Rather than emerging in protected coves, baby blue sharks spend their first years in a big patch of open ocean
Blue sharks, like many sea creatures, are nomads, and their habits over a lifetime have been cloaked in mystery. Now, for the first time, researchers from Portugal and the US think they know where some baby blue sharks come from—and where they eventually go.
The team tracked dozens of blue sharks for an unprecedented 952 days, revealing that the globetrotting predators seem to start their lives in a peculiar nursery—a large patch of open ocean. The discovery may prove vital in efforts to protect the species from deadly encounters with longline fisheries, which inadvertently snare around 20 million blue sharks each year.
Blue sharks live in oceans around the world and can travel unconstrained over large swaths of territory. For the new study, Frederic Vandeperre at the University of the Azores in Portugal and his colleagues decided to focus on the waters around the Azores islands in the North Atlantic. Fishing boats frequently catch both young and mature sharks in that area, an early clue that there might be a nursery and mating ground nearby.
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