SHARKS COULD BE SWIMMING CLOSER TO HUMANS DUE TO WARMING OCEANS

Warming oceans, due to climate change, are impacting migration patterns of tiger sharks, meaning the species of shark could end up swimming closer to man, a new study has claimed.

Through their 10 years of tracking data and 40 years of catch records, research scientists at the University of Miami have found that for every one-degree Celsius increase in water temperatures above average, tiger shark migrations extended farther poleward by an estimated 250 miles, and began that migration two weeks earlier.

Neil Hammerschlag, a shark researcher at the University of Miami and lead author of the study, said: "Given their role as apex predators, these changes to tiger shark movements may alter predator-prey interactions, leading to ecological imbalances, and more frequent encounters with humans."

"But we don’t know exactly how tiger sharks will impact the ecosystems they’re moving into.”

All of which means it could less predictable to say when and where tiger sharks and man could meet in the water.

It almost sounds like a scenario from a Roland Emmerich film, but this shifting of migrations could also see the sharks swim from marine protected areas and into waters where they could be caught by commercial fishing.

Tiger sharks reproduce and grow slowly, which makes them more vulnerable to threats like fishing, and this change in migration could see species numbers tumble.

The study, titled "Ocean warming alters the distributional range, migratory timing, and spatial protections of an apex predator, the tiger shark (Galeocerdo cuvier)" was published earlier this month in the journal Global Change Biology.

Words by Dean Newman

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