Endangered Hammerheads Are Swimming Away From Protection

A new study of specific hammerhead migration routes has found that these sharks are often swimming straight into unprotected waters - a worrying fact that experts are using to help argue for more protective zones to close the gaps.

Hammerheads have been seeing drastic declines in recent years, where some of these shark populations have dropped by up to a stunning 90 percent.

"In Mexico in the eighties, the sea of Cortes was one of the best places to see these beautiful and majestic animals but at present it's hard to see even a few," researcher Mauricio Hoyos from Pelagios Kakunjá said in a statement. "The key to protecting this species is detecting their nursery grounds and protecting them in their more vulnerable stages."

To detect when these sharks are most threatened, Hoyos and his colleagues recently captured and tagged three juvenile hammerhead sharks in the hopes of tracking their development and migration patterns. The sharks were tracked for more than 10 months, with data from one female shark revealing a stunning 3,350-km journey from the Gulf of California. (Scroll to read on...)

"This is the first time ever that we have an idea of the behavior of this life stage in this zone and this information will be important to design management plans to protect this species in Mexico," Hoyos said.

According to the study, tag data revealed that the young female hammerhead swam within a school of fellow hammerheads at an offshore island during the day, but migrated away at night, diving to greater depths to feed on fish and squid, sometimes as deep as 270 meters.

The tag also revealed an unexpectedly wide range of where she foraged, suggesting that food resources for the sharks are scarce, with pressures from human fishing operations largely to blame.

That's why the researchers are saying that current measures to protect the food supply of these young sharks are insufficient, and must be widened to help give the little guys a fighting chance.

The tagging results are detailed in full in the journal Animal Biotelemetry.