“If you don’t understand something, the last thing you should do is exploit it to its full potential,” Braun said.
There’s essentially no cap on the number that can be captured, even though scientists don’t fully understand the blue shark’s role in the ocean ecosystem. The blue sharks Braun tracks are an example. The lack of basic knowledge about sharks poses a problem for protecting marine ecosystems. The interplay maintains biodiversity and balance within the ecosystem. As an apex predator, sharks consume a variety of prey, allowing some species to flourish and others to be kept in check, which in turn influences the distribution of animals further down the food chain. Removing sharks also threatens to disrupt the entire ocean ecosystem. That makes them highly vulnerable to both overfishing-to be made into luxury products such as shark fin soup, for example-and climate change impacts, such as warming ocean temperatures. Sharks, like humans, have long lifespans and few offspring at a time. Knowing how sharks spend their time not only starts to solve mysteries of the deep ocean, it can also help with conservation efforts. Humans don’t know what’s being served, but the sharks know.” Spreading ocean awareness “It’s like this buffet that’s being set in the deep ocean. “My theory is that every fish that we tag, they all visit the mesopelagic region of the ocean,” he said. Braun suspects that the animals spend the energy necessary to dive to the deep scattering layer because they have a guaranteed source of food there. The blue and mako sharks that Braun studies seem to follow this moving food source. Further research showed that the layer was densely populated with a variety of marine organisms that followed plankton migrating to deeper depths for protection when the sun was out and back up to shallower waters after dark. This layer was first detected during World War II when Navy operators, using newly developed sonar technology, saw sound waves scattered by a zone in the ocean 1,000 to 1,600 feet deep, which seemed to move up during the day and back down at night.
Their travel pattern coincides with a phenomenon in the ocean known as the deep scattering layer. Fortunately, the satellite tag technology that Braun is using is letting scientists in on sharks’ hidden lives throughout the breadth and depth of the ocean.įollowing the movements of Johnny, Oscar, and Roland, Braun has found that sharks can dive thousands of feet daily through the ocean’s photic zone, where light gets through, to the colder, deeper, darker mesopelagic zone. “Human observation is limited to this tiny sliver at the very surface of the ocean, and beyond that, we don’t know what’s happening,” Braun said.
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“Without that knowledge, it’s impossible to know where to implement marine protected areas to conserve them or how to devise sustainable fisheries management strategies for sharks.” An underwater buffet “We don’t know where sharks move or why, where they mate, or where they have pups,” said WHOI biologist Simon Thorrold, Braun’s Ph.D. As apex predators at the top of the food chain, sharks play a key role in maintaining biological diversity in the marine ecosystem. There are more than 500 species of sharks, many of which are endangered, largely due to overfishing. “It’s baffling that we know so little about the ocean’s biggest and most important animals,” said Braun, a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI-Joint Program in Oceanography. The sharks themselves also act as scouts: they provide insights into an ocean frontier where they routinely travel, but Braun can’t. When the tags relay their data via satellite back to Braun’s laptop, he gets some of the world’s first views into where sharks go and what they are doing. The tags record the sharks’ movements as well as conditions of the seawater they are swimming through. They only spent a few moments together, but Braun now knows intimate details of the sharks’ daily lives, and he’s followed them as they’ve traveled up to 10,000 miles across the North Atlantic since October. They met in the fall of 2015, with Braun kneeling on the deck of a boat off the coast of Nantucket, holding down each of the 300-pound animals as he carefully attached a high-tech tag onto their dorsal fins. But instead of checking in on Twitter or Facebook, he’s tracking updates from blue and mako sharks moving in the middle of the ocean.īraun and the sharks he studies-Johnny, Oscar, and Roland, among others-have a curious relationship. Like many of his fellow millennials, Camrin Braun often starts his day by going online to see what his friends are up to.
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