Well, we have tagged another great hammerhead shark (Sphyrna mokarran) with an archival satellite tag in Southern Queensland! Great trip and a lot of effort to get one hammerhead shark out of a total of 20 sharks in 5 days.! A health 3.2 m male with a massive dorsal fin (photo below) absolutely blew my mind! I don't think I have smiled so much in my life, that's one more tag for the PhD and one less weight off my shoulders (still heavy though :( ).
We brought him to waist deep water and I grabbed his caudal fin and flipped him into tonic immobility, whilst catching my breath and holding back my excitement. An absolutely great creature, placid and relaxed and no damage to him, We kept water flowing through the gills and allowed him to relax while we took morphometric data and attached the tag.
At this point, I am kneeling in the water and have the hammerhead over my knee's, super (yes super) excited and marveling at how great this great hammerhead is. Once the team caught up, we monitored him, took measurements and placed the tag onto the dorsal fin.
Once attached, we de-hooked him, turned him upright and begun to swim him off out of the shallow water towards the deep. I kept hold of his caudal section feeling the movements telling me his is OK as he regained his gait, strongly moving his tail and swum off into the blue. Super stoked.
With this tag on, we hope gain as much data as possible about his movements and habits until the tag comes off, hopefully 1 year, but nothing ever goes to plan. Like most things in science, you have to work hard and long before you get a result, not everything goes your way. At this one shark in 5 days made the trip worthwhile. At the start of the trip, no sleep lots of preparation/cost and hope, 3 days in with no hammerhead lead me into disappear and all the effort into the trip as well as the ever lingering stress of no data begun to weigh heavily. A constant reminder that shark science is not all fun and games in the water, every day passing with no result is costly. When you do get data, its long long days in front of a computer stressing out over the task at hand!
Lets see where he went! And for now, this is just one chapter, I have more to work on!