Swimming in the sea has its risks.
Ali Truwit of Connecticut, USA was swimming with two friends in the British territory of Turks and Caicos in May 2023 when she was attacked by a shark. The 24-year-old managed to fight it off and escape from the predator but her left leg was badly mangled.
Truwit’s friends saved her life by applying a torniquet to stop the bleeding wound and rushed her to a hospital. She survived but her leg was amputated below the knee.
Months later, Truwit overcame her fear and returned to swimming. And by a stroke of luck, Truwit was able to train for and compete in the recently concluded Paris Paralympics, winning a silver medal for the US in the women’s S10 400-meter freestyle.
With the danger posed by sharks, marine conservationists tagging the predators to study their movements and habitats found the sharks could also be at risk.
Dr. Brooke Anderson, a marine fisheries biologist in the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, led a team of scientists that tagged pregnant porbeagle sharks off Cape Cod in Massachusetts in 2020 to identity areas where they lived in order to protect them.
The researchers used rods and reels to catch the sharks and bring them aboard their boat where each was outfitted with two satellite tags, one a transmitter mounted on the fin to indicate its location when it is above water, CNN reports.
The other pop-off tag measured depth and ocean temperatures and stored the data until the tag popped off after a certain amount of time, floated to the surface and transmitted its data to satellites for analysis by the researchers, according to CNN.
After 158 days, eight months earlier than expected, the researchers began receiving data transmitted from the sea southwest of Bermuda, suggesting that the tag had come off a shark and was floating on the ocean’s surface, said the study published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.
Meanwhile, the porbeagle’s fin-mounted tag had stopped functioning.
Based on the data, the tag recorded a sudden spike in temperature of 22 degrees Celsius at a depth of 150 to 600 meters for four days in March 2021.
“This indicated that the tag was now inside the stomach of a warm-bodied predator such as a lamnid shark,” Anderson told CNN.
Anderson’s team suspected that a larger great white shark had eaten the tagged pregnant porbeagle shark, which could be the first documented predation event of such species anywhere in the world.