Science Centres: Fisheries

Great white shark cradled, tagged and ready for release. (Photo: Malcolm Francis, NIWA)

A 4.4 m great white female fitted with an electronic ‘popup’ satellite tracking tag has set a new distance record for a New Zealand shark and provided the first evidence that New Zealand great whites travel to, as well as from, Australia. ‘Kerri’ took six weeks to swim more than 3000 km from Stewart Island to the southern Great Barrier Reef, diving down to 1000 m along the way.

Sharks tagged at the Chatham Islands in 2005 showed similar deep diving behaviour on their winter migration to tropical Pacific waters. “The tags are revealing invaluable information about the distribution, movements, and behaviour of great whites. This will ultimately help in designing management measures to reduce shark bycatch in fisheries,” says NIWA fisheries scientist Dr Malcolm Francis.

The research is a collaboration between scientists from NIWA, DoC, Shark-Tracker/NABU (Germany), and the University of Washington (USA); funded by DoC, Shark- Tracker/NABU, and the Foundation for Research, Science & Technology.

Scientists from NIWA and Stanford University are embarking on a similar tagging programme for porbeagle sharks.