by Catherine Spangler
My name is Catherine Spangler and I’m a Natural Sciences major at the University of Alaska Anchorage. I started out as a psychology major my freshmen year, took a bird surveying internship on a whim, and haven’t looked back from the natural world since. So, what would the natural next step a year after changing my whole degree and career outlook be? If you said, ‘help study under researched sharks,’ you’d be correct.
This past summer I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Markus Horning at Wildlife Technology Frontiers with support from the Alaska Ocean Observing System (AOOS) on a Pacific Sleeper Shark research project. My time at the internship was split into two parts, the first in Resurrection Bay out of Seward and the second in Prince William Sound.
Catherine assists with the shark handoff between boats. Photo by Lizi Byrd.
In Resurrection Bay, I was first trained to drive both vessels we would be using over the summer. One was a typical 21-foot aluminum boat used to transport people and heavier gear and do the camera drops. The other was a 15-foot skiff that was used primarily for shark work out in the Sound. The boating certification required me to learn operation, safety information, and boat motoring such as approaches to buoys, docks, and boats. I also learned how to respond to overboard crew members in an emergency, navigate rocks and other hazards, and practice basic driving skills. I can report that the scariest part of learning boat maneuvering techniques is trying to pull in and out of the slip in the harbor. If you ever learn how to maneuver a boat around a harbor and into a slip, you will likely hear that you should only go as fast as you’re willing to hit something. Thus, there were many times I stayed in neutral to avoid speed all together.
After getting over a new fear of driving around boats in the harbor, we started our drop camera work to capture shark footage. We did a total of 8 drops and retrievals of our Deep Submersible Camera Trap (DSCT). The locations varied across several drop sites from Fourth of July Beach to the start of Thumb Cove. After dropping the camera safely on the sea floor, we left it there to sit for 24 hours and pulled it up the following morning. After we retrieved the DSCT (later also given the nickname of Cyclops, as it only has one camera like an eye), we downloaded the footage.
Video analysis quickly became one of the most prominent of my responsibilities for the Resurrection Bay work. I watched nearly 200 hours of our red-light footage to see if there were Pacific Sleeper Sharks at the location. I also kept documentation of all other identifiable organisms like cod, halibut, skates, shrimp, etc. It soon became a relaxing routine: drop or retrieve the camera in the mornings, then after lunch start going through and analyzing the footage. There were sharks on 7 out of 8 deployments, and a couple of times there were multiple shark sightings during a single drop.
Squirrel Cove cabin in Prince Wiliam Sound was home base for the project. Photo by Lizi Byrd.
Another project I was introduced to one afternoon was creating a digital form to keep records of our gear deployments and shark taggings that would happen out in Prince William Sound using the program JotForm’s.
After weeks of building excitement, we finally got to start the adventure of attempting to tag Pacific Sleeper Sharks in Prince William Sound. The 2 weeks I spent out there were with a team of five people, including Dr. Horning. Another was one of my other mentors, Dr. Amy Bishop, who is a professor at UAA working on the research project with Dr. Horning.
Our home base for our field work was the Squirrel Cove Cabin, where we prepped supplies, tags, and played multiple rounds of Ecology (a fabulous game even if you aren’t science obsessed) in the evenings while our gear dried. Our days always started with coffee, a morning debrief, and a check-in for the work we planned on accomplishing that day. Then we geared up and left to various locations to drop our 4 longline sets to sit at the bottom of the ocean. We gave the sharks 4 hours to bite before checking them. This was the first chance my electronic forms had their time to shine–used them to record important data on the drops like the location, date, time, depth, bait info, and buoy number. Another important thing to note if you’re planning on sharking is the deployment of gummies when you set the line. Over the two weeks we found that lifesaver gummies had the highest success rate to catch sharks.
After the 4-hour soak times we would go to pull the lines in the same order we set them, and we all took turns in different roles of the hulling and coiling lines. Coiling lines, I quickly learned, is an art form in itself. Everyone does it differently, and personally I opted for more of an athletic stance, standing lower and over the bucket so I could tuck the line closer. This did have the drawback of occasionally getting rained on by the water from the upcoming line.
Attaching the bridle to prepare for a camera drop in Resurrection Bay. Photo by Lizi Byrd.
You know the feeling when you get to the top part of the rollercoaster and you’re looking down at the drop? Waiting for a shark on the line is kind of like that. When a shark did come up, everything started flying. We would set the audio recording as well as a timer and away we would go. Naturally, being pulled up on a line is going to be a stressful experience for the shark so we aimed to only have it up for a total of 45 minutes from the time we first spotted it on the line to the time of release. After moving the shark, people, and equipment over to the smaller skiff, we took measurements before tagging the sharks with devices. One of the tags we placed included a conductivity, temperature, and depth (CTD) tag and a SomniVision which, simply put, is a shark GoPro. It also included Mini PATS which allowed us to track more large-scale movements. The sensors are programmed to pop up from the animals and float up to the surface for retrieval after a set date. We were lucky to have a total of four sharks to work up and release with tags. I took tons of pictures.
A personal highlight of mine from this experience was when I got to handle a shark for the first time. My job was to be the person who would receive the shark on the skiff to transfer over to the stretcher. I remember looking down at the shark and trying to hold it just right so everything could continue smoothly, and we could work it up. In the audio recording you can hear me just repeating, “Oh my god this is a shark, I have a shark,” over and over again. There’s just something about being so close to an animal that minutes ago was over 1,000 feet underwater, and seeing them in person after only seeing them over video footage for two months.
Despite wishing that I could have been out there longer, my time “sharking” has now come to end. I hope to use my new knowledge about research plans and proposals to do exploratory research of my own, potentially for a graduate degree or future career. While touching a shark was not on my bingo card for the year, I could not have asked for anything better. I know this will be an experience I look back on fondly as I continue to build my career. I’m lucky to not have to say goodbye to the sharks completely, as I will continue working on the drop camera video data and hopefully present a poster at the Alaska Marine Science Symposium this winter.