Looks like Jaws is on our team now.
Shark tracking, a practice among many new tech breakthroughs to keep an eye on the apex predators, may lead to “enormous untapped potential” on analyzing hurricanes and other major storm systems, both new research and other experts say. This could potentially help save a plethora of human lives
To do so, sharks among other marine life are being fitted with groundbreaking and micro-sized, “fancy new satellite tags,” Tobey Curtis, study author and fishery management specialist for NOAA Fisheries in Gloucester, MA, told Florida Today, boasting its cost efficiency.
“They have the capability to capture these oceanographic data that can inform hurricane models, which is really cool….Then the data can get transmitted directly into the sort of oceanographic data pipeline and be available in the same places as the all those traditional datasets.”
The concept — which began with tagging seals in the 1980s — isn’t yet perfect. Curtis says “we can’t make them swim in a grid pattern or something yet to accurately sample things,” but still has a major benefit in that they swim across currents, thus allowing more data to be collected.
Using sharks as de facto weather instruments was also found successful in 2017 during Hurricane Irma — a major storm that pulverized Florida and other southern states. The predators were equipped with acoustic telemetry devices as the storm moved through the Miami region.
During landfall, many sharks — especially of the nurse, bull and great hammerhead variety as opposed to larger ones like tiger sharks — abandoned local Biscayne Bay to head for deeper waters, according to Florida Today, which noted previous research saw a similar pattern in years past.
Sharks also appear to show the intuition in telling apart a simple bad weather system from a hurricane as well, notes Michael Heithaus, who researches sharks at Florida International University.
“You can get big pressure drops with thunderstorms, and we don’t see any evidence of them getting out of the system when the big thunderstorms come through,” Heithaus told the outlet.
Researchers say that tagging more and more sharks is only bound to “greatly improve” storm forecasting based on temperature changes.
They also can detected changes in water’s conductivity — 2007 research off the Long Island Sound and Jacksonville found sharks can strongly sense electric fields — as an early warning sign for bad weather.
All such data would be uploaded in real time to the Integrated Oceanographic Observation System, a major database to study ocean currents and patterns.
“There’s a lot of data coming off the backs of animals that are going to be a part of that,” Heithaus said.