• Sharks and Tuna
• Monitoring the Mako
• In the Beginning
• Shark Tracks

Technology, Innovation Help Researchers Understand These Elusive Creatures

Chugey Sepulveda waited. With patience and perserverance, he waited for the sharks.

Sepulveda, a fourth-year graduate student at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has spent several hundred hours battling cold, fatigue, and uncertainty sitting in a tiny boat, endlessly bobbing up and down on the open ocean waters off San Diego, hoping for the sharks to appear. Enduring these less-than-ideal conditions is testimony to his dedication to a groundbreaking scientific project. Sepulveda's pioneering research into the activities and swimming behavior of southern California mako sharks will lay the groundwork for new conservation efforts that will help protect this overfished and vulnerable species.

Finally, the sharks arrived, and the scene changed in a heartbeat. Fueled by adrenaline, Sepulveda's first piece of business was to "feed" the sharks a high-tech tracking device. Once the device was in the shark's stomach, a chase began. Sepulveda was the predator, tracking the shark's every movement across the ocean.

The stakes in the chase were high. If Sepulveda followed the shark too closely, he ran the risk of disturbing its natural swimming behavior, a fundamental requisite of the project. If he didn't follow closely enough, he ran the risk of distancing himself from the animal and losing the vital tracking signal emitted from the high-tech device. If the shark regurgitated it, the chase, tracking device, and many hours leading up to this moment could all go down the proverbial drain. And if this wasn't enough pressure, Sepulveda was a novice tracker using newly adopted technology.

"Everything in the ocean is overfished, but the problem with sharks is that they don't have the ability to recover as effectively as a lot of other animals," said Scripps marine biologist Jeffrey Graham, Sepulveda's advisor and a member of the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine at Scripps. "They have low rates of reproduction and are subject to high fishing mortality. I saw the timing of this project as very right to help establish a greater public awareness of shark conservation problems. We needed to learn more about these animals in their natural habitat."