The largest effort ever to tag and track shortfin mako sharks off the West Coast has found that they can travel nearly 12,000 miles in a year. The sharks range far offshore, but regularly return to productive waters off Southern California, an important feeding and nursery area for the species.
The findings demonstrate “an impressive show of memory and navigation.” The sharks maneuver through thousands of miles of the Pacific but return to where they have found food in years past, said Heidi Dewar, a research fisheries biologist at NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, California.
Researchers tagged 105 mako sharks over 12 years—from 2002 to 2014. The tags record the sharks’ movements, as well as the environments the sharks pass through. Researchers have long recognized that ocean waters from Santa Barbara south to San Diego, known as the Southern California Bight, are an important habitat for mako sharks. Prior to this study, however, they knew little about what the sharks do and where they went beyond those waters.
The researchers are from NOAA Fisheries, Stanford University, Tagging of Pacific Predators, and the Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education in Baja California. They reported their results in the journal Animal Biotelemetry.
Continue reading at NOAA Fisheries.
Image via Walter Heim.