Collaborative Research: Multisensory guidance of marine animal navigation and prey capture

Understanding how animals navigate under water is not only fascinating in its own right, it also contributes to instrumentation designs of underwater vehicles, robots and surface vessels, impacts management of fisheries, and helps protect the marine environment. Sharks have been chosen to demonstrate how they navigate. While they can not detect a drop of blood a mile away, as often stated, sharks do have impressive prey tracking capabilities. Sharks are important in fisheries worldwide and have been severely depleted in recent decades, often taken as unwanted by-catch in other fisheries. Yet, they are essential top predators needed to maintaining a healthy ecosystem. This research project will show how sharks use all their senses in hunting behavior, starting with initial prey detection, through tracking and locating, and ending with striking their prey. For more complete understanding, we compare a few shark species that appear to use their senses differently mostly because they specialize in different prey in different habitats. A team of experts in sensory and shark biology, using unique testing facilities in Massachusetts and Florida, has been assembled including graduate students being trained in the many technical approaches needed for work on live sharks. The research directly involves undergraduate and high school students and provides extensive outreach to other students of all ages and to the public in general. The accumulated knowledge should lead to a model of shark navigation and predation that can be used for the conservation of sharks, protection of humans, and the engineering design of underwater steering algorithms. The inevitable presentation of this research in future television programs and video documentaries will disseminate new knowledge to the public at large, both of sharks and of rigorous science.