It’s rare for a tag that’s been on a shark for a year to be found by researchers after it pops off. What happened to one shark tag in St. Augustine is nothing short of astonishing.
Denise Winton was finishing lunch at The Back 40 restaurant in St. Augustine when her cell phone rang and the treasure hunt of a lifetime began.
It was her daughter, a shark researcher 1,200 miles away in Chatham, Mass., with a tip. A 10-foot great white named Cousin Eddie that she had been following for a year lost its satellite tracker, but a Dec. 17 GPS ping was showing the lightbulb-shaped device had washed up on a nearby St. Augustine-area beach.
Recovering a shark tracker after it detaches is rare. They’re often swept into the watery unknown, able to transmit summary information until the battery dies, but taking with them millions of data points on a fish’s detailed travels.
It wasn’t until recently that technological advances in shark tagging confirmed the secrets of great white migration from summers spent in New England waters to wintertime journeys near Florida and into the Gulf of Mexico.
Each tracking device is a wealth of information — a fortune Denise Winton was determined to find for her daughter.
The St. Augustine resident raced out of The Back 40 so fast she left her purse behind.
“Getting a tag back is the best thing, it’s a bonanza of data,” said Megan Winton, 35, Denise’s daughter and a research scientist at the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy. “But physically recovering the tag is an incredibly tough thing to do.”
She watched once as a tag came off near St. Augustine, but got caught in the Gulf Stream current and was never returned. Short-term tags — those programmed to pop off in a month — are more likely to be found.
“It’s way different when it’s been on an animal for a year,” said Megan, who grew up in Jacksonville.
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While it was already fortuitous that Denise was only a few miles from the device, her other two daughters — Megan’s sisters — were actually on the beach near the location.
“So my mom and dad, both of my sisters and my niece and nephews all converged on this spot that I gave them to find the tag,” Megan said.
The search among the sand for the tracker
Denise searched the tide line for a while, but had to pause to go back and retrieve her purse from the restaurant. Megan’s father, Ben, had a 2 p.m. call at the office and had to end his pursuit. But a more detailed review of the latitude and longitude gave Denise a better idea of where to look.
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She counted houses on Google Earth from a beach entrance at Crescent Beach to better understand where the GPS marker was pinging, and she set off again with Megan’s sister Jenna.
Cousin Eddie was tagged in December 2018 by Capt. Chip Michalove of Outcast Charters in Hilton Head Island, S.C.
Michalove works with the White Shark Conservancy and the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries. Fisheries Senior Scientist Greg Skomal, who works with Winton, is a leader in white shark research and is the person who alerted Winton that a tag they had been tracking washed ashore near St. Augustine where her parents live.
When a satellite tag that’s been out on a white shark for a year washes ashore right next to where your parents are eating lunch, and your entire family heads to the beach and finds it, you might start to suspect you’re the luckiest person in the world 💜#Christmasmiracle pic.twitter.com/jgFEwYJQLD
— Megan Winton (@MegalodonWinton) December 17, 2019
Winton said recent research has focused on watching the movements of sharks near Cape Cod where a rebounding seal population is drawing the sharks closer to the beaches and people.
Sharks: A long-lived and vulnerable species
In September 2018, a 26-year-old man became the first person to be killed by a shark off Cape Cod since 1936. That attack followed an incident where a man was bitten but was able to escape from a white shark a month earlier near the same beach.
No white shark attacks have been recorded in Florida, according to the International Shark Attack file.
“This is a really long-lived and vulnerable species,” Megan said. “Besides the public safety perspective, where they are going and what they are interacting with is really valuable information.”
Megan told her mother and sister the tracker would be hard to find. It’s just a few inches long and black, easily hidden amid the seaweed and ocean debris caught in a wrack line.
Megan used a locator app on Denise Winton’s phone to follow along and direct them where to go via Facetime.
“She told me we were in the hot spot,” Denise said. “But even with her showing us and using Google, it was still a long shot.”
They walked in the same area over and over.
Then Jenna said, “I think I found it.”
The device and its antenna were covered in a fine fuzz of algae and dotted with barnacles, but they scraped away the grime and saw the contact information.
“Once we found out it was what we were looking for, we were all going crazy,” Denise said. “It was awesome.”
