This week has been an eventful week for the Deep Water Sharks team. We said goodbye to three members of our team while they went off on their kayak trip. However we still have been working hard, out surveying two times this week, one of which was late Friday night. We stayed up as late as we ever have this semester and, as teenagers who are busy and need our sleep, there were some yawns.
Even so we had an awesome time. Aly went to set the survey with Annabelle and Sean, then Sean and Aubrey joined to retrieve the survey at 11pm. Though we have only caught two sharks this week, they are two types of sharks that we are looking for to conduct further research.
We are focusing on the Gulper and the Taiwan Gulper. Friday afternoon we caught a Gulper, but unfortunately we were not able to put a satellite tag on it to track its movements. Friday night, however, we caught the Taiwan Gulper, which is the larger of the two sharks and this one was 152 centimeters long. We took blood, a DNA sample, and placed a satellite tag on the shark.
The tag will track the shark for 30 days then pop off and transmit all the data it has stored on the sharks movements to a satellite. Currently we are working on our final presentations/scientific papers. Individually we wrote our introductions, but now in our academic rotations for kayak, the three of us are working as a team on our methods section here on campus.
Clay, Aly and Aubrey
