Autumnwatch New England

(birds screeching) (splashing) (emotional music) I'm Greg Skomal. I'm a marine fisheries biologist here in Massachusetts. I'm probably a 16 year old boy trapped in a 50 plus year old man. Morning, Cap. -

Man

Morning. (chuckling) I've got alotta energy, and maybe too much at times. But I'm driven by what I do. I decided when I was a young teenager that I was gonna grow up studying the ocean. Ultimately, I thought maybe someday I might be able to study sharks, but honestly, I thought we knew everything there was to know about those incredible animals. But I found out that was not really true at all. (birds screeching) What we have off the coast of Cape Cod is a big population of seals. You know, we had basically driven seals to the brink of extinction a hundred years ago. We finally protected them in 1972. We've got half a million seals of the east coast of the United States and Canada now. (birds screeching) (emotional music) We got plenty (splashing) of seals in the water here, and look at 'em, all their heads bobbin'. Man, there's gotta be sharks around here. The peak months for the sharks really consistently are August, September, and October. In essence, what we have is a big restaurant, with white sharks being the customers that take advantage of it. But here in Cape Cod, we have another element that we're dealing with. We're dealing with a potentially dangerous animal, and this dangerous animal is living in incredible close proximity to human beings. And so any information we get about the daily habits of this shark that we can turn into recommendations that will enhance public safety are much needed. Where do they go, what do they do, how long do they live, all that stuff has been really shrouded in mystery for this part of the world. What we wanna do is place a tag into it. So, the way this works is I place this dart into the base of the dorsal fin of the shark, like this, from the boat, and then I'll pull it back. Shark swims away and we've started learning all about it. We've been able to get almost 150 tags into these sharks. We're not catchin' 'em. (emotional music) We're not handling 'em. We're just letting 'em swim, we place the tag. It's a really, really great way to do it. Earlier this week, we had a really good day. We saw at least 20 or so white sharks that we videotaped, and I got a tag into one of 'em then. -

Man

Nice! -

Greg

I tagged it, I tagged it! -

Man

Perfectly! (cheering) He's coming right under ya! Our intensive research is giving us really good indications as to what the population's doing. And the general pattern we see is a very simple north-south migratory pattern, basically moving up into northern waters in the summertime, staying for the summer into the early fall, and as thing start to cool off, moving back south again. We're located here, right on Cape Cod, right where this big mass density of dots are. And that's because in the months of July, August, September, October, are peak months to be off the coast of New England. We know more about these animals than we ever did. I think that we live in a new world, the old world being the only good shark was a dead shark, right. I think I'm starting to see more and more fascination with these animals versus fear. And once you can get people to do that, the respect for these animals is there. And once you respect 'em, then you wanna save 'em, you wanna save that which you cherish. So I see a bright future.