Dr. Boris Worm and a colleague discuss their observations after diving in baie des Anglais, near Baie-­Comeau. Photo © Jeffrey Gallant (GEERG.ca)

The Worm Lab from Dalhousie University has teamed up with GEERG to study the movements of the Greenland shark and the basking shark in the St. Lawrence Gulf and Estuary.

Thanks to the contribution of Dr. Boris Worm who is known worldwide for his leading scientific contributions on fish populations, we will be able to deploy six pop-up satellite archival tags (PSATs) in 2012. This type of transmitter has the advantage of not requiring an underwater receiver to record the data. We may thus follow the movements of tagged sharks no matter how far they travel.

The first tentative deployment on the Greenland shark will take place in June 2012 in the Baie-­Comeau area. Basking shark tag deployments will take place later in the summer off the Gaspé Peninsula.

The Worm Lab includes students and postdoctoral fellows engaged in the study of marine biodiversity, its causes, consequences of change, and conservation.