June 20, 2019 — Researchers on Cape Cod are launching a new study focused on the hunting and feeding habits of the region’s great white sharks following last year’s two attacks on humans.
Greg Skomal, a state marine biologist leading the effort, says the hope is to contribute critical information to the ongoing debate over how to keep Cape beachgoers safe.
The new research calls for placing sophisticated tags on sharks to track their swimming speed, depth and body position in the water.
June 20, 2019 — Canada passed a new law banning the import and export of shark fins, which also includes a requirement to rebuild depleted fish populations.
The new Fisheries Act, approved late on Tuesday, was hailed by environmental and conservation groups as a win for the preservation of fish habitats and for the shark population. Canada has become the first G20 country to ban the export and import of shark fins, said Josh Laughren, executive director of Oceana Canada, a private conservation group.
“With all laws, how they’re implemented matters, but there’s no question this has the potential to be transformative for how we manage Canada’s oceans,” Laughren said.
June 19, 2019 — Researchers on Cape Cod are launching a new study focused on the hunting and feeding habits of the region’s great white sharks following last year’s two attacks on humans, including the state’s first fatal one in more than 80 years.
The hope is that the work, which starts in the coming days, contributes critical information to the ongoing debate over how to keep Cape beachgoers safe, said state marine biologist Greg Skomal, who has been studying the region’s great whites for years and is leading the new effort.
“If we can figure out how, where and when these sharks are attacking seals, we may be able to see if there is a pattern or any predictability to it,” he said. “That’s really useful information for someone trying to manage their beach and enhance public safety. If there are hot spots that can be identified, we certainly want to share that information with the public.”
Cape Cod officials have been wrestling with how to respond to public concern in the aftermath of last year’s attacks. A New York man was badly mauled by a shark last August off a beach in Truro but survived. Then weeks later a Massachusetts man was killed by a shark while boogie boarding in nearby Wellfleet.
June 18, 2019 — Fishermen along the Outer Banks say there are too many sharks in North Carolina waters, so, WNCT’s Dillon Huffman asked the question: is the fact that there are so many sharks, contributing to the number of attacks we’ve seen.
There have been three in North Carolina in the past month.
Fishermen in the Outer Banks say not really, they said they’re more of a problem for them, but they said there are more sharks out there than you know and to be careful.
Holton Clifton is a commercial fisherman along the Outer Banks.
“I love it, you get paid to fish,” said Clifton.
He fishes for tuna on the Sandra D but said in the last few years he’s noticed a problem.
“As soon as the rod comes up, the sharks are waiting, when a tuna starts struggling, the sharks just wolfpack them,” said Clifton.
Holton said there are too many sharks in North Carolina waters and that’s due to there being so many rules and regulations when it comes to fishing for sharks most fishermen don’t even bother.
“It makes it hard for us, you get a bunch of heads back to the boat, hahaha that ain’t no fun for nobody,” said Clifton.
June 10, 2019 — Say the word “shark” to a New Englander these days and the mind jumps straight to great white sharks, which have seen a remarkable increase here in recent years.
But great whites aren’t the only sharks around. And it turns out we know little about many of the sharks that frequent New England’s waters.
Now there’s a new effort to understand how catch-and-release fishing of sandbar sharks impacts their survival.
“We want to know if the catch and release processes is harming the fish in any way, and if it is, we want to work with fishermen to try to figure out what is it about the capture event that is causing the sharks to die,” Jeff Kneebone told Living Lab Radio.
Kneebone is a fisheries scientist with the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life at the New England Aquarium and much of his research focuses on figuring out where sharks are and what they’re doing as they move around the region.
Twenty years ago, Sandbar sharks had a large population off the mid-Atlantic coast. When the population dropped, it became illegal to catch and keep them. But fishermen still are allowed to pursue them using catch-and-release fishing.
Given the sharks’ susceptibility to population declines, Kneebone wants to know more about what happens after they are caught and released. When they die, why?
“Is it how long they’re being fought? Is it how they’re being handled when they’re landed on the beach? Is it where they’re being hooked?” he said.
June 7, 2019 — There were only a few sharks for sale on the day the ABC was invited to the fish market in the north Japanese city of Indramayu.
“No-one breaks the rules here … when [the fishermen] catch sharks in their nets, they release them back to their habitats, if the sharks are still alive,” said the chief of the local fisheries cooperative, Darto.
However, the following day the ABC turned up unannounced and found evidence of a thriving shark industry, with workers cutting off hundreds of shark fins right there on the dock.
Walking over a carpet of shark carcasses, the auctioneer barked numbers rapid-fire into a megaphone, as a small pack of buyers crowded around him.
Among the dead animals at their feet, leaking blood from their gills, were endangered hammerhead sharks, with their heads carved into a point to hide their distinctive mallet-shaped snouts.
Further down the dock, juvenile sharks were being stacked like firewood into trucks, and taken away for export.
June 6, 2019 — The Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries five-year white shark population study is nearing completion and scientists will begin a new wave of research off Cape Cod this summer.
Since 2014, research led by state marine biologist Dr. Greg Skomal has been conducted to get a more accurate picture of how many sharks spend their summers in waters off the Cape.
Results from the five-year study are expected to be released soon.
The Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, in collaboration with DMF, will start several projects that are focused on getting a better understanding of the predatory behavior of white sharks in the region.
“The big focus now is to get better information to inform public safety practices,” said Megan Winton, a staff scientist with the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy.
“The best way we can do that at this point is to learn more about what these animals are doing in the waters off of the coast.”
The research conducted over the next five years will be a continuation of the previous population study.
“Now the focus is to really get as many tags on animals as we can to get a better idea of what the population is doing as a whole off of our coast,” Winton said.
Atlantic White Shark Conservancy CEO Cynthia Wigren said it is critical to get a better idea of hunting and feeding behavior from a public safety perspective.
“If sharks are feeding at certain times of the day or stages of the tide, for example, we can use that information to identify periods when the risk of interactions between sharks and recreational water users may be highest,” Wigren said.
May 29, 2019 — A Cape Cod company has proposed building a sonic barrier around the region’s beaches to chase away seals and prevent shark attacks.
Deep Blue LLC presented its idea Wednesday at a public meeting in Barnstable. It sparked a broader debate about addressing the region’s massive seal population.
The company envisions a system of underwater audio devices that will emit a sound unpleasant to seals.
Owners Willy Planinshek and Kevin McCarthy say that if the seals leave the area, the great white sharks that eat them will follow.
May 28, 2019 — Seals have rebounded to healthy numbers along Massachusetts’ shores after being nearly decimated by early settlers and a bounty that later wiped out tens of thousands of them, according to experts — and that is what is attracting sharks.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates there are at least 27,000 gray seals and 75,000 harbor seals in U.S. waters during their breeding seasons.
“What we’re witnessing is a comeback to a really healthy marine environment,” said Kimberly Murray, seal program lead at NOAA Fisheries in Woods Hole.
The numbers are a stark contrast to the 1700s, when gray seals had been nearly wiped out during the first 100 years of New England settlement, said Tony LaCasse, a spokesman for the New England Aquarium in Boston.
By the late 1800s, the seals had rebounded, but conflicts with commercial fisheries and a desire for the seals’ meat and pelts led to a bounty on both gray and harbor seals from 1888 to 1962 in Massachusetts and Maine. During those years, as many as 135,000 seals were killed, Murray said.
“Seals were perceived as competitors to fisherman,” LaCasse said. “Fishermen would carry shotguns in their boats and shoot them on sight.”
May 22, 2019 — Marcus Drymon wasn’t expecting a baby shark to barf up a ball of feathers onto his boat.
The shark’s presence wasn’t the weird bit: Drymon and his team of fisheries ecologists regularly assess fish populations along the coasts of Mississippi and Alabama, and every year, they’ll catch, weigh, tag, and release thousands of sharks. In 2010, they were doing just that for the meter-long tiger shark when it coughed up the feathers. “Being an ecologist, I scooped them up and took them back to the lab,” Drymon says.
He passed the feathers to Kevin Feldheim, a molecular biologist at the Field Museum, who analyzed the DNA within them to work out what species they belonged to. The answer: a brown thrasher, a thrush-like songbird that lives in forests. What on Earth was it doing in the belly of an oceanic apex predator?
“I had expected a laughing gull or a brown pelican,” Drymon says. “The brown thrasher was the last bird I would have expected.”