#Deep sea shark trial#
#Deep sea shark series#

Off the Azores, just over 800 miles west of Portugal, sixgills likely come to the shallows to feed, but they prefer to spend their time in deep water, where temperatures are cooler, says Fontes, at the University of Azores. Perhaps one of the most mystifying behaviors of sixgills is their visits to shallow waters, despite the fact they spend most of their time at depths of up to 4,500 feet. Because sixgill sharks have very thick skin, attaching tags to them in this way is minimally invasive. Santa Catalina Island, California Photograph by David Doubilet, Nat Geo Image Collectionīoth tags will be attached to the tips of spear guns mounted on the front of the science submersible. One is a satellite tag with a nine-month life span that will document the shark’s vertical movements, and the other is a camera tag that can not only film the shark over an eight-to-12-hour period but also track its location, speed, depth, and surrounding temperature. Their goal during the week-long expedition is to outfit as many bluntnose sixgill sharks as they can with two types of tags. ( Get an intimate look inside OceanXplorer.

To track sixgills, scientists onboard OceanXplorer-a 286-foot-long former oil drilling support vessel-have at their disposal two submersibles, a remotely operated vehicle, and a research vessel outfitted with equipment that can scan the water column and map the seabed. “This suggests this particular ecosystem is healthy.” The right tools for the job “Previously, when we were fishing these animals for deploying tags, we would essentially have one or two animals per night, but here we've been having 10, 11 encounters per night,” he says.

#Deep sea shark series#

The sixgill research will be featured in the six-part National Geographic series OceanXplorers, executive produced by James Cameron, BBC Studios' Natural History Unit, and OceanX.Īnd so far, the expedition has spotted many more sixgills than expected, Fontes says. “So attaching is going to shed some light on these animals that really rule that part of our oceans.” “We really are just scratching the surface with what we actually know about sixgill sharks,” says Márquez, a marine biologist at Curtin University in Western Australia. (Read about six sharks you’ve likely never heard of.) On June 3 an OceanX team on their research vessel, OceanXplorer, embarked on an expedition off the Azores in the North Atlantic Ocean, working with local scientists to attach satellite and camera tags to the large population of bluntnose sixgills that live among the underwater canyons and seamounts surrounding the islands. The success of the Bahamas expedition energized sixgill research.

#Deep sea shark trial#

After much trial and error, the team attached a tag onto a bluntnose sixgill in the Bahamas. OceanX provided a submersible outfitted with a pair of spear guns modified to inject a satellite tag into the shark’s thick skin.

This is largely due to the fact that studying these sharks is not easy: Scientists can catch them with nets and hooks and pull them up to the surface, but the experience can be traumatic for the animals.īut in 2019 scientists from Florida State University, the Florida Museum of Natural History, the Cape Eleuthera Institute, and OceanX-an ocean exploration and media initiative established by Ray Dalio and his son Mark Dalio-found a better way to study these sharks: by tagging them where they live, hundreds of feet below the surface.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the bluntnose sixgill as near-threatened, though data is extremely scarce. Intriguing as they are, scientists still know very little about these apex predators of the deep sea. See how a deep-sea shark was tagged off the Bahamas