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 cellphone rang and the treasure hunt of a lifetime began.
It was her daughter, a shark researcher 1,200 miles away in Chatham, 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 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, 35, a research scientist at the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy. “But physically recovering the tag is an incredibly tough thing to do.”
Shark researchers put various types of tags on sharks. Some are simple acoustic tags that broadcast an identifying signal that can be heard by receivers attached to buoys in shallow waters along the shoreline. This $4,000 archival satellite pop-up tag records the shark’s location using the angle of the light and the time, as well as environmental data like water temperature and depth. It can also determine the shark’s acceleration, which may be indicative of feeding or other life processes.
“It’s high-resolution data with a lot more detail about what the fish was doing,” Megan said. This was the first of these tags her team had ever recovered.
She once watched 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. Data is logged every 15 seconds on an archival tag, but a lot of that data is summarized when it is broadcast to the shore via satellite as the tag floats following detachment. This tag had 2 million data points, she said, which would show shark movements and environment on a far finer scale if retrieved and downloaded.
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,” she said.
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.
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 captain Chip Michalove of Outcast Charters in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.
Michalove works with the White Shark Conservancy and the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries. Fisheries senior scientist Greg Skomal, who works with Megan, is a leader in white shark research and is the person who alerted her that the tag they had been tracking washed ashore near St. Augustine.
Megan 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.
In September 2018, a 26-year-old man became the first person to be killed by a shark off the Cape 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’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.”
Megan said it’s exciting and fortuitous when someone you don’t know finds a tag, but when it’s family it’s really special.
“They’ve always been so supportive and they dropped what they were doing to do this scavenger hunt because they know how much it meant to me to get one of these back,” she said.
Cape Cod Times reporter Doug Fraser contributed to this report.
