06 Oct Tracking Basking Sharks in the Western Atlantic
Posted at 14:58h in Newsletter
This paper demonstrated the use of Depth-Temperature profiles from Wildlife Computers PAT tags, and high-resolution oceanographic models to estimate the movement of basking sharks in the western Atlantic.
Basking sharks generally dive too deep to measure dawn and dusk light levels thus are a challenge for light-based geolocation models. The authors found that tagged sharks spent most of their time at epipelagic depths during the summer around Cape Cod and the Gulf of Maine. In winter, basking sharks spent extended time at depths of at least 600 m while moving south to the Sargasso Sea, the Caribbean Sea, or the western tropical Atlantic.