Wade Cautiously Through This Awesome Shark Tracking Map

Ever wonder what those reality TV scientists do when they’re not being followed around by cameras and microphones? Real research, it turns out.

The team of oceanographers that were the subjects of the History Channel’s “Shark Wranglers” have been turning some heads with a new GPS-powered shark tracking map they’ve developed. At a basic level, all Chris Fischer and his crew are doing is tagging great whites with tracking chips and then streaming their locations to a simple web-based map for the public to play with. (It’s actually sort of fun to find the sharks on the map and then contemplate taking your friends and family on a beach vacation nearby without telling them about the danger.) In practice, they’re actually breaking tons of new ground in shark research and hope that all of the data they’re collecting will help them better protect sharks in the future..

The big innovation that Fischer — good name — and his crew have made lies in the tracking chip itself. Shark researchers typically use a tracker mounted on a harpoon that they fire at the shark while she’s swimming around in the water. The tracking chip comes off, and the shark swims away. Nobody gets hurt. The problem, however, is that the chip typically falls off in about six months and isn’t as accurate as it could be. Fischer’s using a different method whereby his team actually captures the shark, brings it on board and drills a more sophisticated GPS tracker into its dorsal fin. This chip beams the shark’s location up to a satellite every time the shark’s fin breaks above the water and can last up to five years.

Animal right’s activists aren’t thrilled about Fischer’s new method, though. They argue that catching the shark causes unnecessary stress and trauma for the animal. After all, once the researchers hook the animal, they basically swim it around to the point of exhaustion before they can finally reel it in. They even accidentally killed one shark off the coast of South Africa using this technique. When the team was working off the coast of Cape Cod, the locals didn’t take too kindly to their research and submitted a petition with 750 signatures to the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries claiming that, in the words of the New York Times, “the project was being carried out under the guise of science for sensationalist and for-profit purposes like reality television.”

Fischer pushes back against the criticism. “This vessel is one of the only platforms that gives scientists unprecedented access to the great fish,” he told the Times. "Any time you capture a fish by any methodology, you're going to expose it to some level of stress. But we try to minimize that." After all, saving a species isn’t supposed to be easy.