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"  From everything I&amp;#039;ve seen, people usually put sharks into slings and bring them into the boat to tag them, but in Jaws Comes Home you use a different method. What&amp;#039;s the reason for that?  In any other part of the world, these animals are drawn to the tagging vessel by chum. In New England, it doesn&amp;#039;t seem like the sharks are attracted to the traditional chumming methods. So we have to get them while they&amp;#039;re hunting in shallow waters. We use a modified harpoon techniquethrowing a precision tagging tool instead of jabbing into the animal while it swims by the boat or hauling it out of the water. We have a traditional harpoon vessel, which gives us a 20-foot pulpit. It allows us to approach the shark without spooking it with the boat, because the boat is 20 feet behind the person doing the tagging. The shark may hear the boat but not feel it, so to speak. So we can be right over the shark and apply the tag while it&amp;#039;s free swimming. How is the harpoon different from regular harpoons? It&amp;#039;s a traditional New England Harpoon, an aluminum pole weighted at the forward end with brass. But instead of the traditional harpoon lilywhich, when you&amp;#039;re using a harpoon for what it&amp;#039;s meant to be used for, is the dart that goes into the fish and kills itwe&amp;#039;ve modified the applicator to be a needle that goes into the fish and places our dart at the base of the dorsal fin. We use a professional harpooner, who places it with high precision to that area. You&amp;#039;re actually placing the dart on the end of the needle with a little bit of rubber band pressure. So we wrap rubber bands around it and it slips off.  Why is it so important to tag these sharks? Our interest is to learn about the biology, ecology, and natural history of the white shark in the Atlantic Ocean. It&amp;#039;s really the first opportunity to be able to do that. Virtually everything we know about the white shark comes from other hotspots around the world where access to white sharks has been fairly predictable. In the Atlantic, that has not been the case. This is the first real opportunity to learn about this species in this part of the world. So why is it so extraordinary to see whites in the Atlantic Ocean? The white shark is really a rare species in the Atlantic. At least it&amp;#039;s been considered a rare species. Our encounters with it as scientists have been very limited over the last 100 years. Nearly everything we know about the white shark in the Atlantic Ocean has come from fishing reportsfishermen who have reacted with white sharks. And as you can imagine, you can&amp;#039;t learn that much from those kinds of reports.  But there&amp;#039;s a changing dynamic in the Western North Atlantic with the restoration of the seal population over the past 40 years. With the restoration of that population, we now have white sharks coming to specific areas, perhaps as they used to before the seal population was destroyed, and with that predictability of encountering a white shark we finally have access to this animal to study its biology and use these new tools that have been developed in the last couple of decades. Why do the sharks respond so differently to different environments? If you look at all three major oceans, or even just the shorelines in the same ocean, you&amp;#039;re dealing with very different topography and hydrography and species that live there. That will dictate how a fish behaves. So the Pacific sharks do one thing and the Atlantic sharks may act similarly, but do it very differently because of the different oceanography.  So is the goal to learn about their behavior not just to know about it, but also to keep people venturing into the water safe? There&amp;#039;s a bunch of usefulness to knowing about how this species of shark or any species of fish lives. If you know the basic biologyit lives to 55 years, it migrates north and south, little sharks do this but big sharks do that, they feed on X species, they reproduce here, they give birth to their young therethen you start to discover what kind of conservation measures can be put into place. Whether we are talking about codfish or white sharks, knowing about their biology will help us to serve the species in the long run and, in the case of the white shark, protect human beings.  You use two different types of tags, satellite tags and acoustic tags. How do they work? The satellite tags are data loggers that pop off the animal, float to the surface and transmit to a satellite. They don&amp;#039;t give us real-time animation, but they do give us information that lets us do a retrospective three-dimensional analysis of the animal&amp;#039;s behavior after we tagged it. And that gives us information about what the sharks are doing over longer periods of time over broader scales. Bigger migratory patterns can emerge from those data sets: We tagged the shark in August, so where is it in February? Where is it the following April?   The acoustic tags let us look at the behavior of the sharks at the finer scale, both time and space. They&amp;#039;re at Cape Cod, but what are they doing when they&amp;#039;re at Cape Cod? Are we seeing any patterns emerge as it relates to the hunting strategy of the white shark around Cape Cod? The utility of the acoustic tags is only as good as the receivers we&amp;#039;ve put in the local waters. So once we&amp;#039;ve covered these local areas with these receivers and put the acoustic tags in these sharks, we can look at higher resolution data when they&amp;#039;re specifically around Cape Cod.   For example: Say we have an acoustic receiver set up, and we do, just outside a popular surfing beach. Then we have a receiver set up near a big seal colony. And we&amp;#039;re looking at the datathe tags are emitting the pulses picked up by these receiversand see there were a lot of the sharks around the seal colony during the day, but they weren&amp;#039;t around at night. And they were around more at high tide versus low tide It means they&amp;#039;re hunting during the day around the seal colony, and they like the high tide because it pushes the seals into the water. So we can see the picture emerging, then relate that to the popular surfing area. And if it gives us the same kind of pattern, we can say when there&amp;#039;s some vulnerability to a surfer. Are you getting that information in real-time? It&amp;#039;s only as real-time as frequently as we check the receivers. So if we check the receivers daily, we&amp;#039;d know when the last shark was there. It&amp;#039;s not satellite-linked, at least not yet, but I think that&amp;#039;s coming. And when that happens, you can use it as a warning system too. Exactly. Imagine if we tag a dozen white sharks off Cape Cod, and we&amp;#039;ve got receivers on all the popular swimming beaches and the receivers are linked to a satellite. That could really give a sense when white sharks are around beaches. We&amp;#039;ve talked about doing that for public safety. What information did you learn from the sharks you tagged on the show?  I thought at the very least that the sharks would exhibit some kind of migratory pattern similar to what they do in other parts of the world. In the Pacific, they usually spend a few months there feeding on the seals and sea lions until they get bored or until there is some kind of change in the weather, and then they&amp;#039;ll move out into deep water, sometimes as far west as Hawaii. They dive to depths in excess of 1000 feet every day, sometimes up to 1500 to 2000 feet every day. I expected that same kind of behaviormaybe not the same pattern, but I thought they&amp;#039;d go out to the middle of the Atlantic or they&amp;#039;d leave Cape Cod and do some deep-diving behavior.   We started getting data back after our initial efforts in 2009, and it really showed behavior that was quite unremarkable. The sharks were traveling from Cape Cod when things cooled down and moving to Florida. They stayed relatively close to shore, within 50 to 100 miles on the continental shelf, moving between the surface and the bottom between 100 to 200 feet deep everyday. They camped in Florida for the winter before moving back north again. That was a pattern that four of our sharks did in 2009. And I thought, wow, very different from what their counterparts are doing in other parts of the world.   Then, in 2010, we tagged additional sharks and what we found was that the 2009 pattern wasn&amp;#039;t holding true, and this is what I thought was pretty remarkable. We had a couple of sharks go to Florida and do the usual routine. One of them stayed there for two weeks, then moved down around the Florida Keys and into the Gulf of Mexico. Which is greatthat shows that the pattern doesn&amp;#039;t hold true and there are individuals doing other things, and the patterns will emerge as we tag more and more sharks. Another shark that we tagged actually moved off the continental shelf and acted like a Pacific shark, diving to depths in excess of 2500 feet.   So there&amp;#039;s more going on than what meets the eye. These sharks are doing different things and we got to look at why. The shark that ended up going out into the Atlantic and diving to great depths was a big, mature femaleand quite possibly pregnant. So maybe pregnant females are doing very different things than the other sharks, whether it&amp;#039;s feeding at depths or giving birth to her young at a place where they are set apart from where the other sharks gowho knows?  How&amp;#039;s the tagging going so far this season? We got our first tag out on Saturday. I&amp;#039;m optimistic because we saw six different sharks. That means, theoretically, we could have more opportunities to tag this year. We had our first success tagging white sharks on Labor Day weekend 2009. Had you told me the week before that we were going to tag 11 white sharks in the next two years, I would have said you were crazy. The Cooperative Shark Tagging Program, which had been going on since 1963, had only tagged 32 white sharks in the span of that period with conventional tags. That gives you a sense of how rare the species is to encounter in the Atlantic. This is not an animal that I would be able go out and be able to predictably find. And then two years later, boom, we&amp;#039;ve tagged 11 because of the changing dynamics. So it&amp;#039;s kind of crazy to see that we might be actually going back to what once was, but hasn&amp;#039;t been, for as long as 200 or 300 years. 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<http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a11798/how-to-tag-a-great-white-shark-week/>