Cayman Reef Sharks

Subscriber Content Preview
Only active subscribers can view the whole article here

That shark you saw last summer at Little Cayman may be the same shark you saw the summer before on Grand Cayman. That's one bit of information from a nearly decade-long study of Cayman sharks discovered, and there are many more surprises found by the researchers.

Grand Cayman and Little Cayman are 59 nautical miles apart, and Little Cayman is just 3.5 nautical miles (nm) from Cayman Brac. They have narrow coastal shelves - 43 percent are Marine Protected Areas - dropping to more than 2000 meters deep.

Beginning in 2010, researchers tagged 66 reef sharks off Little Cayman (60 percent), Grand Cayman (26 percent), and Cayman Brac (14 percent). They placed 57 acoustic receivers at various spots, covering about 7 percent of the coastal shelf. Through 2019, divers periodically retrieved the receivers, and the data was downloaded and the receivers reattached to their mooring lines. The last data downloaded was in 2019. Data yielded 77,651 shark detections, 11 percent at Grand Cayman, 54 percent at Little Cayman, and 35 percent at Cayman Brac....

Subscribers: Read the full article here

---

Get more dive info like these and other important scuba updates sent monthly to your email. And a FREE Recent Issue of Undercurrent
Get a free monthly email and a sample issue!