Saving Seafood

MASSACHUSETTS: Scientists take advantage of rare shark stranding in Orleans

ORLEANS — The corpse lay on its side as scientists honed knives on whetstones in preparation for the first cut.

But the scene at the town transfer station Monday wasn’t a ghoulish Halloween skit intended to frighten the knot of onlookers; it was a necropsy on a 12-foot-long great white shark that washed onto Nauset Beach on Sunday, dying in the sand.

The scientists were there in part to see if there was any obvious reason the 20-year-old male shark had washed ashore and died. But they also were collecting valuable specimens from an animal that can no longer legally be caught and killed, leaving researchers dependent on the rare instances when one washes up on the beach.

“We hate to have sharks strand because we like to have them in the water and healthy, but when they do we maximize what we could possibly learn from them,” said Gregory Skomal, lead shark scientist at the state Division of Marine Fisheries.

Researchers from his agency, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s School of Marine Science and Technology converged on the transfer station Monday morning to take advantage of the opportunity.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

100-shark milestone surprises even researchers

October 11th, 2016 — With a quick jab, Greg Skomal reached a milestone last week. The detachable stainless steel tip on his harpoon penetrated the skin of a 14-foot male great white shark hunting seals just 20 feet off Nauset Beach. The dart lodged between the tendons at the base of the shark’s dorsal fin, tethered to a pencil-size acoustic tag that will broadcast a signal identifying the shark for the next decade.

Skomal had tagged his 100th great white, dating back to 2009 when the massive predators began showing up in appreciable numbers off Chatham. He named the shark Casey after shark tagging pioneer Jack Casey, who founded the National Marine Fisheries Service Cooperative Shark Tagging Program in 1962 and developed many of the techniques still in use today.

As the number of sharks coming to the Cape seems to grow every year, so has Skomal’s appreciation of the unique situation he finds himself in: a shark researcher caught in a real-life “Sharknado.”

“If you told me 10 years ago we’d hit a hundred, I’d say, ‘You’re crazy,’” he said.

The number of sharks ranging along the Cape’s shoreline, many passing near surfers and swimmers, is sobering. Skomal, a senior fisheries biologist with the state Division of Marine Fisheries, is finishing the third year of a five-year population study and has identified more than 200 individual sharks through tagging and underwater videos that find unique scars and coloration on each animal.

“Frankly, I was surprised nobody got bit this summer,” said Chris Lowe, a professor at California State University, Long Beach, noting that seals and sharks have modified their behavior to the point where the sharks must hunt in increasingly shallow waters, including the popular beaches where millions swim every summer.

A soon-to-be published study of seven adult gray seals, captured and tagged on the Cape three years ago by a team led by Duke University professor David Johnston, showed them leaving the shore to feed at all times of day and night, and taking multiday trips, when sharks are not around in the winter. But the summer is a different story. Johnston said the study found seals have adapted their behavior to better avoid white sharks. Since great whites rely heavily on their eyesight to hunt, tagged seals were leaving at twilight and taking only single day trips in summer, he said.

Read the full story at The Cape Cod Times