She grew up spending her weekends and summers exploring the Chesapeake Bay, where her passion for the ocean began. Kate Quigley is an intern for Beneath the Waves at their new lab. Beneath the Waves further presents this information to support protections for these amazing creatures. Researchers use results to expand knowledge of sharks. A shark’s diet, stress, and hormone levels are analyzed to determine its overall health. The samples and data collected will be used to study the shark’s diet, stress, and hormone levels.
To ensure the shark is under low stress, Beneath the Waves aims to keep the workups quick. This 7ft blue was the perfect first shark because of how calm he was, making the Thursday group’s first workup just 8 minutes. Lastly, the team took a cloacal swab and blood sample before attaching an extra pop-up tag to track the shark via satellite. If caught in the future, the crew could collect additional information about the blue shark.
Researchers inserted a spaghetti tag below its fin with an ID number and phone number. Kate started by taking morphology, a small fin clip from the dorsal, and then made an incision next to the dorsal to take a small muscle sample. Then the boat is put in a low gear, so oxygenated water could flow through the shark’s gills. Once the crew hooked the blue shark, Brendan, Christine, and Seba held it against the ship. It nudged the chum bucket and curiously swam around the boat before we dropped a hook in front of it. Just 20 minutes after settling in to wait for a bite, a blue shark casually made its way towards the ship. Chum creates an oily slick in the ship’s wake, which the sharks can follow to the boat. The back of the boat holds buckets of chum. Each pole sits at a different depth in the water to cover more ground. The crew begins setting up the deep sea fishing poles, baited with either bluefish or mackerel. The boat continues to drive 20+ miles offshore. Finding ‘Nothing’ is still data! In the future, we hope to see sharks and other species’ behaviors on the BRUV footage. They were unable to find anything, however, the experience of looking at 300 feet of deep ocean was a treat. Later in the lab, the interns watched the GoPro footage, witnessing hours of open ocean, admiring the vastness of the ecosystem. An acoustic receiver and hydrophone communicate with the BRUV to float to the surface at the end of the day so we could retrieve it. Next, Seba and Kate set up the BRUV (Baited Remote Underwater Video) with a bait arm and GoPro, dropping it to 300ft to sit and record for the day. Eventually, we will send the sample to a lab where scientists will analyze them to show the biodiversity of marine life in the area. These bottles can be processed in the lab the following day using our pump. They are used to take water samples at the desired depth without mixing with water from other depths.
Niskin bottles are plastic cylinders with stoppers at each end in order to seal the bottle completely. Soon after that, we take our DNA samples using a Niskin bottle which we drop at 30ft and 100ft depths. Heading out to the deeper waters of Stellwagen Bank, we cast a few fishing lines to catch a few mackerel to chum the water. Loading the Pelican cases, fishing equipment, and other supplies only takes a few minutes. We begin the trip with an early morning drive to Plymouth Harbor, where we rendezvous with the captain. Despite the technological malfeasances in the lab, our team was eager to get into the water and find some sharks! Preparing the gearĮach tagging day is a calculated operation. In the lab, our team is getting ready to process samples (waiting in our -80☌ freezer) from Beneath the Waves’ research around the world, including the Turks and Caicos, Bahamas, Cape Cod, and the UK.
Deep blue shark under boat manuals#
A series of equipment failures provided a learning experience for our interns as we delved into manuals and YouTube videos, stepping into the life of a marine biologist and becoming experts on the fly. With the field days planned for Thursday and Friday, our week began in preparation mode: practice drone launches, BRUV deployments, and packing Pelican cases.
Deep blue shark under boat full#
Our second week of fieldwork was full of excitement.
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