OCEARCH Announces Nova Scotia Expedition Following Great White Sharks Has Concluded
by Kelsey Mohammed, Erin Leite, Kaylin Lopes, Jordanna Cooper and Jibril Osman.
In 2007, during a shoot, according to Discovery, a researcher gave Chris Fischer (Chairman of OCEARCH), a massive eye opener. Fisher said, “While we were helping these scientists, one of them looked at me and said, ‘Man, if we lose our giant sharks, we’re not gonna have any billfish or tuna or anything else because they’re the balance keepers and we don’t know enough about their lives to create their future.” From 2008 to 2012, Chris Fischer’s boat was a traveling TV set, with Fischer and Brett McBride capturing white sharks for the National Geographic and History Channels. Since his shows ended, he has created a unique and contentious model for marine research in which the OCEARCH acts as a roving field station for shark scientists. OCEARCH’s crew catch the sharks and allow scientists the rare chance to collect blood samples and attach GPS-enabled tracking tags, Abe Streep reports for Outside Online.
Currently, great white sharks are seriously decreasing in numbers and are rare due to years of being hunted. It’s because of this that OCEARCH began expeditions and now nearly 10 years from getting that reality check, today, OCEARCH and its team of collaborating scientists in working relation with the Canadian Government have announced that they have completed an expedition, successfully gathering about 300 samples from seven white sharks.
According to CBC, expedition leader Chris Fisher called their time in Nova Scotia “historic,” in that their findings contribute to research about stabilizing the North Atlantic’s endangered white shark population. While the 21-day expedition showed a lot, Fisher did conclude that, “I think that there’s a lifetime of work to do up here, based on what we saw, for many people.”
In terms of what was found, one of the scientists in the expedition, Dr. Robert Hueter, Chief Scientist on the Nova Scotia Expedition and Director of the Center for Shark Research at Mote Marine Laboratory said, “We found mature males and females, but we also found sub-adult males and females.”
“Is this an actual mating site, just a feeding site for this time of year, or a refugee of some kind?”
Hueter continues, “We can say that the area we tagged the seven sharks, south of Lunenberg, is clearly a hotspot for this species and a great place to increase our same size for our white shark studies.”
This was OCEARCH’s 33rd expedition and first ever trip to Canada. OCEARCH hopes to return to Nova Scotia on future expeditions to gather data and learn more about the high level of shark activity in the area.
