Fish & Water - Sounds Wild
Salmon Shark Sightings

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Transcript

Salmon Shark

Sabrina Garcia is kneeling on the deck of a ship, examining a six-foot salmon shark. Garcia is a marine research biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. In summer you’ll find her on ships in the Bering Sea studying juvenile salmon, documenting their abundance, distribution, and diet. Each summer during salmon surveys a few salmon sharks are caught in surface trawls and released unharmed. Garcia is making the most of these opportunities to add to our understanding of these little-studied predators.

Sharks are important because they are a top predator in Alaska waters, and regulate lower-level predators and help keep balance in the ecosystem. It’s known that salmon sharks sexually segregate, and that most of the sharks in Prince William Sound are females, and most of the sharks in the Bering Sea are males. But marine scientists want to know -- - are there one or two distinct populations of salmon sharks in the western and eastern Pacific, and do they mix? Where do they mate, and where do they have their pups?

To better understand salmon shark migration and distribution, Sabrina Garcia is documenting shark sightings (and those caught by people fishing) in Alaska waters, to create an accessible database that includes shark locations, sex, date caught or seen, and size.