Stony Brook University, Southampton - Fall Lecture Series

Dr. Demian Chapman will present a lecture titled "Tracking the

Oceanic Whitetip Shark: Apex Predator of the Great Blue Desert".  

The oceanic whitetip shark (Carcharhinus longimanus) was once one of the most abundant large apex predators in the world. Living in the open ocean, usually far from land, it occupies a “blue desert” where prey is patchy and hard to come by. Nevertheless, it is a bold predator that manages to capture some of the largest, fastest animals in the sea, including tuna, mahi mahi, billfish and squid. Besides that, we know very little about this species. Even worse, oceanic whitetips have suffered dramatic population declines as industrial fishing fleets began targeting tuna with pelagic longlines in the middle of last century. Oceanic whitetips were incidentally captured in these fisheries and their fins were sold in the Asian dried seafood trade. As a result, millions of oceanic whitetips have been killed and the species is now considered to be vulnerable to extinction, especially in the Atlantic Ocean. In this seminar, I will describe studies of this species underway at Cat Island in The Bahamas. A team of scientists has been visiting this site every spring since 2011 after finding that it appears to be one of the last known oceanic whitetip hot spots in the region. Using a combination of satellite tags, DNA profiling, accelerometer tags and field-based ultrasound examination, our objectives are to elucidate the migration and reproductive patterns of this species.