'Shark Men' scout out shark nursery

USA Today: 'Shark Men' scout out shark nursery
Jaws may have forever frightened folks about great white sharks, but some real-life shark hunters this spring offer a gentler lesson about the species — front row seats on a search for a shark nursery.

Don't worry, there's still plenty of snapping jaws and saltwater drama, though. Starting Sunday with a double episode, Shark Men (National Geographic Channel, 9 p.m. ET premiere) returns for its second season of shark wrangling. This year, the team travels from the Guadalupe Island about 150 miles off the Mexican coast, to Malibu, to the Gulf of California in search for the breeding ground of great white sharks cruising California's coast.

"There are some fundamental puzzles of the great white sharks," says expedition leader Chris Fischer of OCEARCH, a nonprofit ocean conservation group based in Washington, D.C. "The really big one is finding out where female ones are going to have their pups."

On board the Ocean, a former crabbing boat turned shark hunter ship, Fischer and his team, which includes shark biologist Michael Domeier of the Marine Conservation Science Institute in Fallbrook, Calif., set off in 2009 to solve this mystery. "We had a unique group of people, who you'll see putting their body parts on the line, who really love the ocean."

Despite sharks' movie fame, much of shark biology remains a mystery, even for the renowned great white shark, Carcharodon carcharia. They can grow some 16 to 19 feet long and particularly like to dine on seals (people not so much, although there are attacks occasionally, such as reports of kayakers off the California coast) and bony fish. But knowledge of how they spend their lives, where they breed, where they hunt and how they migrate, roaming warm waters worldwide, is incomplete. Only in 2005, for example, did a study in the journal, Science, led by Ramon Bonfil of the Wildlife Conservation Society, resolve a long-running debate by revealing that female great whites migrate from South Africa to Australia. And on Thursday, a first survey published in the journal Current Biology, of great white sharks off the northern California coast found a surprisingly low number of them, 219 in all.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources lists great whites as "vulnerable," where about a third of all ocean-going shark species are threatened with extinction. Largely the threat comes from overfishing. Earlier this year, Peresident Obama signed a law limiting shark fin fishing boats in U.S. waters. The big-time sports fishing crew of Shark Men kick off Sunday's shows by catching some minivan-sized great white sharks for tagging — not happy fish when they are trapped in a special forklift-style loading deck aside the boat — off Guadalupe Island, a marine reserve.

Tagging the sharks to track them is the point of the expedition, Fischer says, although the drama of actually landing one likely is the draw for viewers.

"I can't say if I capture a great white shark what I've really accomplished, but I'm sure it would be great commercial television," says shark biologist Vincent Gallucci of the University of Washington, who was not part of the show. Still finding locations of shark nurseries, where they bear their "pups," is a "legitimate scientific question to answer," Gallucci says.

In the first shows, a hook left lodged in one great white, named Junior, leads to the team facing questions about their research from the marine reserve's federal overseers. A 2010 review, prompted by public complaints, by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials concluded the sharks tagged by the show were alive. "Our experience is that sharks appear to be quite robust and capable of recovering from superficial hook wounds, as we have caught sharks with healed wounds," said the report. The NOAA officials also called for limiting sharks caught by the team's forklift method to ones under 18 feet long, out of concern about the health effects of being removed from the ocean.

"We've always felt the entire team has been very careful to follow the rules," says Steve Schiffman of the National Geographic Channel. "We see them as modern-day explorers trying to make a difference in the world."

One surprise the team finds are unexpected numbers of juvenile great whites, less than 12 feet long, offshore of Malibu, Calif., the surfer's haven. "I think the surfers know about them," Fischer says. "But I worry the word is not getting out beyond them."

Over the course of the season, the team will track three females back to a surprising breeding ground in the Sea of Cortez, or Gulf of California, far from the deep ocean where the sharks are mostly found. "People fish there legally now and we have found baby sharks in the trash at (nearby) fishing camps," Fischer says. He calls for protecting some parts of the nursery from fishing.

For great white sharks (and really all other fish), "not removing juvenile fish from the ocean is the key to a healthy population," Gallucci says. "Equally important is protecting the source of juveniles," he adds, noting that rather being the fearsome hunters of the movies, young sharks are more often, the hunted. "If they have found a nursery, you would want to keep it protected from sports boats that might want to come down to Baja California looking for them as trophies."