-: Hi, everyone.
Thank you so much for joining us today for our webinar
"Shivers in the Graveyard of the Atlantic - Sharks!"
I'm Shannon Ricles, the Education and Outreach Coordinator
for Monitor and Mallows Bay National Marine Sanctuaries.
And I'm gonna be your host today.
And joining me as host is also Mark Losavio,
the Media and Outreach Coordinator
for Monitor and Mallows Bay National Marine Sanctuaries.
This webinar is brought to you
by NOAA's Monitor National Marine Sanctuary
in collaboration with the North Carolina
Office of State Archeology.
Partnering since 1975, NOAA and the State of North Carolina
worked to research, honor and protect the hallmark
of North Carolina's underwater cultural heritage shipwrecks.
These shipwrecks hold information about the ever-changing
technologies and culture and physical landscapes.
They serve as uniquely accessible underwater museums
and a memorial to generations of mariners who lived,
died and worked and fought off our shores.
This is one of the many webinars that we have offered
in the past and will be offering in the coming months
for the "Submerged North Carolina" webinar series,
which is in collaboration with
the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology.
Now, Monitor is just one of 15 national marine sanctuaries
and two marine national monuments
in the National Marine Sanctuary system.
The system encompasses more than 620,000 square miles
of marine and Great Lakes waters from Washington state...
Whoops, sorry about that.
From Washington state to Florida Keys,
and from Lake Huron to American Samoa.
Now, during the presentation,
all attendees will be in listen-only mode.
You are welcome to type in questions for the presenters
into the question box at the bottom of your control panel
on the right hand side of your screen.
This is the same screen you can let us know
about any technical difficulties you might be having.
We'll monitor that box and we'll respond
to any technical difficulties that we can
just as quickly as possible.
So, we welcome today...
I'm sorry, my computer's doing its own thing.
So, today, we welcome Dr. Carol Price,
the Conservation Research Coordinator
for North Carolina Aquariums,
where she develops, conducts and oversees research
and field work that aim to protect species and habitats
of high conservation needs.
Carol, I'm gonna turn it over to you.
It is all yours.
Let me change presenters.
There you go.
And Carol, I believe you're...
Okay, now you're unmuted.
-: Yeah, I just got it unmuted.
So, thank you so much, Shannon and Mark.
I wanna start by saying thank you so much
for this opportunity to share my work with you guys
and for the great technical support you've provided
in getting this talk set up and everything.
And I wanna also thank all the people who've tuned in today.
So thanks for coming to spend some time with me today
while I tell you the story of this really cool shark work
that I get to do.
So I work for the North Carolina Aquariums.
We have three locations in North Carolina,
on the Northern, Central and Southern coasts,
and I hope that sometime you get to go visit those,
and visit the sand tiger sharks that we have there.
But let me tell you a little bit about them.
So this is the species that I study, the sand tiger shark.
It is a native species to North Carolina,
and this is what it looks like.
It's a kind of a large shark.
They get up to about eight feet, six to eight, nine feet,
and they have this beautiful gray coloration
with these speckle patterns on the side.
And just keep in mind those speckle patterns
because those become very important later on.
These are pretty common off our coast,
and some interesting things about them
is that they give live birth.
So the females will have one to two pups per year
or every other year, every two years.
And they're often found in association with shipwrecks
where they are very, very tolerant of interactions
with human divers, as you can see here.
And this is important for our research.
Now I wanna talk about why I use the word shivers
in the title of my presentation today.
So it turns out that if you get a bunch of sharks together,
they are actually called a shiver.
And so when you're talking about sharks
in the graveyard of the Atlantic,
that's a pretty great title that you can add
to your presentation.
So in addition to seeing these sharks offshore
if you go diving,
one of the places that probably most people get to interact
with this shark and see these sharks up close
is in aquariums, not just in North Carolina,
but all over the United States and even worldwide.
And wherever people see them,
they're always a fan favorite because they're large sharks,
they have this big toothy grin,
and they're just very charismatic.
But they're great for aquariums and people like to see them;
they're tolerant of other fish,
as well as other sharks in their habitats.
And so, they're great sharks to have.
And importantly, we can then use people's excitement
and enthusiasm and passion for these sharks to kind of,
as a launchpad, to talk about really important needs,
risks to these sharks in the wild,
and the importance of conserving shark and ray species
in the U.S. as well as globally.
So it's just a great way to open up those conversations.
And the North Carolina Aquariums are part of a group
of aquariums and zoos in the United States
called the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.
And this is an accreditation organization.
And the idea is that being part of this group
means that we are meeting the highest standards of care
for animals in our collection, animals in our care,
but that we are also promoting the conservation
of these animals in the wild,
and we're doing that collectively.
So by coming together through AZA,
we can participate in programs
like Saving Animals From Extinction, SAFE.
There is a SAFE for sharks and rays, for example.
And the idea is that we can really focus our energies
on the species that need the most help.
And by pulling together with other collaborators
in the research fields, as well as within AZA,
we can really just expand our input, expand our reach,
and have very collective messages for our public,
and amplify the good work that we can do.
And this is really important,
not all species occur globally;
some of them are local species.
And SAFE and AZA are a way that we can support both
species that are locally important,
as well as the ones that are globally imperiled.
And the sand tiger shark is an example
of a species like that.
You can see here they have almost a worldwide distribution,
the places there in that sort of orangy color
is where historically sand tiger sharks are known to occur.
But in some places, there you can see,
they are critically endangered and their populations
have been really, really, really depleted over the years.
Fortunately, off of our coast,
off of North America on the Atlantic coast there,
we do still have a strong population.
However, it has declined significantly
over the past few decades.
So we think it might be declined by as much as 75%.
And so that makes our research program Spot A Shark USA
really, really important and relevant for this species
off of U.S. waters.
And so, why specifically North Carolina?
Well, it has to do with our history.
So this is a really interesting connection
between archaeology and biology.
There are hundreds, if not thousands of shipwrecks
off of the coast of North Carolina.
This map doesn't show all of 'em,
but it kind of does show some of the major ones,
and you can see there's shipwrecks all over the place.
And as it turns out,
sand tiger sharks really like these shipwrecks.
And so we can take advantage of that
because people also love to come and dive.
They come to North Carolina from all over the world
to go dive, to see these shipwrecks,
learn about the history, but also to visit the sharks.
And that was how Spot A Shark USA got started.
Hap Fatzinger, he's one of the Aquarium Directors here,
saw a really great opportunity to connect
our very dedicated community of divers
with this need to understand more about this shark
and collect data that can be useful
for conservation of the species.
So to that end, Spot A Shark USA started a few years ago.
And the basically how this program works
is we ask citizen community divers when they go out,
when they come to North Carolina,
when they go out and visit these shipwrecks
to take photographs of the sand tiger sharks that they see.
And we give them a little bit of information
about how to do that safely and how to get photographs
that are gonna be the most useful for our research.
Of course we want everybody to be safe
and we want them to be respectful of the sharks.
So the idea is to approach the sharks
in a very slow and respectful manner,
not to touch them, not to get too close,
to respect their space and of course, to stay safe,
but to be able to get these pictures
of the sides of the shark
where we can see those spot patterns.
And then those images can be uploaded,
and I'll show you a little bit more about that
in just a minute.
And so this is what it looks like.
You can see these sharks are very tolerant of humans
being close enough to them that we can get these
amazing photographs of them while they're out here diving.
And we have divers; some of them are just
recreational divers that come out and some of them
are very experienced divers.
And in fact, we even have professional photographers
that donate a lot of pictures to us like Tanya Houppermans.
And all of these photographs are really, really useful
for our data.
And we could not do this without the help
of our citizen divers.
And so, after they take their photographs,
it's pretty easy to participate.
You visit our website, spotasharkusa.com,
and we have a form that you fill out.
You drag your images over to the box,
just drop 'em right in there.
And then you give us a little bit of information
about yourself, give us your email address
so we can send you updates about your sharks,
and then let us know what day you were diving
when you saw that shark,
and tell us where you photographed that shark.
There's also opportunities to input
a whole lot of additional information
if you happen to collect it.
But really we just need the date and location.
That's sort of the basics that we need.
And then that data can be used in our photo library.
The other way that we can collect information about sharks
in their images is by directly engaging with divers
at the dive shops.
This is a really fun student project.
Every year, every semester, every summer,
I have undergraduate students who help me on Spot A Shark.
And in the summers, one of the most fun projects
is to actually meet the boats from the dive shops
as they're coming back in.
The crew lets the divers on the boat know
that they're gonna be researchers there to get pictures,
to collect images from them.
And then students, like the ones posted here,
Mikalyla Beeson, she's gonna come up again in a few minutes
for a different project.
And then yes, I actually have two students named Ben.
So the Bens may show up at the dive shop as well,
and just be there to pull SD cards
straight out of people's cameras.
It just kind of streamlines the process,
makes it a little bit simpler so we can get those pictures
right there on the dock side.
It makes it just a little bit easier
and it gives divers a chance to interact
with the research team and learn a little bit more
about our project.
So, once we've collected these images,
either from the web or in-person,
let me share with you a minute like just how simple
Spot A Shark is.
This is a very basic idea here.
We're all familiar with human fingerprints
that are really unique.
The patterns are so unique,
they're individual to every human
and relatively easy to study.
And those spots, remember those spots,
I said to remember about those,
those spots patterns on the sides of sharks
are just as unique to sharks as our fingerprints are to us.
And so if we can map those spot patterns,
that's basically like getting a unique ID for that shark
and we never have to touch it.
This is a completely noninvasive way to study these sharks.
We don't have to capture them or mark them
or tag them in any way; they come with their own marks.
And we just sort of take advantage of that.
So, what does that look like then
when it's on a real photograph?
So we use a software from Wildbook that we can upload
the photos and then it puts it into this software package
and we can actually map the shark's spots.
So the first thing we do is we tell the algorithm
where the dorsal fins are and the pelvic fin
as sort of reference points.
You can see those in those white circles.
And then the yellow dots are where we put
dots over the spots.
And we've gotta map between eight and 30 spots
is sort of the ideal sweet zone.
And when we map those, we get that unique spot pattern.
We send that spot map, as we call it,
to a server somewhere in the Rocky Mountains,
I'm not exactly sure where, but somewhere in the Rockies,
and it compares this spot map to every other spot map
pattern in our database.
As you can imagine, that takes a few minutes,
but then what we get back is a list of sharks
that are possible matches.
So this tells us if this shark has been seen before
or if it's a new shark.
And this is kind of what that looks like.
So you can see those colored dots on the side of the shark
are where the program thinks we might
have a matching pattern, but it still takes the human eye.
My students or I, my research assistants still have to use
the human eye to make the final determination
on whether or not this is a match or a new shark.
So in this one, you can see the pattern is kind of similar,
but if you note that purple spot towards the tail
of the shark on the left,
you can see it's like at the base of the tail there.
But if you compare where the same spot,
where the computer thinks the same spot is,
you can see it's under that second dorsal fin.
So we would say this is not a match.
So you can see why the computer only helps us.
It gets us in the doorway,
but we still have to spend a lot of time
very carefully looking at these
and sort of making the final assessment.
But sometimes we get lucky.
And this is the exciting part is when we get a match.
So, for example, here,
we had a shark that was seen on one of our shipwrecks,
the Aeolus in September of 2016.
It has this very unique spot pattern there,
and also sort of towards the back of its body
you can see another nice cluster
of very definitive spot patterns there.
And you can see that this is a matching image.
So we would call this a match.
And that second picture was taken on the Aeolus,
same ship wreck, but 10 months apart.
So, understanding, well, did that shark
stay there the whole time?
We don't know.
Did it migrate somewhere else?
We don't know.
We don't know what it did between September and July,
but we do know that that shark
was in this same location twice, 10 months apart.
So this data is the kind of data
that we're trying to collect.
We've been working on this pretty hard for about three,
three and a half, four years.
And so I've just done a huge download of the data
to try to see what all we can learn
from all of these pictures that people have sent us.
And I haven't finished analyzing everything yet,
but I did wanna share with you
just a few of the things that we...
Sort of summary pieces of information that we do have.
So to date, we have over 2,000 individual
spot mapped sharks, which is huge.
That's an enormous dataset to have.
They go back many years.
We have photos that divers had in their collection.
So our records go back more than four or five years.
They go back about 10 to 12 years.
We have information on sharks
from over 30 shipwrecks in North Carolina,
as well as some natural hard bottom areas.
So these are places where there's natural hard reef-like
material on the bottom of the ocean,
where sharks also are sometimes found.
And we have over 100 sharks that we have seen
on more than one occasion.
So most of these sharks are seen twice,
have been seen maybe twice, often on the same wreck,
and often within a few days of the first encounter.
However, we do have some that we have seen four,
five, six, 12 times, sometimes at the same site,
sometimes at different sites.
And very interestingly, it can range from one day
between sightings or at liberty,
up to over 2,000 days between sightings.
That is almost six years between the first, second,
and third, fourth sighting.
And it's these repeated encounters over time
that will really help us understand a lot more
about how these sharks are using these spaces.
One of the fascinating things that we've been able to
find out is that about 60% of the sharks
that we're seeing are female.
Now we can't identify male and female sharks
in every single picture.
Sometimes we don't have the camera angle
and we have to label those as "sex unknown,"
but of the sharks that we can tell,
a lot of them are females.
About 25% or so are unknown.
And about 15 or 16% are males.
So we're seeing, we know that these habitats
are especially important for female sharks.
And so to give you a little idea of how important
this might be, I'm actually gonna turn over control
briefly to Mark, who's gonna show you a video
that was taken off of our coast last fall,
or end of summer, beginning of fall.
He's gonna show you the video twice because it's fast,
it goes by fast.
You're gonna see a shark coming in,
but take a look at that shark
and see if you see anything really cool happen.
All right, Mark.
(water bubbling) (oxygen hissing)
All right.
Thank you, Mark.
So what you saw there was a video
that one of our Diving Safety Officers was able to shoot,
and that is actually a female sand tiger shark
with what we think is a baby shark inside of her.
And what you could see was the side of her body wobbling
as she's making that turn,
seeing that pup moving inside of her.
So it's evidence like this that is helping us
to gain a further understanding of these sharks,
the importance of this habitat,
but also to confirm hypotheses
that have been around a long time
from divers in the community,
from scientists and researchers about the importance
of this habitat for this species.
We know that they mate here.
We have evidence like what you saw in the video
that they are pregnant or gestating while they're here.
And there's even some suggestion that they might
even be giving birth here.
Although we don't have any confirmation
of where those pupping grounds might be.
But of course, we're definitely trying to look for those.
In addition to the spot mapping,
we get a lot of other information
like stuff from the videos, information from the videos.
And I wanna spend just a little bit of time on a project
that one of my superstar students pictured here,
Mikalyla Beeson, who's on the right,
has been working on for her honors thesis project.
She just graduated from NC State University
in the spring of 2022.
And she worked very closely
with one of our Diving Safety Officers, Shawn Harper,
who collected videos in November of 2020.
He filmed five of his dives that he did at four wreck sites.
And what Mikalyla did was use these videos to map
the shark cloud around the shipwrecks that he was at.
So to look very closely at these videos
to see how the sharks distributed themselves
around the shipwreck,
just to kind of learn even more about that.
She watched a lot of hours of video.
So these two wrecks,
I'm gonna show you two of her maps that she built
at the Keshena and at the Dixie Arrow.
These are off the Outer Banks and they are both vessels
that they've been underwater and on the sea floor
for about the same amount of time, since the 1940s.
The Keshena is about 140 feet long,
and she lies in 75 to 90 feet of water.
The other shipwreck we'll show you about today,
show you today is the Dixie Arrow.
These shipwrecks are about five miles apart, roughly,
and the Dixie Arrow also sunk off our coast in 1942.
This is again where history and biology come together.
And the Dixie Arrow is a much larger vessel.
So she was 468 feet,
but she sits in about the same depth of water,
70 to 90 feet.
So, very similar habitats, very different in their size,
but a lot of similarities as well.
So if we look at the Keshena,
there's a picture of how she looked
when she was still in service.
Here's a photograph of her on the sea floor.
You're looking here at the bow, which is here.
And so what you're gonna see is,
I'm just gonna kind of click through,
and you'll see here is the anchor point where
Shawn tied up to the wreck and descended to...
He was actually on a dive to go work on some equipment
that we have on this ship
as part of some acoustic telemetry work we were doing.
So he was servicing the telemetry equipment out here.
So he swam across over to the port side of this vessel.
And you can see where the sharks are distributed.
If you look, they're color coded.
So orange sharks, we can't tell if it's a male or a female.
The hot pink ones are a female.
The blue ones are male.
And then we have a couple of sharks that showed up
that actually have external tags on them.
And so we've noted in green where we have those.
You can see where that equipment was attached to the ship
and where we encountered a lionfish.
And once he was finished with his work,
he swam over to the starboard side of the vessel
and swam sort of back up towards the bow.
You can see he spotted a sea turtle there,
hanging out right next to the ship,
and then he continued on.
So you can see what Mikalyla did was to note the location
of these sharks relative to the shipwreck,
as well as whether it was males or females.
And then, so throughout this dive,
we're able to see the distribution of these sharks
around the shipwreck.
She did the same thing with the Dixie Arrow.
Sorry, on the Keshena, she saw 71 sharks.
On the Dixie Arrow, which is a much larger vessel,
she saw almost 300 sharks.
So just imagine how many times she had to watch this video
to be able to map the location of each of those sharks.
This is what the Keshena looked like in port.
Or I'm sorry, the Dixie Arrow looked like
when she was in port.
And here is what she looks like at the sea floor.
And you can see this is these sort of round structures
that you can see in the high resolution map
there at the stern.
So these are maps that we got from the NOAAs,
the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration.
They have these wonderful high resolution maps
of these shipwrecks.
And so we're able to use those to sort of geo-reference
where the sharks were in the video
because the maps are so exact.
So again, tying off on the bow,
and then heading out towards the stern.
You can see there were a lot of sharks on here.
Again, about 300 sharks showed up in this video
and lots and lots of sea turtles.
Shawn completed the work that he needed to this time
on the stern of the vessel.
And then he turned around and he came through
and did another sweep up the same side of this vessel,
and was able to document all of these additional sharks.
And so, Mikalyla was very careful to make sure
that these were new sharks that she was seeing
as the camera angle changed slightly
on that perspective there.
So, as far as I know, this is probably the first time
that anybody's ever put together a map
of the cloud of sharks around boats
or shipwrecks underwater.
So I'm incredibly excited about this work that she's done.
And so, you know, I wanted to show you just real quickly,
a little bit of data that we've been able
to collect from here.
Some differences we saw between those videos.
So you can see those shark clouds,
but if we look at sort of some of the numbers associated
with those behaviors, we can see that on the Keshena,
a lot of the sharks we couldn't tell whether
they were male or female,
but of the sharks that we could tell,
most of them were male.
In comparison, on the Dixie Arrow,
most of the sharks that we could determine a sex were female
with a much smaller proportion of male sharks.
So that's a really interesting finding.
In addition, she mapped that location of where
the sharks were relative to the wreck and took note of that.
So she was able to estimate whether the sharks
were next to the wreck, which was within two body lengths,
about five meters of the wreck, or if they were further off.
Now, most of the sharks,
if they were near the wreck like that,
or away from the wreck were above the sand,
but not above the profile of the shipwreck.
And so you see on the Keshena, most of those sharks
were actually away from the wreck.
So more than two body lengths away
from the structure of the wreck.
On the Dixie Arrow, by comparison,
and that's where we saw that high proportion
of female sharks, they were much more tightly associated
with the wreck; right up next to it,
within a couple of body lengths.
Although there were still a few that were on the sand
a little bit further out,
but one thing we noticed is that in both sites,
there were fewer sharks, although there were some,
that were hovering sort of more above the wreck.
So, we've known that sharks hang out all over the place
on these wrecks, but this is sort of a really,
a first look at trying to quantify
that a little bit more precisely.
So this is the kind of information
that we've been collecting and that I'm currently analyzing,
hopefully to publish, and hopefully maybe even
to share those results in the future with the public.
Which of our shipwrecks of all those shipwrecks
that we have offshore,
which are attracting the most sand tiger sharks?
Are males and females using them differently?
And are there seasonal patterns to these habitat preferences
or patterns in their movement ecology?
There's a lot of basics about this species
that we just don't really know for sure.
We've had a lot of stories from divers
that have been watching these sharks for a really long time,
but actually being able to put numbers to this
and actually generating hypotheses
and being able to use data to really get down to the facts
is really fun for this species.
Like I mentioned, with those recaptured sharks,
we'll be able to tell if we're seeing the same sharks
every year or different sharks,
do the same sharks do the same thing every year,
or they change their behavior year to year?
We know that females might only show up every two years
because we know they mate, they have their pups,
only one to two pups every two years.
So we know some of the females migrate
out of North Carolina,
but we're curious when they come back,
do they go to the same wrecks when they come back?
Thinking about how important all of these locations are
for males, females, migratory behavior, to support mating,
reproduction, gestation, and possibly pupping,
really trying to narrow down some of those answers
are what we're hoping to achieve
with this data moving forward.
So, we wanna continue our direct engagement with our divers
and then also integrating the Spot A Shark work
with acoustic tagging data that some of which
the North Carolina Aquariums is collecting,
but also other scientists are also tagging sharks.
And so trying to fit those two different kinds of data
together to start telling us one story
is sort of in the works as well.
And then continuing to analyze video data.
When we have video data,
we can collect so much more information.
And one of the projects,
one of the video data projects that I'm super,
super excited about just finished, just wrapped up.
The Global Foundation for Ocean Exploration,
partnered with National Marine Sanctuaries,
the Monitor Sanctuary,
as well as the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science,
and the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology
to conduct several, a huge mission.
So many, many trips, many days out at sea,
they used an ROV named Yogi to go down and explore.
So hours of footage from multiple shipwrecks
off of our coast, some of which had sand tigers on them.
Some of them were very deep,
just amazing video footage though.
So not only at the Monitor,
but also at other shipwrecks near, in the same area.
And using really advanced satellite technology,
they were able to live stream these ROV trips
for the public over the web.
And so, I was really, really grateful to be asked to be
one of the hosts that joined the live streams
to sort of comment on what we were seeing
and to share information about sand tiger sharks
when they were showing up in the video.
And so one of the most exciting things I will be working on
in the next, probably years is having this be additional
student opportunities for student project and research,
to really understand what we're seeing about the sharks
and their behavior in this video.
And so we did get a little tiny snippet of data
of video ROV footage.
And I'm gonna turn this back over to Mark,
and he is gonna show you a clip of what kind of things
we were seeing down there.
And I hope you'll see why it's so exciting
to have this in my future.
Man: We are on the World War II tanker, the E.M. Clark,
a victim of World War II's Battle of the Atlantic.
On March 18th, in 1942, it was hit by two torpedoes
and went down very quickly.
Woman: When you have a shipwreck that sinks,
it is able to form this structured habitat.
And in the case of the E.M. Clark, around 500 feet long,
this is a massive influx of a hard structure
that rises about 60 feet up into the water column.
Man: So we're looking at it historically,
archeologically, but of course,
we're getting literally smacked in the face with marine life
and we're looking at it ecologically
because this transport of war has truly
turned into an island of life.
Man: Those fish are staying still,
the ROV continues to move along this wreck
that is 500 feet long,
and every square foot of it is covered with the lionfish.
I've never seen anything like this.
Woman: Most scientists now believed that lionfish
began appearing in this area when people dumped them
from their home aquariums.
And they can influence the types of fish
that are on these sites as their veracious predators.
This is just absolutely stunning seeing this mixture
of small bait fish with the jack darting through,
and then the slow moving sand tiger sharks
and the lionfish at the foreground.
-: So this is just such a great project to be part of.
And it's a wonderful opportunity to show people
all of the great biodiversity that exists
just right off of our coast,
but that's so hard to get to and see for so many people.
So, with that, I am going to wrap up my talk,
but I will be taking questions in the chat box.
While people are entering their questions,
I wanna just give a thanks to so many people.
I do not do this research by myself.
I've mentioned my students who do outstanding work.
Ara McClanahan is working on a Master's project right now.
A lot of help from colleagues
at the North Carolina Aquariums, the local dive community,
professional photographers,
as well as researchers like Dr. Avery Paxton at NOAA,
who actually was one of the founding scientists
on Spot A Shark and got us started.
And Tane Casserley, who is partnering with the sanctuaries
on those videos that I mentioned there towards the end,
as well as many, many other researchers and groups
that make all of this work possible.
So, with that, I will see if there are any questions.
I'm happy to answer.
Shannon: All right.
Well, thank you, Carol.
That was fascinating.
Before you start answering questions,
we did have a couple requests.
If you could show the belly flop one more time
because they missed it.
So, Mark, would you roll that B roll?
Mark: With pleasure.
I love this video. Shannon: I know.
It's so cool. (Carol laughing)
Mark: Okay, so the belly flop is like near the start
of the video, so pay very close attention
to the side stomach of the shark.
(water bubbling) (oxygen hissing)
Carol: Right when she's turning.
Right now.
Shannon: All right, perfect.
Okay, well, I'm gonna take the screen back from you.
-: I hope everybody got to see that.
What you can see is as she's coming around
towards the diver, she kind of veers off,
and you just see the whole side of her body
just sort of quiver like this.
And you can see from her very rounded belly
that does appear to be a pregnant sand tiger shark.
And so, those are the kind of things like,
how did we get so lucky, right?
I think it was Ethan who shot that video.
And so, it's incredibly fortunate,
but also just valuable information that we could not
purposely try to go out and be like,
let's go get pictures of sand tiger sharks
with babies wobbling in their bellies.
Like there's no way you can purposely get that.
It's just incredibly lucky.
Shannon: All right.
Well, just a reminder, if you haven't downloaded Carol's bio
in the chat box, you might want to do that now,
because in that bio you're also gonna find more information
about Carol, but also you're gonna have some links
that might be of interest to you.
So, go check it out to learn more about her research
and also more about the North Carolina Aquarium system,
and of course us.
So one of the very first questions
that I'll throw out at you, Carol, that we got,
is how can you tell the difference
between male and female from the pictures?
-: Okay, great question.
So male sharks have reproductive appendages
that sit right behind their last set of fins.
All right, so these are external organs
that they use during reproduction.
And so the females don't have those.
The sand tiger sharks have two,
the males have two claspers, is what these are called,
one on either side.
And so, in the adult mature males,
they are large and very visible.
And so, for adult animals, if you can get a good look
at the sort of back part of that shark,
it's fairly easy to tell.
Sometimes, however, the pictures are maybe a little angled.
And so, while we can see the spots,
we might not really be able to see that part of the shark.
Sometimes if it's taken from above
or if it's a very young shark,
those claspers might not have developed yet.
And so, we don't want to misidentify those as females.
So we're very careful and we always look at everything
two or three times and get second opinions
on a whole lot of stuff to make sure
that we're getting things as right as possible.
But it's a great question.
Shannon: All right, Mark, do you have a question
that you want to ask?
Mark: Yes, but before I do,
I just want to remind everybody that any picture you take
in North Carolina waters qualifies as an entry
for the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary
in our Get Into Your Sanctuary Photo Contest.
So please do participate in that contest,
but this is actually a really, really good question.
But do you have any idea what these sharks
used before shipwrecks?
-: You know, that is such a mystery.
Shipwrecks are a new habitat, for sure.
So, I mean, people have been on the oceans
for thousands of years, but until pretty recently,
ships were made out of wood.
And so they might have lasted for some time,
but these large metal vessels,
like the ones that we are seeing
are maybe not permanent structures,
but they are long-lived structures.
And as that video mentioned, the longer they are down,
the more and more they are serving as habitat.
But we presume, although we don't know,
because nobody was photographing sand tiger sharks
100 years ago, or even 50 years ago.
Just the ability to get out that far and to get deep enough,
and then the photographic equipment has really just evolved
in the last few decades for us to be able
to even look at that.
But we do know that where these sharks are in other places
in the world like Australia, for example,
they're highly associated with offshore reef habitats,
or hard bottom habitats.
So, not necessarily like coral reefs,
like you think about like in the tropics,
but more like rocky outcrops, those sorts of structures,
where there is elevation and what we call relief.
Those are the kinds of places that we tend to see
sand tiger sharks in other parts of the world.
So it is really interesting to understand
how human structures in the ocean are serving as habitat
for this species, as well as all of the other animals
that are colonizing these habitats.
That's a whole new focus of research.
There's another location on the southern part
of North Carolina called Frying Pan Tower
that is an old observation tower.
So, it has like sort of legs that go down into the water.
And there's a live camera on there,
right now it's not operational
for the public to be able to see,
but we have a camera there and not, we,
one of my partners, Dr. Burge has a camera there.
And so we're actually able to get footage there.
So it's very different in that it's not a shipwreck,
but it is a big metal structure that also is providing
some sort of a benefit that these sharks really like,
because we have many, many sharks that seem to be
overwintering at that location.
So there's just so much to learn.
I'm really curious how wind structures,
wind energy structures in the ocean, for example,
might serve as habitat for these sharks.
And it might teach us a little bit
about how they recruit to new locations.
Shannon: Okay, thank you.
Another question that came in is,
"Are there hypotheses about how pregnant female
sand tiger sharks benefit from occupying shipwrecks?"
-: Well, (laughs) that is a really good question.
I think sort of our first step here is to really be able
to document that, in fact, we are seeing pregnant females
at these shipwrecks.
The video that we saw is just one example,
but really being able to document over many years,
that what we are seeing are these very large round females
presumed to be pregnant.
That's kind of like really the first step.
These sharks aggregate,
the pregnant female sand tiger sharks do aggregate
or school or get into their shivers,
their female shivers in other parts of the world.
So we know that that is a natural behavior
and it could just be, this is a very social shark.
And so, it could be that this is sort of how they behave
most of the time.
It might not be just when they're pregnant, for example.
There might be safety in numbers.
So, they might just...
If you're a very large, these are not fast moving sharks,
so it could be if you're a species that's kind of slow
and you're very pregnant,
maybe it's nice just to hang out near some structure
with your other female pregnant friends.
Again, we are so much at the beginning
of learning about this species that some of these
basic questions haven't even been answered.
So that's what really makes this very exciting.
There's just so much more exploration to do.
Shannon: Okay, Mark, do you have a question?
Mark: Yes, I'm seeing a lot of ire
for the lionfish in the chat,
but this is actually a really interesting question.
"Do you have any insight on if there's a type of shipwreck
that these sharks can prefer and would that change
depending on like their food, shelter, or the time of year,
or something like that?"
-: Another fantastic question.
So that's kind of some of the stuff I'd like to get out
with this analysis that I'll be doing this fall and winter
in the write up that I'm exploring is where are these
shipwrecks that the sharks tend to be found at?
Now, this is a bit confounded because really
what we're seeing is shipwrecks where divers like to go,
where there are also sharks.
So we have to be careful about untangling some of that,
but we really are interested in seeing if there are certain
depths that they seem to prefer, inshore,
out offshore a little bit further,
and then the age of the shipwreck.
So, as a shipwreck goes from having just...
A ship goes from having just been sunk
to being in underwater and being on the sea floor
for 20, 30, 40, or more years.
There's been some excellent work done by Dr. Avery Paxton,
for example, to study how the community shifts
over that time period.
And we know that there is a sweet spot
when the sharks start to show up and recruit to these wrecks
and how that community of fishes and other organisms
changes over time.
Also very, very new field of study.
And the sand tiger sharks are definitely
an interesting part of that story.
And we're also hoping that that ROV footage will help
take apart of that as well.
But excellent question.
All really great research questions.
Shannon: All right, and another question that came in
that's kind of interesting.
It says, "In theory, are there thoughts that the lionfish
are negatively impacting food availability for the sharks?"
-: So, lionfish are, gosh,
they're their own fascinating subject.
So we do know that lionfish are eating so many fish.
I mean, they're voracious feeders.
They have an enormous gape size,
so they can eat something that's almost the size
of themselves in one sort of gulp.
So they sort of inhale their food.
But mostly, a lionfish, even a big lionfish is gonna be
limited by the size of fish that it can eat.
We know that they feed on commercially
and recreationally important species,
as well as the full range of other small fish
that we see out there.
The sand tiger sharks on the other hand
are really feeding in a different size bracket.
So they're gonna be eating fish that are much larger.
We are still trying to figure out exactly
what sand tiger sharks eat.
Very few reports of them eating specific items,
like watching them eat.
Here, we do know they eat fish and skates and rays
and even other sharks,
but really understanding their diet is still something
that needs to be investigated.
So there is definitely a link there,
but they're really eating at different places
in the food web.
So I don't know that there's perhaps a direct impact
of those lionfish, but over time at a large scale,
with out of control lionfish populations,
it is certainly a hypothesis worth investigating
because we know when you have a species like lionfish
that are so out of balance in the ecosystem that that can
have up and down effects along the food webs.
It's a excellent ecology question.
Shannon: All right, Mark, one more question?
I think we may have time for one or two more.
Mark: Great.
I'm going to, again, use this question as an excuse
to plug the Get Into Your Sanctuary Photo Contest,
but do you partner with any other dive shops in the area
for photographing these sharks?
-: Yeah, so we don't necessarily directly partner
with the dive shops.
They are very helpful because what we do
is we go to the dive shops and we share information
about Spot A Shark.
We have little cards and handouts and slates
that we can provide the dive shops.
And then we tell them about Spot A Shark,
and they tell their divers about it.
So partially because of the COVID sort of plopped itself
right in the middle of getting Spot A Shark off the ground,
which I think was kind of rude.
We're sort of getting back into the swing of things
in terms of engaging directly with dive shops.
So, we have reached out to over 30 dive shops and dive clubs
in North Carolina all up and down the coast,
and even a little bit inland.
We have a plan, had a plan,
now we're kind of moving back into implementing that
to reach out again, to remind everybody,
"Hey, tell your divers.
Hey, here's our information cards."
So it's definitely on our outreach plan
is to continue engaging with the dive shops.
And we will partner with any of the dive shops or clubs
that are interested in learning more.
I was actually go and give talks to dive clubs when invited.
Either I or some of our Diving Safety Officers,
my students, or other volunteers.
So we have a lot of ways to get involved for dive shops
that want more information.
And I think you're gonna pop up my email account there
here in a couple of minutes.
So please do, if you're affiliated with a dive shop
or a dive club and would like to learn more,
please get in touch.
Shannon: Okay, thank you.
And Mark, I put the link to the Sanctuary Photo Contest
in the chat.
So everybody click on that so you can learn more
and send your photos in.
Okay, so I think this will be the last question.
Somebody asked, "Do you tag the sharks
to try to look at their movements?"
-: So for Spot A Shark USA, we do not tag the sharks.
The tag is sort of the video photograph.
So it's completely noninvasive.
However, we do have a separate project where we do put tags
inside of sharks, acoustic telemetry tags.
So that's a tag that lasts about 10 years,
that sends out a sound signal into the environment.
And if the shark that is tagged with one of these passes by
an acoustic receiver, that's a machine that can pick up
that sound that is coming out of that tag, it gets logged.
And so we can, and these are deployed,
these receivers are deployed all over North Carolina,
all over the Atlantic seaboard,
many, many researchers have those deployed,
and we share that data.
So, we have our own receivers.
So we know if we get a ping or a hit from one of our tags
and also any other tagged fish that swims by.
It's kind of a really cool system.
So, we do have some tagged sharks out.
We've got about 30, a little over 30 sharks
that we have tagged.
There are also people that we work closely with
that tag them.
We're also planning on deploying some other kinds
of like satellite tags that also transmit information
about the movement patterns of these sharks
via satellite technology.
So that gives us different information.
These are all really great questions.
There's other kind of tags that you can put on the outside
of a shark that has like a number on it.
So if the shark is caught,
you can report that number
to the National Marine Fishery Service or to a researcher.
So there's a lot of ways to put external tags
or internal tags on sharks.
And the cool thing is that all of these different kinds
of ways of studying sharks give you different information
at different scales.
And so, what's exciting is getting people that kind of
do different things and collect different kinds of data
together to figure out what the overall holistic picture is.
And I think that's hopefully work that we can support
in the future is kind of like bringing all of that together
in sort of a collaborative science network
to really understand what's going on,
not just off North Carolina, but off of the entire US coast.
Shannon: Okay, thank you, Carol.
All right, so if we did not get to your question
or if you have additional ones,
you can always send them to the presenter.
And Carol's email address is listed right here
on the screen.
You can also visit the North Carolina Aquariums website
to explore and learn more about these fascinating creatures.
And if you're in the area,
be sure to stop by one of the three aquariums
and/or Jennette's Pier in the North Carolina.
And a video recording of the presentation will be available
on the Sanctuaries Webinar archives page
found here at the URL listed here at the top of the page.
But don't worry, that's a long URL,
and I don't expect you to remember it.
In addition, the webinar will be archived
on Monitor National Marine Sanctuary's website.
You can click on the Multimedia section in the toolbar
to access the webinar box.
You'll also find future webinars in that same section.
And again, don't worry,
all of this information is gonna be sent to you
in a follow up email once the recording is ready to view.
And just so that you know,
the recording usually takes about a week
'cause we have to caption it
and then we have to have our web team put it up.
So, just be patient, but it will be up.
And on July 21st, I invite you to come and watch
Office of National Marine Sanctuary series
when they are hosting Dr. Steve Gittings
to explore the world of lionfish.
We saw a lot of lionfish today on the shipwrecks.
So this might be one that everybody wants to follow up with.
Learn how things have changed
since they were first discovered in the Atlantic Ocean
nearly 40 years ago and how the lionfish is impacting
the future and health of our ocean.
And of course, we invite you to always follow us
on social media.
And lastly, as you exit the webinar,
there is a short survey for formal and informal educators.
If you are an educator, NOAA would really appreciate it
if you'd take a minute or two to complete the survey.
Your answers will help NOAA develop future webinars
to meet your needs.
And your participation is voluntary
and your answers will be completely anonymous.
So, once again, thank you, Carol, for a great presentation,
and thank you for joining us today.
And I hope that everyone has a wonderful day
and this concludes the presentation.
Thank you.
-: Thanks, everyone. Shannon: Bye, everyone.