Expedition Australia update – What about Ned?

Tagged off Cairns, Ned the tiger shark was tagged off
Cairns as part of Expedition Australia (Image: Rob Snow)

This February, we joined forces with OCEARCH and other researchers to tag tiger sharks along the Queensland coastline. Battling huge seas and shy sharks, we managed to tag 8 tiger sharks. Six of these sharks were tagged off Cairns, and they continue to ping in. See where they are now at OCEARCH.org.

World’s largest treadmill…for fish

The new megaflume - a treadmill for large sharks

Measuring how much energy animal’s use for their daily activities can be REALLY useful. It can give us an idea of how much food they need to eat; how long they might be able to spend running or swimming at high speeds; and it can even help us understand why animals can live in one habitat, but not in others. We usually talk about an animal’s rate of energy expenditure in terms of “metabolic rate”, and scientists have come up with lots of cool ways of measuring metabolic rate at different levels of animal activity, e.g. resting, running, hopping or swimming.

Mola mola mania

SHARK!...or not.
From Wikipedia Commons

The past 12 months has been a terrible period for shark bites in Australia; five fatal incidents including the recent tragic death of a Japanese national at Ballina, northern NSW. When several bites occur within a relatively short time period, the inevitable response by the media and general public is to ask whether sharks are becoming more abundant, and/or encroaching on popular swimming or surfing beaches more often than they have in recent decades. 

Running the Gauntlet of Global Shark Threats

Tagging a shark is a thrill. Ok, it’s a big thrill. But the thrill doesn’t end when you step off the boat at the end of a tagging trip. The months and sometimes years following tagging a shark is also exciting for researchers as we follow the ‘ping’ journey of our tagged animals. In short, it’s not just the shark that gets hooked.

Are Tasmanian coastal areas a love niche for broadnose sevengill sharks?

A broadnose sevengill shark caught off the coast
of Tasmania, Australia.

An essential question to answer when scientists want to understand the ecological role on any species is to identify if animals use the habitat for reproduction. This information can be used to inform and improve conservation and management programmes. With this in mind, we wanted to understand if the broadnose sevengill sharks (Notorynchus cepedianus) use certain Tasmanian coastal areas for reproductive purposes. 

What's cracking in tracking? Using accelerometers to record movement and behavior of aquatic animals

 A blacktip shark (Carcharhinus limbatus) showing off the latest in accelerometer fin-wear.

I guess the word “accelerometer” might conjure images of the CERN Hadron Collider or of Captain Kirk yelling orders to his engineers on an old episode of Star Trek. However these devices are becoming increasingly main stream, and most people will have used or at least heard of the smart-phone apps that allow you to monitor your own activity levels while jogging, or impress your friends with the scariness of the rollercoaster you just rode on. Increasingly, the same devices are being applied to more-scientific pursuits, and marine biologists are using accelerometers to make all sorts of fascinating discoveries with aquatic animals.

Mozambique get their first Tiger sharks tagged!

Our research on tiger sharks (Galeocerdo cuvier) to date has been in Australian tropical waters, but recently, we began investigating tiger sharks a little further afield.   Together with South African colleagues Ryan Daly, Clare Daly and Malcolm Smale I have been tagging tiger sharks off Ponta Do Oura in southern Mozambique. Ryan has been running a bull shark project (called Zambezi shark in Africa) here for the last few years. This field trip in January 2014 was the start of the tiger shark project which we are conducting in collaboration with Mahmood Shivji from the Guy Harvey Institute.