In this episode, host Ryan McVinney sits down with Greg Skomal, PhD, an accomplished marine biologist and great white shark expert, to discuss how he and his team track great white sharks on Cape Cod. Greg is an accomplished fisheries biologist and underwater explorer who has worked with the Massachusetts Division Marine Fisheries (DMF) for over 30 years. He heads up the state agency's great white shark research and works with the Save The Seas Foundation to conduct research on off the coast of Cape Cod in the Atlantic Ocean. The interview delves into the species of sharks in the Northeast and how the researchers tag, track and study white sharks on Cape Cod. We learn how great white sharks hunt their prey (including jumping our of the water to prey on seals), the frequency of feeding events and the environmental factors that drive their overall behavior and migrations. Researchers use an innovative approach that combines accelerometry with tag-mounted video cameras and bio-energetic modeling to enable them to closely examine the predator–prey relationship between white sharks and grey seals. Accelerometer tags, which record fine-scale three-dimensional movements, tell the scientists the shark’s tail-beat frequency, amplitude, body posture and swimming depth at sub-second intervals. Skomal and his team couple this technology with camera tags, which provide direct observations of white shark behavior and data used to estimate energy expenditure and feeding requirements of white sharks so as to quantify seal predation rates while taking into account the environmental conditions that correspond to predatory activity. Shark identification (i.e. basking sharks vs great white sharks) is covered with photos of over 400 tagged sharks and advice on how to identify shark species in the wild.
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