Saving Seafood

Cape gray seal population estimated at up to 50K

April 7, 2017 — While the first day of the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission’s annual meeting, held for the first time on Cape Cod, dealt with threats to a tiny Mexican porpoise and massive Arctic polar bears, Thursday’s sessions brought the focus home with a profoundly local subject: gray seals.

“These animals are reassuming their ecological roles,” said David Johnston, an assistant professor at Duke University. “And people freak out.”

Seals are back in force, with between 30,000 and 50,000 living in the waters of Southeastern Massachusetts, primarily on and around Cape Cod, according to a new estimate produced by Johnston to be published in an upcoming report. Feelings about their return, however, are decidedly mixed.

After seal hunts and bounties exterminated gray seals from New England by the mid to late 60s, few imagined they would come back, certainly not to the point where tens of thousands now inhabit the Cape and surrounding waters.

Fishermen complain about seals taking their catch, boats run into them, some question their effect on water quality or their potential to spread disease, and raise concerns about the threat of a rapidly expanding great white shark population, visiting Cape waters to dine on blubber.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

Cape Cod may use high-tech balloon to spot great white sharks

March 20, 2017 — Researchers and public safety officials may soon have a new tool to track the growing great white shark populations off the coast of Cape Cod.

Shark researcher Greg Skomal, a scientist with the state’s Department of Marine Fisheries whose team recently completed a major study of the region’s shark populations, is considering launching a pilot program to use a high-tech balloon to spot sharks in the waters near Chatham, according to a report in the Cape Cod Times.

A Miami-based company, Altametry SmartBalloon, has developed a balloon with high-definition cameras, video streaming capability and specialized lens filters to peer under the ocean’s surface and alert officials to sharks that near the shoreline.

“I think it has great potential and I’m excited to be trying it,” Skomal told the Cape Cod Times.

Read the full story at Mass Live

Unraveling the mysteries of great white sharks

September 6, 2016 — Meeting a great white shark in the wild is nothing like you expect it would be. At first glance it’s not the malevolent beast we’ve come to expect from a thousand TV shows. It’s portly, bordering on fat, like an overstuffed sausage. Flabby jowls tremble down its body when it opens its mouth, which otherwise is a chubby, slightly parted smirk. From the side, one of the world’s greatest predators is little more than a slack-jawed buffoon.

It’s only when the underwater clown turns to face you that you understand why it’s the most feared animal on Earth. From the front its head is no longer soft and jowly, but tapers to an arrow that draws its black eyes into a sinister-looking V. The bemused smile is gone, and all you see are rows of 2-inch teeth capable of crunching down with almost 2 tons of force. Slowly, confidently, it approaches you. It turns its head, first to one side and then the other, evaluating you, deciding whether you’re worth its time. Then if you’re lucky, it turns away, becoming the buffoon again, and glides lazily into the gloom.

There are more than 500 species of sharks, but in popular imagination there’s really only one. When Pixar needed an underwater villain for its animated film Finding Nemo, it didn’t look to the affable nurse shark or the aggressive bull shark. Not even the tiger shark, which would be more appropriate in Nemo’s coral-reef home. It was the great white shark — with its wide, toothy grin — that was plastered on thousands of movie billboards across the world.

The great white shark is the ocean’s iconic fish, yet we know little about it — and much of what we think we know simply isn’t true. White sharks aren’t merciless hunters (if anything, attacks are cautious), they aren’t always loners, and they may be smarter than experts have thought. Even the 1916 Jersey Shore attacks famously mentioned in Jaws may have been perpetrated by a bull shark, not a great white.

We don’t know for sure how long they live, how many months they gestate, when they reach maturity. No one has seen great whites mate or give birth. We don’t really know how many there are or where, exactly, they spend most of their lives. Imagine that a land animal the size of a pickup truck hunted along the coasts of California, South Africa, and Australia. Scientists would know every detail of its mating habits, migrations, and behavior after observing it in zoos, research facilities, perhaps even circuses. But the rules are different underwater. Great whites appear and disappear at will, making it nearly impossible to follow them in deep water. They refuse to live behind glass — in captivity some have starved themselves or slammed their heads against walls.

Read the full story at The Week

Rare Great White Nursery Found Off Coast of Long Island, New York

September 1, 2016 — Jaws is back and she’s got babies.

Even though great white sharks have been on this Earth for thousands of years and have held a place in pop culture for decades, there is still little known about these apex predators. Scientists aren’t sure how these animals mate and have never witnessed a great white shark give birth, so recent news of a great white shark nursery in the Northern Atlantic is colossal.

According to Smithsonian, research group Ocearch, led by former Shark Wranglers host Chris Fischer, believes the waters off Montauk, Long Island, in New York may be a sort of baby shark daycare center, after finding and tagging 9 great white shark pups in the area in the last two weeks.

“[This is] definitely the nursery, likely the birthing site,” Fischer tells Jeff Glor of CBS This Morning. “Probably the most important significant discovery we’ve ever made on the ocean.”

Read the full story at People

Tracking Great White Sharks off Cape Cod by Land, by Air, by Sea

August 23, 2016 — Two days a week, from June through October, the Aleutian leaves the dock of the Chatham Bars Inn in Chatham, Massachusetts, in search of great white sharks.

Marine scientist Greg Skomal of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries is usually on board armed with two poles: one for filming the elusive predators and another for placing acoustic tags. He’s joined by a small crew of researchers and by Atlantic White Shark Conservancy executive director and co-founder Cynthia Wigren.

“The ultimate goal, really, is to learn as much as we can about the species to be able to protect it and support the conservation of white sharks,” said Wigren.

Read the full story at ABC News

OCEARCH Tags and Releases Great White Shark Pups For The First Time Off Long Island

August 22, 2016 — MONTAUK, N.Y. — Meet Montauk and Hudson, two young-of-the-year great white sharks just tagged and released off Montauk, NY by OCEARCH and its collaborative team of multi-disciplined scientists.

“This is an exciting marine conservation event right here in our New York seascape,” said Jon Forrest Dohlin, Director of WCS’s New York Aquarium.

“We’ve learned a lot about the adult sharks in recent years, but the pups are still a complete mystery,” said Tobey Curtis, lead scientist and Fisheries Manager at NOAA Fisheries. “Tagging these baby white sharks will help us better understand how essential Long Island waters are for their survival.”

Montauk, a 50-pound, 4-foot female white shark, and Hudson, a 67-pound, 5-foot male white shark, are the first two white sharks tagged by the shark-tagging partnership in New York waters. The tags on these young-of-the-year sharks will allow scientists to track their movements up and down the coast for the next several years.

The team, which includes researchers from WCS, NOAA Fisheries, South Hampton Schools, Florida Atlantic University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, and Stony Brook University, collected blood samples, fin clips, parasites, muscle sample and took measurements of the sharks. Each sample provides baseline data previously unattainable for great white sharks in this initial phase of life.

Read the full release at Marketwired

Long Island a Possible ‘Breeding Ground’ For Great White Sharks, Experts Say

June 13, 2016 — Ever since the blood-curdling screams of an ill-fated skinny dipper, who met her famous demise in the opening scene of “Jaws,” generations of beach-goers have approached the water with bone-chilling trepidation.

Now, a leading shark research team has said it suspects Long Island might be a breeding ground for great whites and has launched a tagging expedition to be able to determine potential birthing sites.

But the news isn’t reason to panic: Experts agree that swimmers have a greater danger of being killed by a faulty toaster oven — or driving on the Long Island Expressway, for that matter — than being devoured by a shark.

According to OCEARCH Chief Operating Officer Fernanda Ubatuba — OCEARCH is a nonprofit organization dedicated to shark research — if you look at a global shark tracker, five mature female great white sharks have been tagged in the past three to four years, and it seems that “there is certain activity in that region.”

Great white sharks, she said, travel from Florida to Canada, “and you can see their activity sometimes overlaps around Long Island.”

OCEARCH has launched a Kickstarter campaign to tag and research great white sharks in the North Atlantic; that research might help to investigate sample sites and ultimately determine definite breeding sites around Long Island, Ubatuba said.

The team will tag juvenile great whites in New York waters, the campaign site says.

Technology utilized by OCEARCH aims to allow people to see, in real time, “breeding and mating sites for the first time in history. It’s amazing,” she said.

Read the full story at Patch

Megalodon teeth washing up along North Carolina beaches

November 2, 2015 — These days, we humans tend to freak out if a little ol’ great white shark gets too close to one of our beaches. Imagine being alive millions of years ago, and having to contend with megalodons, giant sharks that were longer than any of the ships Columbus took across the Atlantic.

Beachcombers along the North Carolina coast are getting a good idea of the size of these prehistoric fish that ruled the oceans between 2 million and 15 million years ago. Recent strong currents have unearthed fossilized megalodon teeth, and washed them up on the sand in North Topsail Beach and Surf City, according to local NBC affiliate WITN.

Read the full story at The Times-Picayune New Orleans

 

 

Cape Cod: Playing tag with sharks

November 1, 2015 — CHATHAM, Mass. — The summer crowds and traffic on Main Street were down to a trickle. Leaves sifted onto lawns, and the birdsongs and rattle and hum of insect life were stilled for another year.

As the Aleutian Dream nudged past rolling breakers at the mouth of Chatham Harbor, the ocean told another story. Rippling V’s of migrating waterfowl filled the skies. All around the vessel, spouts from fin whales on their way to the West Indies, pausing to gorge themselves on sand eels, burst into the air like escaping jets of steam. The inky black backs of minke whales, likewise headed for equatorial regions, jackknifed as they dived on the eels below.

Notably absent were the great white sharks that seemed omnipresent at summer’s end, closing town beaches from Orleans up to Wellfleet as they cruised close to shore, occasionally beaching themselves in their pursuit of seals in Harwich, Chatham and Wellfleet.

But tagging data going back to 2010 showed that most great whites were gone from the Cape by mid- to late October.

“It’s only the big slobs hanging out now,” joked state Division of Marine Fisheries shark scientist Greg Skomal. In the summer, average sizes hovered around the 12- to 13-foot mark, but most of the sharks they had encountered this fall were to 14 to 15 feet long.

Perched on a pulpit, a narrow catwalk jutting forward from the bow of the Aleutian Dream, Skomal eased his back onto the hard aluminum rail and stretched his legs, waiting for word from above. Despite the bright sunshine and blue skies, wispy high cirrus clouds foretold of the coming storm that likely would end what had been a record-breaking shark-tagging season.

Read the full story at Cape Cod Times