A sighting of a great white shark off the coast of Florida provided marine biologists with key insights into the species migration route.
Inside NoVa reported that a 9-foot great white shark named Brass Bed was detected swimming off Merritt Island. The young female shark was tagged in October in Nova Scotia's Mahone Bay.
While the species' winter migration route is well known, scientists are realizing that great white sharks travel farther than originally believed.
"About two-thirds of the sharks that we've tagged have shown evidence of at some point going into the Gulf," John Tyminski, a senior data scientist at OCEARCH, told Inside NoVa. "It's much more prevalent than we've understood previously.
"Some of them will stop on East Florida, and others will go right around the tip of Florida, and then typically bend north and follow that West Florida escarpment up into the Eastern Gulf of Mexico. We've had a couple of sharks off Mississippi and Alabama this year already."
Nova Scotia's Tancook Islands have become an essential research hub for marine science students interested in studying and tagging great white sharks. Led by Nigel Hussey, the Tancook Islands Marine Field Station uses acoustic tags to identify when and where sharks are swimming in Mahone Bay. The tags are surgically implanted into the sharks, according to Inside NoVa, and can last up to 10 years, providing scientists with key data on the sharks' movements.
"Nigel has brought this to the next level, started a field station there where graduate students can be completely immersed in the community and environment," Tyminski said. "They can stay there for months on end and learn more about how these white sharks are utilizing the habitat in Atlantic Canada."
As these and other scientists continue to develop their research methods, they're more equipped to collect data on species that have historically been difficult to study. While it may seem like more sharks are being tagged along the East Coast, part of the uptick in sightings stems from the scientists' improved mechanisms for identifying and tagging great white sharks.
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