Date: October 4, 2016
Source: University of Delaware
Thanks to movies like
"Jaws," we tend to think of sharks as loners who prefer to do their
own thing. But if the ocean were a mixer, they'd actually be networking their
fins off, not standing in the corner staring at their iPhones.
New research conducted at the
University of Delaware found that sharks prefer to travel in groups of various
sizes and spend a surprising amount of time together. Some individuals even
spent up to 95 consecutive hours together over the course of the year.
Researchers gathered this data by
using a novel tagging procedure to collect tens of thousands of interactions
between 300 or so tagged sand tiger sharks along the Eastern Seaboard. They also
documented interactions between sand tigers and seven other fish species.
The findings, published in the
Nature journal Scientific Reports, could help researchers in future efforts to
improve the life cycle of sand tiger sharks.
Documenting shark encounters in
the open ocean
The project began in summer 2012,
when UD researchers tagged 20 sand tiger sharks with implanted acoustic
transceivers to study their interactions and movements. When the scientists
recovered the tags from two male sand tiger sharks in 2013, the downloaded data
told an unexpected story.
"Based on previous work, we
knew that during the summer the sand tiger population formed groups in the
Delaware Bay, with male and female adults and juveniles all together in the
same places, sometimes very close together," said Danielle Haulsee, the
paper's lead author and a doctoral student in the College of Earth, Ocean, and
Environment's School of Marine Science and Policy.
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