At the end of April, a South Carolina fisherman called in a tag recapture on a 66 male sandtiger shark. He caught the shark offshore of Myrtle Beach, SC. The shark was originally tagged in Delaware Bay by our colleagues at Delaware State University in 2012. Assuming the shark followed the coastline, thats just about 500 miles. The approximate time between tagging and recapture was 597 days. Long annual migrations are normal for a mature sandtiger shark. Tag and recapture data helps us to better understand shark abundance, when/where sharks use coastal habitats, what distances shark migrate and where they migrate to, and how sharks are distributed overall. The NOAA Fisheries Elasmobrnach Tagging Program is an ongoing collaborative tag/recapture study of shark species in the Gulf of Mexico and western U.S. Atlantic Ocean. The Shark Population Assessment Group at the NOAA Fisheries Panama City Lab (1.usa.gov/1dUQU1H) and the Shark Team at the NOAA Fisheries Mississippi Lab have played an important role in this study, tagging over fifteen thousand elasmobranchs since 1993. Photo: (Left) Graphic showing the original tagging (yellow pin) and recapture (red pin) locations. (Right) Credit: Delaware State University.
Posted on: Thu, 05 Jun 2014 20:07:04 +0000