Word: tigers
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Back in Honolulu, on the other side of Oahu, the tiger-shark tagging is another high-tech effort to understand a different aspect of shark behavior. In 1992 two people were killed by tiger sharks in Hawaiian waters, the first such deaths there in three decades. An earlier spate of killings had provoked an all-out program to eradicate tiger sharks, but it was never clear whether that slaughter had been really effective...
With funding from the federal Sea Grant Program and help from students, including Lowe and Meyer, Holland began hooking tiger sharks off Waikiki Beach. Smaller specimens get old-fashioned tags; if a tagged shark is recaptured, the scientists know that it has returned to the same spot at least once...
...incision in the belly. Every time the shark nears an acoustic receiver anchored on the ocean floor, it leaves a record of its visit. Based both on these records and on open-ocean shark chases, Holland has come to several conclusions. "First," he says, "we've established that tiger sharks do have home ranges." Those ranges, however, are huge: Holland's crew has tracked sharks all the way to Molokai, 25 miles away...
...last spring that it was cutting this year's quota for large coastal sharks by 50%, to 1,285 metric tons, as well as establishing the first quota ever for small coastal sharks and banning commercial harvests of five species considered especially prone to overfishing--whale, basking, white, sand tiger and bigeye sand tiger. Outraged fishermen have responded by suing the Secretary of Commerce. Conservation is important, agrees Robert Spaeth, head of the Southern Offshore Fishing Association, but he argues that shark populations are difficult to count accurately--an assertion biologists agree with--and that the government's statistics...
Perhaps they could make their point more strongly if they could get CITES to meet in Honolulu next time and take the other delegates out to visit the tiger sharks on their home turf. Arguments about the impact on marine ecosystems and about the destruction of creatures whose biochemistry might one day save lives are, in the end, somewhat dry and academic...