New technology slated to track great white sharks between California and Hawaii

UPDATE 6/29/2016 5:45 PM:

Marine scientists are trying to go where no one has tried before. Likening it to a mission to Mars, local researchers are trying to follow great white shark migration patterns far out in the Pacific Ocean.

Between the West Coast and Hawaii is a large region scientists call “White Shark Caf.” Every winter, large white sharks from California and Mexico head down there and stay for months. Researchers don’t know why.

“They think perhaps mating could be taking place out there,” said David Ebert, the executive director of the Pacific Shark Research Center. “There may be some food resources out there. We do know when they leave they tend to be gone for a year or more.”

Scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium say male sharks repeatedly dive hundreds of feet below the surface. They hope to find out why with new tagging devices.

With the help of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), they’ve fabricated a small video camera that would safety attach onto the dorsal fin. The camera has to be able to stay on the shark for up to nine months, survive dives as deep as 3,300 feet and bursts of acceleration at speeds up to 25 miles per hour.

“Can measure depth, light, temperature, acceleration and have the video turn on at interesting times,” said Thom Maughan, MBARI engineer. “It’s going to be a very hard thing to solve, which attracted me to the challenge.”

Sal Jorgensen, the brainchild of the project, compared it to a mission to Mars.

“You have all these little systems that have to work just right and go to sleep for a period of time while it’s traveling and it’ll wake up and the camera comes on at the right moment, and all the while you have to resist the corrosive environment of the ocean with its pressure and darkness,” Jorgensen said.

The camera would start recording when sudden changes in swimming patterns are detected and pause when routine swimming resumes. Cameras have to be able to withstand feeding frenzies, swift swimming patterns and sneak attacks.

An ocean of information, in the abyss of the Pacific.

“It tells us how little we really know about the ocean out here,” Ebert said. “You have this vast area between California and Hawaii where these large sharks are congregating at an area that we would look at and call a biological desert but clearly there’s something out there.”

Test runs are happening now, with the official launch at the start of the next migration. In December or January, researchers plan to visit one of the white shark hotspots, like the Farallon Islands, and clip the camera tags onto the sharks.

Ebert said it’s not only white sharks that congregate at the caf. A basking shark, which feeds on plankton, was once tracked to the area.

“So you have two of these sharks, the basking shark, the second-largest shark in the world, and the white shark going out to a similar area, we have no idea,” Ebert said. “But one’s feeding on mostly plankton and the other’s feeding on much larger prey items, so you have this area of traffic going on out there.”

ORIGINAL POST:

Every year great white sharks migrate from the California coast toward Hawaii, stopping halfway at an area known as the “White Shark Cafe.”

Researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and MBARI want to know exactly what they’re doing there. New technology will allow scientists to attach a small camera to a shark’s fin in hopes to see what they’re doing.

KION’s Mariana Hicks speaks with a shark expert on why great white sharks could be hanging out in that particular area.