Blue shark deep diving record

This video from the USA says about itself:

Jonathan Bird’s Blue World: Blue Shark Adventure

Mar 12, 2013

Jonathan joins Charlie Donilon on his shark charter boat in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and learns about how shark tagging has shed light on the biology of and behavior of Blue sharks. Tagging has shown that these incredible swimmers actually migrate completely across the Atlantic ocean. Jonathan tries his hand at tagging a shark and then swims with Blue sharks. We also learn that Blue sharks are not nearly as vicious as they have been reputed to be, and the divers are actually able to pet the sharks!

From the New Zealand Herald:

Shark’s record dive into the blue

By Morgan Tait

5:30 AM Thursday Apr 25, 2013

Recently tagged male blue shark plunges 1250m off the Bay of Plenty coast in a quest for a meal of squid.

A shark broke a world record when he dived deeper than any recorded before off the coast of New Zealand this week.

Bodhi, a 2.5m male blue shark, dived 1250m deep off the Bay of Plenty coast on Tuesday, data from satellite tagging research by University of Auckland PhD student Riley Elliott has shown.

Mr Elliott tagged the shark three weeks ago off the Coromandel Peninsula as part of his study to track the habitat use and migration of blue sharks in New Zealand waters.

Bodhi is one of eight sharks monitored with tags that transmit their location to Mr Elliott’s computer, but only one of two fitted with tags that also record depth and water temperature.

“This guy went from the Coromandel out into the Bay of Plenty area and went about 100km off the Bay of Plenty. There he’s in 2000m of water at a big … underwater volcano, and for some reason he realised that he wants to go down for a dive – so he went from the surface water down to the deepest recorded depth a blue shark has ever gone.”

The previous record was held by a 1.8m female blue shark tagged in Portugal. She dived to 1160m.

Bodhi was probably chasing squid – 60 per cent of a blue shark’s diet – when he made the dive, said Mr Elliott.

“It’s unusual for sharks to dive so deep. They usually stay in the top layer of water because it isn’t efficient for an animal to do that unless they’re getting a reward, so that further supports the idea that it’s foraging.”

Mr Elliott’s study was the first of its kind in NZ waters, and such finds so early on are encouraging.

“He did 90m more which isn’t a great amount but the fact that he’s only been tagged for about three weeks and is still in coastal waters and has recorded a depth deeper than ever recorded means he’ll probably dive deeper throughout the one to three years the tag should keep giving me information.”

Professor John Montgomery, Mr Elliott’s supervisor and Leigh Marine Laboratory director, said the record was likely to be one of many to come from the work.

“I suspect this is the first of a number of very interesting findings that will come out of this study,” he said. “There’s a whole new wave of technology coming out with respect to those tags which provide really new insights into what those animals are doing and where they are.”

Mr Elliott hoped his research would increase knowledge about sharks and their behaviour and aid shark conservation projects.

Record-setting shark

• 2.5m male blue shark named Bodhi.
• Satellite tagged off Castle Rock, Coromandel, three weeks ago.
• Dived 1250m deep off Bay of Plenty coast on Tuesday.
• Previous record was 1160m dived by a 1.8m female shark tagged in Portugal.

Blue sharks use large, swirling ocean currents, known as eddies, to fast-track their way down to feed in the ocean twilight zone — a layer of the ocean between 200 and 1000 meters deep containing the largest fish biomass on Earth, according to new research by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the Applied Physics Lab at the University of Washington (UW). Their findings were published August 6, 2019, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: here.

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