Tiger sharks are moving north with some experts believing the new migration to be a result of climate change. Migrations are not abnormal for tiger sharks.
A new study by NOAA fisheries demonstrated that tiger sharks are moving, and it may be because of the ocean warming.
“Our tagging and tournament sampling data show that tiger sharks have always spent time in northern latitudes at least going back to the 1960s and 1970s,” said Cami McCandless, study co-author and lead for the NOAA Fisheries’ Apex Predators Program.
The warming of the water temperature make wildlife more vulnerable to fishing. The tiger sharks as a species are highly migratory. The distributing of tiger sharks extends from Cape Cod in Massachusetts to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico.
Experts believe this new migration to have been a gradual thing that took place over the past several decades. This new research on tiger sharks was announced to the public in the journal Global Change Biology. Satellite data, habitat modeling and capture data were used for the research in the study.
Forty-seven tiger sharks were tagged as a part of the study. The new data is is compared to tiger sharks that were tagged from 1980 to 2018.
