September 16, 2020 — They are some of the most iconic and unique-looking creatures in our oceans. While some may think they look a bit odd, one thing researchers agree on is that little is known about hammerhead sharks. Many of the 10 hammerhead shark species are severely overfished worldwide for their fins and in need of urgent protection to prevent their extinction.
To learn more about a declining hammerhead species that is data poor but in need of conservation efforts, a team of researchers from Nova Southeastern University’s (NSU) Save Our Seas Foundation Shark Research Center (SOSF SRC) and Guy Harvey Research Institute (GHRI), Fisher Finder Adventures, the University of Rhode Island and University of Oxford (UK), embarked on a study to determine the migration patterns of smooth hammerhead sharks (Sphyrna zygaena) in the western Atlantic Ocean. This shark, which can grow up to 14-feet (400 cm), remains one of the least understood of the large hammerhead species because of the difficulty in reliably finding smooth hammerheads to allow scientific study.
To learn about smooth hammerhead behavior, the research team satellite tagged juvenile hammerhead sharks off the US Mid-Atlantic coast and then tracked the sharks for up to 15 months. The sharks were fitted with fin-mounted satellite tags that reported the sharks’ movements in near real time via a satellite link to the researchers.
“Getting long-term tracks was instrumental in identifying not only clear seasonal travel patterns, but importantly, also the times and areas where the sharks were resident in between their migrations,” said Ryan Logan, Ph.D. student at NSU’s GHRI and SOSF SRC, and first author of the newly published research. “This study provides the first high resolution, long term view of the movement behaviors and habitats used by smooth hammerhead sharks—key information for targeting specific areas and times for management action to help build back this depleted species.”