Overview
- This week the Atlantic Shark Institute reported it successfully tagged a 6-foot female hammerhead near Block Island, marking the nonprofit’s first confirmed hammerhead tagging.
- The team deployed both satellite and acoustic tags that should transmit location and fine-scale movement data for ten years or more to track migration and habitat use along the East Coast.
- Researchers filmed an earlier encounter with a much larger scalloped hammerhead that would not take the bait and could not be tagged, showing both opportunity and limits of at-sea tagging work.
- ASI director Jon Dodd said warming coastal waters are drawing warmer-water shark species north, a change that the new tracking data will help explain and map.
- The tagging was documented for an Ocean State Media documentary, ASI has tagged roughly 10–15 species in past years, and the group plans to return to the area to tag more hammerheads to strengthen conservation and fisheries data.