Basking sharks seek winter sun in Caribbean
Researchers have finally solved one of the enduring mysteries of marine biology by tracing where hundreds of basking sharks spend their winter months.
Hundreds of the temperate water sharks – at around 10 metres long and five tons the world’s second largest fish – disappear each year from both Atlantic and Pacific waters and scientists had previously believed that they spent the winter hibernating on the seabed.
But the extraordinary trans-ocean migrations of several of the sharks to tropical waters have now been tracked following a tagging study by Mauvis Gore of Marine Conservation International.
One female shark tagged off the Isle of Man headed down to a depth of 1,264 metres before crossing the Atlantic and heading for Newfoundland, providing the first evidence of a link between shark populations on either side of the ocean.
“It seems possible that our populations are linked across from the Caribbean but we haven’t had a tag on long enough to see if that’s the case,” Gore told the Times.
A separate tagging study of western basking sharks also turned up some surprising results with several of the creatures heading south across the Equator and one even turning up in the mouth of the Amazon before continuing along the Brazilian coast.
Little is known about basking sharks, which have mouths as wide as a piano, subsist entirely on plankton and tend to live at depths which mean they rarely stray into encounters with humans.
Scientists had believed there were four separate distinct species of the shark, but the new studies suggest the existence of a single population of around 10,000 of the creatures making a cyclical migration.
That has important consequences for shark conservation. While the fish are protected in European waters, they are hunted in Asia for use in traditional medicine, cosmetics and shark fin soup.
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