Below is Masen's first blog post. You can also find it posted on his blog page as well.
Date: May 31, 2009
Welcome to the Masen Marine Research—MMR—live blog. We are trying something new this year at MMR and wish to share our experiences here with you. Before I go into the details of our new program I’d like to first share with you a little about what we do at MMR.
At MMR we strive to turn fear into knowledge and understanding. We study and research sharks in their natural environment so that we cause as little stress to them and disruption to their normal life cycle as possible. We want the public to understand these amazing creatures and not think of them as the monsters they are made out to be.
In order to help inform you and make you more aware, less afraid, and better educated about sharks, while helping ourselves here at MMR at the same time, we’ve started an intern program. Yes that means that anyone one of you reading this blog could be the next to join us on our endeavors to learn about, educate the public and protect sharks and their environment.
So why put the info here? Why blog it for everyone to see? It’s simple really. It benefits us and you.
For you, it lets you see what we do so you can learn from it and also shows you how you could possibly benefit from becoming an intern with us in the future. You get an up close and up front information and first account views of what everyday life is like with our foundation. That information and knowledge could help you make decisions about your own future and what you want to do with it.
For instance our first intern is currently employed at Sea World. She wants to make a career change that would broaden her horizons and put her in contact with a greater variety of sea life. However she is not sure of certain aspects surrounding her new job, which would have her coming in contact with sharks on a regular basis. Fear of the unknown you could say. So by spending the summer with us and learning all she can about these magnificent creatures, she can then make an educated and well informed decision about her future.
For us, the benefits are twofold. One benefit would be that we would be able to receive a great amount of funding to broaden our research and expand our explorations of sharks in their natural habitat so that we can learn even more about them. Every penny of funding we would receive from our intern program would go directly into research.
Our second benefit is that we get to educate those who want to learn about sharks. The more who become educated about them, the more they are understood and can be better protected.
So in order to give you an accurate account of what life with our research team is like and enable you to see the types of things we do, each week a different member of the MMR crew will post on the blog about an experience they’ve had aboard our boat while working. We feel that by doing this you will better be able to see if working with MMR is right for you.
Since I am providing this week’s entry, I wanted to share with you one of the ways we gain insightful information about a shark’s traits and habits, and their movements. I’m going to discuss shark tagging, what the benefits of it are and what information can be gained by doing it.
There isn’t a great deal of reliable information available to us about the basic biology and ecology of sharks. Because sharks spend most of their lives out of the sight of human eyes it has been necessary to develop a way to study them in their own natural habitats. Through recent advances in modern technology we have developed remote tracking devices—tags—to better suit our ability to gain the information we need. It has become a very important tool in our research endeavors.
The tag, which has a satellite chip inside it, sends information regarding the tagged shark’s home range in the ocean, their migration pattern, and mating habits. The chip then transmits the information to the satellite and allows us to retrieve it from our computer system for study.
Because some species are endangered, such as the Great Whites, it is extremely crucial for us to learn more about their feeding, mating, and travel patterns in order to help protect them from becoming extinct.
The way we tag a shark is to use a harpoon pole approximately ten feet long, with the monitoring device tag attached to the end of it. We go out in boats in areas where the specific species of shark we are studying have been known to frequent and we use decoy methods to lure the sharks in near the boat. Some use chum methods of luring in the sharks, but here at MMR we never do because it could create a potentially dangerous eating frenzy situation. Often times, some of our members, myself included, do enter the water to study the sharks and chumming the waters would make it extremely dangerous if not impossible to do so.
Once we have lured the shark into the reach span of the harpoon pole, we spear the shark near the dorsal fin to implant the device into the shark’s skin for tracking purposes. The tag is already activated when it is put into place and begins to record information immediately.
The tag remains on the shark for a predetermined period of time. If you were only going to be in an area for a short period of time, you would use a tag that would come loose after a few days and then float to the surface to be located through the GPS chip located inside it.
Another type would remain with the shark for a long period of time, usually covering an entire season. In an area such as False Bay, Africa, where research is done quite frequently, the tag signal bounces off a series of relay poles, similar to what cellphone towers do, so we can retrieve the information while there and then detach itself when that time frame is complete.
An additional type of long term tag would remain with the shark for a predetermined amount of time. Once it detaches it then floats to the top of the water much like a buoy would and then immediately begins transmitting the information it has recorded to the satellite and then to our computers. This type allows us to gain information long after we have left the study area.
That concludes my blog post for you this week. Please feel free to post questions and comments and one of our staff members will respond as soon as possible.
