Joan of Sharks is a 16-foot-long great white shark tagged in April of this year in Albany, Western Australia.
Tracking Sharks reached out to the Department of Fishers and spoke with Shark Monitoring Network Project Manager Mark Kleeman.
“The Shark in question was tagged with two separate Acoustic Transmitters within 5 days of each other. One placed externally and the other surgically implanted,” Kleeman said.
“These transmitters emit a unique sequence of low frequency ‘clicks’ that give each tag an audible ID number that can be recognised by an acoustic receiver or ‘listening station’.
“The Department of Fisheries has a Shark Monitoring Network comprising a number of acoustic receivers set in arrays around the Western Australian coastline which can detect and record acoustically tagged species that swim within 400-500 metres of the receiver .”
“Although we have already had a number of detections of this Shark from one of our Satellite linked receivers in Albany, it is too soon for us to compile any form of valid movement data from these isolated detections. Hopefully over time we can collect enough data from this particular Shark to give us a better insight into the wide scale movements of White Sharks within our waters.”
Unfortunately, we will have to wait to see what info will be released. He did add that the Shark Smart website developed by the Department of Fisheries in Western Australia is being worked on and they plan to display near real-time detections of acoustically tagged sharks which swim within range of satellite linked receivers.
