Welcome Caitlyn!

HMC student Caitlyn Ossa (second from left, to the right of Felicity in image below) was finally able to join us on Sunday. She participated in shark tagging the very next day and can be seen wrangling a nurse shark in the first image. Dr. Espinoza can be seen managing the hook attached to this juvenile nurse shark.

A ray was also tagged this day!

 

Shark Tagging Episode 2

This week has been highly successful with respect to shark tagging. All students were able to aid in shark tagging that took place on two separate days of catching and tagging sharks. Image below shows HMC student Yoo-Jin Hwang measuring a recently caught nurse shark after she and team we able to position the shark in a state of "tonic immobility" (upside-down).

Two types of tags were embedded in the shark: 1) an acoustic transmitter tag that emits acoustic signals at pseudo-random intervals, and 2) PIT (passive integrated transponders) tags that can be used to identify the shark if re-caught later.