OCEARCH’s free Global Shark Tracker App available in the Apple Store. The app refreshes the locations of tagged sharks throughout the world for conservationists.
The app includes the sharks’ species, given name by the tagger, stage of life, gender, length, weight, and when and where the shark was tagged. The app also includes shark travel patterns.
For example, a female Mako Shark named Carl is six feet and nine inches long and weighing one hundred fifty pounds. She was tagged by the Free Nicky’s crew in Montauk, New York in 2014, and has traveled all of the way up the East Coast, to the middle of Nova Scotia, and then swam hundreds of miles east into the Atlantic.
The app also includes videos and pictures of the sharks that were tagged by the OCEARCH team. These videos help tie everything together, by allowing a virtual firsthand experience while the OCEARCH team executes their tagging routine. Longer versions of these videos are available on YouTube. These videos include footage of the OCEARCH team tagging the shark, drawing the shark’s blood, weighing and measuring, the shark, and then releasing the giant fish back into the depths of the ocean.
The researchers only have a short amount of time to get as much information as they possibly can. Each OCEARCH team member has a specific job once the shark is on the lift. These duties the OCEARCH team does include putting the shark on its side, laying a blanket over its eyes, maintaining the shark’s hydration, taking the temperature and cultures, and recording them.
The GPS tags are to learn about where sharks go to mate have their offspring, where they feed, etc. Learning this information is crucial to preservation of these species.
OCEARCH hopes to accomplish how to preserve the lives of this mysterious species and learn how they survived evolution for thousands of years.