Satellite tag pops off!

 

The Bluntnose sixgill about to have a satellite tag attached to it (photo- Lance Jordan)

 

 

The deep water shark team is excited to announce that the first of 3 satellite tags has popped off a Bluntnose sixgill shark! The shark was tagged with an X-tag supplied by Lucy Howie-Jordan of Microwave Telemetry Inc. on September 13th 2010 and set to record the shark’s movements for 30 days. The tag popped off, as programmed, on October 14th 2010. Once reaching the surface the tag began to slowly transmit the stored location, depth and temperature data and we are anticipating full recovery of the data. It’s exciting to see that the shark was tagged just off Cape Eleuthera and popped off at the Southern tip of Eleuthera just offshore from Lighthouse beach! On the image below you can see the track that the floating satellite tag took via surface currents. We hope it continues to drift and transmit it’s data but if it then washes ashore we will go on a tag-hunt and hopefully get the tag back! This is just the start of the journey towards learning more about the deep water shark species in the Exuma Sound and we are counting down the days to hearing back from the Gulper and Taiwan gulper sharks we’ve tagged also.

 

Location of satellite tag (provided by Microwave Telemetry Inc.)