Shark Talk: OCEARCH’s Chris Fischer

Last week, satellite tracking data revealed that the waters near the Atlantic continental shelf off the shores of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and the east coast of Florida are a winter hot spot for large great white sharks.

Such a discovery may not have been possible without OCEARCH founder Chris Fischer. OCEARCH, along with their research partners, have been catching, tagging and releasing great white sharks aboard its M/V OCEARCH research vessel as part of its mission to enable data collection by providing collaborating researchers and institutions unprecedented access to sharks and other marine predators. That data is then shared with both scientists and the general public through its OCEARCH Tracker database system.

As part of this site’s mission to bring you a wide range of expert voices from the global shark community, Sharkophile was able to speak exclusively with Fischer, who will be the guest for the ‘Inside Look’ speaker series this weekend at SeaWorld Orlando, about OCEARCH’s latest shark-tagging expeditions, the role of social media in scientific communication, and which of his tagged sharks is his all-time favorite:

What went into the discovery of a white shark hot spot off the east coast of the U.S.?

One of the things we’ve seen happen as we’ve worked in various parts of the world is that there more than one area for the fall aggregation which is when we believe the sharks are mating. You see that in the Farillon Islands and Guadalupe and then they go out into a shared foraging area. Some people call it the white shark cafe. We went out to the Pacific in 2009 to verify that they were out there foraggin on squid. So when we started to look at other parts of the world like the northwest Atlantic, we had a pretty good idea that the fall aggregation around Nantucket and Cape Cod was likely to be for mating. When we tagged the first fish back in 2012, sharks like Mary Lee and in 2013 with Katharine, they all came down to this area between north Florida and the Carolinas so we were like ‘Wow, what’s going on down there?’.

So we moved the ship down there to try and find, capture and tag other sharks. One of those sharks from 2013, Lydia, we found never went to Cape Cod but went to Newfoundland and into Canada. In 2017 we tagged a mature male named Hilton who also never went to Cape Cod. He went to Nova Scotia and New Foundland. We’ve been waiting to see to see if the secondary data was going to shape up like it did in the Pacific, so this past fall we went to Canada for the first time and were able to catch seven and tag six. All of those sharks from Canada came straight down to the same region in the winter as the sharks we tagged in Cape Cod, much like how Guadalupe and the Farillons were sharing an offshore foraging area.

We were like ‘Aha, this makes sense’ after we saw the trend lines for a number of years, so then it was just a matter of finding that secondary aggregation. It was a matter of getting the data to demonstrate that. Once all those adult sharks from Canada came down to the same area with all the Nantucket and Cape Cod sharks, we were like ‘there it is’ and now we have the tracking data.

So what it is it about this area that draws all these different sharks populations to this one area?

We’ve been monitoring the water temperature and the geography over the last couple years with the captured sharks and it became obvious to see the temperature data with the Gulf Stream coming up from Florida that kicks offshore at Cape Canaveral and kind of winds offshore before it comes back in around Cape Hatteras. That Gulf Stream kind of pins cold water between the Gulf Stream and the east coast of the southeastern United States. They were all in this cool pocket of water.

You have all of this fresh water draining out of the southeast through massive estuaries, there’s a massive amount of bait, there’s big healthy fish moving along the beach

It’s part of putting the puzzle together. We had an idea of what we thought was going on but it was all about creating data with expedition after expedition. Even though sometimes you think you see the puzzle but for the purposes of what we do and what the scientists are doing, you don’t really have all the pieces to the puzzle until you have that data, until you have that track, until you have demonstrated proof. Now we have that.

What make these shared foraging areas so important to the sharks and to the ecosystem?

Number one, if the foraging area doesn’t have an abundance of life, the apex predators can’t thrive and so our kids won’t have the chance to eat fish sandwiches. I think one thing that people don’t understand is that OCEARCH is not a shark program. OCEARCH is an abundance program. We didn’t come out at this from a shark place. We are ocean people. When we started, we were helping scientists study billfish and other species. The marine scientists came to us and said, ‘Hey, it’s great that you are helping us but if we don’t figure out the large shark thing, there’s not going to be any fish.’

We were like ‘Whoa!’ because if there aren’t any sharks, the squid explode and wipe out all the fry for the baby tuna, the baby mahi, the baby billfish and all the fish we need to grow up to be able to eat. Just like inshore, if you wipe out all the sharks, the rays explode and they wipe out all the crabs and the shellfish. Up north, if the sharks aren’t present to keep the seals in check, they’ll wipe out the cod, the lobsters, the salmon and everything else.

At the time —around 2006 — we were down to about nine percent of our large sharks, so we said why not manage our sharks like we manage the billfish and find out where they live, where they migrate, where they mate and where they give birth. The scientists said they’d never been able to solve that puzzle. I was like, ‘you just told me, no big sharks, no fish sandwiches for our grandkids.’ They didn’t have the data so I said, ‘Well, I guess we’d better get on that.’ It was understandable. A single scientist and an intern weren’t going to be able to capture big mature white sharks to study them and let them go alive, so we brought together ocean people with the scientists.

You can’t change the future of the oceans on a fisherman’s story, you need peer-reviewed papers and a lot of scientists don’t have that practical knowledge from being on the water everyday. So we brought the practical and the academic together so that we could collect data that was fundamentally important to our kids’ ability to eat fish sandwiches.

OCEARCH is an abundance program and the path to abundance leads through our large sharks. They are the balance keepers. Which is why these shared foraging areas are so important.

What are you looking forward to with OCEARCH’s planned expeditions in 2019?

The first trip will be for 25 days into that shared foraging area between Jacksonville and Hilton Head. These trips are tough so if we see three sharks, we’ll be thrilled. These trips are important though because some of our most important sharks have come out of this region. The sharks that led us to Canada came out of this region… They led us back to that region. This region has led us to opening up other pieces of the puzzle because the sharks could be coming from a variety of areas.

The next expedition will be in August in Nantucket. We believe Nantucket is a mating aggregation in fall and early winter so the scientists need a sample size of 60 white sharks that comes from this particular region…We have 33 of the 60 the scientists want so now we will focus on getting them the remaining mature male and subadult males that we can find in that region so that when the science team publishes their findings, they will have good defensible science with a broad set of data.

Our final trip will be to Nova Scotia and possible New Foundland to try and zero in on exactly where the concentration of white sharks are up and to determine if that is an entirely different aggregation. We need to collect more samples to see if that is an entirely separate piece of that life history puzzle for that population of white sharks. We’re also hoping to see if a shark like Luna, who we tagged last year, got pregnant and might show us where she gives birth.

OCEARCH has done an exceptional job of using social media for science communication with the general public. Was this by design? Did you plan on creating Twitter stars out of your tagged sharks?

When we started, we knew that if we wanted to make an global impact on the future of sharks, we not only needed to solve the life history puzzle and the science around their management, we needed to shift the tone of the conversation from the old disposition of “Jaws” and that fear to the understanding. We needed people to love up on the sharks like they do with our big cats or our wolves. We needed to give the sharks a voice so that we could shift that tone of the conversation simultaneously while trying to do the science.

If we solve the science puzzle but are still in the position that people are terrified of sharks are dangerous and that sharks are no good, even if we have the data, we won’t have that political will to manage real change. Our communication campaign has tried to change the conversation around sharks, which I think we’ve been doing. Now when people see a shark wash up on the beach, they try and save it. 10 years ago, they would have gone down and cut it’s jaws out so they could sell it. There has been a parallel path of shifting the tone so people understand the vital role that sharks play — that there’s no fish sandwiches for our kids if the sharks aren’t thriving— so that when the science pops and you are moving toward policy, everyone already understands why we need to look after our sharks rather than trying to create that awareness after the fact because the science might take ten years. When it is time for policy you’ll already have a base constituency so you can move forward immediately with because everyone already knows why. That’s why we include the world in the journey.

What’s your favorite shark that you’ve ever tagged?

It would have to be Mary Lee. Mary Lee came along at a critical time when I thought OCEARCH was going to come to an end. I thought we were going to lose the ship, lose my house, lose everything because I leveraged everything to try and build OCEARCH. We had just had our television contract for “Shark Wranglers” cancelled because we didn’t want to move in a reality TV direction because we didn’t want to undermine our credibility for future policy making.

We went off in 2012 with the last of the money we had. I named the shark ‘Mary Lee’ because I though it would be the last shark we ever caught. We named it after my mom because my parents had done so much. Marylee proceeded to move down the east coast and was able to engage the entire eastern seaboard with our work. With the media, it created such an interest that our corporate sponsors saw that what we were doing was a good thing. They stepped up and told us not to worry about anything and to keep doing what we were doing and share it with the world. Mary Lee saved OCEARCH so she would have to be my favorite.

You can follow the OCEARCH tagged sharks like Mary Lee and Hilton by accessing the near-real time, free online Global Shark Tracker, or by downloading the Global Shark Tracker App available for Apple and Android platforms. You can also follow all the latest OCEARCH-related news from Sharkophile here.

https://www.sharkophile.com/2019/01/15/ocearchs-chris-fischer-to-appear-at-seaworld-orlando/