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Science Quickly

Tiger Sharks, Tracked over Decades, Are Shifting Their Haunts with Ocean Warming

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.2639 Ratings

🗓️ 25 January 2022

⏱️ 3 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Using a combination of fishing data and satellite tracking, scientists found that the sharks have shifted their range some 250 miles poleward over the past 40 years.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:11.0

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0:19.6

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0:22.7

J-P. That's Y-A-K-U-L-T dot CO.J-P. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacolt.

0:32.6

This is Scientific American's 60-second science. I'm Christopher in Taggata.

0:43.4

As it happens, tiger sharks have something in common with certain east coasters.

0:49.4

During the winter when it's cold, they kind of snowbird down near the Bahamas and off of Florida.

0:52.7

And then during the summer, they migrate north.

0:57.4

Neil Hammershlag is director of the Shark Research and Conservation Program at the University of Miami. He and his colleagues analyzed 40 years of fishing catch data, and they found

1:02.3

that as ocean waters have warmed, the shark's range has shifted, some 250 miles to the north.

1:08.2

The sharks, it seems, are chasing their preferred water temperatures toward

1:11.7

the pole. They also track dozens of tiger sharks with satellite tags for nine years,

1:16.5

and they found similar results. So taken together, we have several lines of evidence that

1:22.3

tiger shark distributions and their migrations are changing from ocean warming, causing their distributions

1:29.4

and migrations to extend and expand further north. And in these northern areas, they actually

1:35.8

occur earlier in the year for ocean warming. Their findings appear in the journal Global Change Biology.

1:41.9

This shift matters, Hammerslack says, because tiger sharks are

1:45.3

apex predators, and where they go influences the food web beneath them. The sharks are also moving

1:51.0

outside marine protected areas and into places where they could be more vulnerable to commercial

1:56.2

fishing. What this poised to is that these marine protected areas need to consider current but also future changes in species distributions from ocean warming.

2:07.2

And they certainly have to be adaptive and maybe work with not only having marine protected areas but also other types of protections like catch limits and other types of more

...

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