It seems that the waters of south Long Island, New York are heavily populated with great white sharks. Only a couple of things have been known about them until now: they get pretty big, and they cover a lot of water. Nobody knows when or how they mate, though it is known that they give birth to live young.
Digging through historical data, researchers noticed something interesting: over the past two centuries, a lot of four-foot-long great whites were caught around Long Island, but not elsewhere in the North Atlantic. This led them to suspect that the area might harbor what amounts to a nursery for the animals.
Also, OCEARCH tagged a 16-foot long female named Mary Lee back in 2012, and its return to New York this May suggested to them that she was coming to give birth.
Through a just-completed two-week research expedition off the South Shore of Long Island, researchers think they have discovered a great white nursery in New York's backyard, and possibly, what one called "the holy grail of the research": a birthing site.
During their trip, they'd hoped to catch a couple of baby sharks, but they ended up with a total of nine during that time.
Chris Fischer, founder of OCEARCH, told CBS that finding the nursery is "probably the most significant discovery we’ve ever made on the ocean."
Fischer told the network that Long Island's waters are "definitely the nursery, probably the birthing site" for great whites in the North Atlantic.
They bring them up with an hydraulic platform, and in the span of fifteen minutes, they weigh and measure the pups, take a muscle biopsy, and drill a small hole through the dorsal fin in order to attach a GPS tracking tag. Then it's back into the water for them, and they remain in the general area until they mature - at about 20 years of age. When they surface, the tracking tags ping a satellite, and the pings are returned to the ground station. The data are displayed in real time on the OCEARCH website.
Apparently, they name every shark they tag, and they've tagged a lot of them of various species. Personally, I'd go with numbers: GW9, for example, would be great white #9, while T2 would be tiger shark #2. I assume they do the naming thing instead in an unlikely effort to humanize them, so that people can more easily identify with them. Yeah, that'll work.
