Local Movement of Sharks

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The capability of movement is one of the defining characteristics of animals. This act of motility can be performed in a variety of ways, such as swimming, flying, or walking, and for a variety of purposes. These purposes include finding food, mating, finding a suitable habitat, or to escape predators. More specifically, types of movement can be placed into two broad categories: local movement and migration. The great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias, is a species of shark that exhibits both of these movement behaviors and frequently they result in shark-human interaction. The purposes and environmental implications of the local movements and migration patterns of white sharks is being researched and understood.
Local movement is defined as the movement of an organism from one place to another, usually within a short distance and for short periods of time. For some animals, this involves predation or herbivory, mating, or finding resources. The local movements of White sharks have been studied by numerous people and their conclusions of their research have detailed the purposes for their movement.
One purpose for movement is sexual segregation. One study that showed this was conducted by Kock, O’Rain, Mauff, Meyer, Kotze, and Griffiths in False Bay, which is on the south-western tip of South Africa, where it opens to the Atlantic Ocean. There is an island found in this bay that is home to the second-largest island-based breeding colony of Cape fur seals. All of these conditions make it an excellent place for White sharks to congregate. The researchers lured the sharks to the boat using chum and a dense foam seal decoy in order to tag 56 sharks and to determine their sex (39 female, 17 male). The sharks were monitored with ac...

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...ness overtime. Some of these long term affects have been monitored in other wildlife that is attracted for the viewing pleasure of humans and include “dependence on provisioning, overfeeding, malnourishment, increased aggression, altered behavior, disrupted ecological relationships and an unbalancing of energetic budgets” (Huveeneers et al. 2013).
Sharks reside in almost all of the ocean waters in the world, and the Great White shark in particular has a wide-range of areas that it inhabits. Although numerous studies have been performed on this species, the local movements and the migratory patterns and their purposes are still not fully known. More investigations and research need to be performed in order to implement coordinated global conservation of these apex predators since growing shark-human interaction is starting have a negative impact on the populations.

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