(Lofotposten): In recent summers, the Institute of Marine Research has carried out several projects in which they have marked sculpins and brugders, both of which belong to the shark family.
In 2022, four ospreys were marked in Lofoten, and one of them headed straight south.
Straight to the South
The tags that are put on also give away the position if they detach from the shark, and that happened off the Canary Islands.
As coincidence would have it, a holidaying marine researcher and tagging expert Keno Ferter, who leads the work tagging the drifts and drifts, happened to be in the same area where the satellite tag came loose.
– I was lying on the beach in the sun when I heard that the tag from the shark had come off and was sending signals. Four months before I spotted the shark in Lofoten, and now suddenly we were both in the South. It was completely wild, Ferter tells the Norwegian Marine Research Institute’s website.
The mark was a little too far away for the vacationing researcher to pick it up, but he admits that it was tempting to jump straight on board the nearest boat.
– Even if we get better data if the mark settles, it sends signals when it is on the surface. We still get a lot of information, so we’ve had a lot to work with, Ferter continues.
10 miles a day
The data shows that the shark has been in a hurry to get south. With a speed of up to 100 kilometers per day, the hope ran more or less straight from Lofoten towards the Canary Islands.
– It is simply fascinating to see how quickly the shark moves, and very exciting to be able to show the results of the tagging we have carried out, shark researcher Claudia Junge, who leads the research project Sharks on the Move, tells HI.
Four marked in Lofoten
In a new scientific article, the migration pattern of three sharks of the species sculpin, all of which were tagged during 2022, is followed.
– We noticed it outside Vesterålen in August. The other two were marked by Irish colleagues off the coast of Ireland in April of the same year. What the three tagged sharks have in common is that they migrate far and move fast. But it was very different where they left, says Junge and elaborates:
– One of the sharks that was tagged in Ireland mostly stayed in Irish and British waters. The other swam all the way to the Barents Sea, before taking more or less the same route to the Canary Islands as the shark we spotted in Norway. Later it swam back north, she says to HI’s website.
In August 2023, the tagging team from HI succeeded in tagging a further four hope runs outside Lofoten. These are marked both with satellite marks and with tracking marks. Junge says that they are receiving data from the 2023 sharks continuously, and it will be exciting to find out if the Norwegian sharks behave as differently as the sharks in this study.
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