Considerations for using sharks as ocean observing platforms
Date
2025-02-07
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ICES Journal of Marine Science
Abstract
The combination of animal-borne telemetry and oceanographic sensor technologies creates an opportunity for marine animals to serve as ocean observing platforms (OOPs), carrying tags that record in situ oceanographic data as they naturally move. In this study, we create a blueprint of shark OOP species selection, quantifying and comparing the potential for species to transmit collected data, the environmental ranges various candidates are expected to encounter, and the oceanographic features they may be expected to resolve. Metrics of data satellite transmission probability, movement behaviors, and environmental sampling ranges are calculated combining historically collected satellite tag data for 11 shark species tagged in the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean basins. Species with the highest satellite data transmission potential include shortfin mako (Atlantic and Pacific) and blue (Pacific) sharks. These species also demonstrated overlap in time and length scales for area-restricted search-like movement behaviors with several mesoscale ocean features, including hurricanes and upwelling events. Additional comparisons of decorrelation time scales between theoretical shark versus glider sampling platforms suggest that shark OOPs have the ability to provide three times more uncorrelated water column temperature and conductivity profiles than gliders at 15% of the operational cost.
Description
This article was originally published in ICES Journal of Marine Science Published by Oxford University Press. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fsaf011.
© The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Keywords
oceanography, animal telemetry, animal movement, shark ecology
Citation
Caroline J Wiernicki, Tobey H Curtis, Barbara A Block, Mahmood S Shivji, Jeremy J Vaudo, Bradley M Wetherbee, Kim N Holland, Jérôme Pinti, Matthew J Oliver, Aaron B Carlisle, Considerations for using sharks as ocean observing platforms, ICES Journal of Marine Science, Volume 82, Issue 2, February 2025, fsaf011, https://doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fsaf011