Researchers see little evidence that more white sharks prowling North Atlantic
Global News
A new study of the distribution of the endangered great white shark in Canadian waters suggests the population remains stable but is not growing.
A new study of the distribution of the endangered great white shark in Canadian waters says an underwater detection network suggests the population remains stable but is not growing.
That runs counter to worries the ocean’s greatest predators are increasingly prowling the region — perceptions fuelled by a suspected attack last August on a woman in the waters off Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island and cellphone videos the same month depicting a shark chewing a seal carcass.
Shark-tracking apps have also become popular, as the Ocearch group has operated in the region for several seasons tagging animals and allowing the public to follow the creatures online as they migrate into the northwest Atlantic from July to November.
However, work by a consortium of leading great white shark experts studying the animal’s behaviour says sightings in Canada aren’t translating into increased detection by underwater acoustic networks that pick up signals from tagged animals.
The collaborative study published last month in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences says that when the increased number of tagged sharks and the bigger array of detection systems are taken into account, the number of great whites in Canadian waters appears to be holding steady.
It says while there have been theories of increased numbers of great whites on the basis of sightings, “we found limited corroborating evidence.”
“There was no systematic increase in the proportion of the tagged population visiting Canadian waters, which has remained relatively constant during the years where an appreciable number of animals had been tagged (2016 onward),” says the study.
The document is co-authored by Heather Bowlby, the lead researcher at the federal government’s Canadian Atlantic Shark Research Laboratory, Megan Winton of the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy in North Chatham, Mass., and Gregory Skomal of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries.
