Can Sharks Help Predict Hurricanes?

Is there a secret connection between sharks and hurricanes? Outside of both being the names of teams in the NHL, that isn’t all that apparent — but it turns out that one group of scientists are using one of them to better understand the other. To clarify, they’re using sharks to study hurricanes, now the other way around. After all, it’s a lot easier to get electronic sensors on a shark than a hurricane.

Writing at The Washington Post, Dino Grandoni has more details on this initiative — and why sharks are the creatures being used for it. Aaron Carlisle of the University of Delaware told the Post that he and his colleagues opted to use sharks to gather data because they could go where human researchers could not. “[B}y instrumenting the animals that live out there, you can basically turn them into these ocean sensors that are constantly collecting data.”

As the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has pointed out, scientists have found a connection between ocean temperatures and the severity of hurricanes. So the more data scientists have available to them about different regions of the ocean, the more they can predict about how serious extreme weather might be.

Arctic Sharks Are Now Showing Up in the Caribbean, Apparently

The Greenland shark was spotted in the area for the first time in history, seemingly vacationing off the coast of Belize

The Post notes that sharks are not the only aquatic creatures that scientists have enlisted to better understand the planet’s oceans. Narwhals, seals and dolphins have also been used in various efforts around the world.

Initial results from one tagged shark has been, according to Carlisle’s comments to the Post, “a great proof of concept.” He and his colleagues hope to expand their efforts in the future, including working with a wide variety of shark species. Turns out the process of better understanding stormy weather can involve unlikely collaborations. And it’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time sharks have been involved in research efforts like this.

Meet your guide

Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…