After 26 expeditions, Ocearch said the birthing site in the famous waters off Montauk, Long Island is the most significant discovery they’ve ever made. In the three-week-long expedition, Ocearch’s team has found the white sharks nursery off Montauk, Long Island.
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“We have just been totally overwhelmed by the abundance here and the volume of sharks we’re seeing”, Chris Fischer, founder of Ocearch, told ABC7 in NY.
Ocearch said its team of fishermen and scientists has found the first known birthing site for great white sharks on the North Atlantic Coast.
This is a really unique population of animals.
A great white shark birthing site is ‘the holy grail of research, ‘ the team explains, and can make for better protection policies down the line. It is a life stage that has not been much studied earlier.
“This is an exciting marine conservation event right here in our New York seascape”, Jon Forrest Dohlin, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s New York Aquarium, said in a statement.
“One of the reasons we are excited about this information is because there are a lot of unanswered questions”, said Mr. Dohlin told LiveScience in January. Researchers also collect blood and tissue samples, get measurements, and determine the gender of the sharks.
But for all the fear of sharks, she said the actual facts remain scant.
You might remember Mary Lee, the 3,500-pound great white shark caught off the Jersey shore in 2012 by OCEARCH.
During their discovery of the North Atlantic nursery, the researchers were able to capture nine white shark pups. Both of them plan to continue with tagging the white sharks.
Fischer rejects accusations that Ocearch’s tagging practices may be hurtful to the sharks, pointing out that researchers need to track a small number of them for the benefit of the entire species. “We don’t learn unless we let them go in good shape”. The face of the matter is that we have to get some tracking devices on a handful of these animals so we can help them all thrive’.
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“She was, yeah. And she’s gone, but now everybody can follow her”, Fischer added. Each time her fin breaks the surface of the ocean, her tag transmits her location via satellite. Researchers expect them to stay in the area until they reach the age of 20, which is considered to be the age of shark’s adulthood.
