makes capture, tagging, and release a breeze. While it may not make much of a difference for smaller sharks like Monatuk, the platform comes in handy when researchers are dealing with 15 foot tiger sharks.
One of the many goals of Expedition New York is to determine if any of these juveniles are the offspring of the Northern Atlantic great white shark population that OCEARCH has in its database. That will lend credit to the theory that this nursery area is also a pupping ground. Another goal is to tag and track the young shark’s migration patterns.
Image Credit: Ocearch / R. Snow
All of the sharks in the OCEARCH system have trackers attached to their dorsal fin. Each time the shark surfaces, the satellite tracker sends a ping to the database. The juvenile great white sharks have already started moving about the coast of New England.
By understanding where these sharks are going, we can protect the areas that they use as habitat. Without protecting these apex predators, the marine food web as we know it will collapse.
You can follow along with the OCEARCH sharks on Twitter, and can see the real-time data of every tagged OCEARCH shark here.