MAINE PUBLIC • August 22, 2022
Matt Davis, pictured here, started earlier this year as the Maine Department of Marine Resources’ first researcher dedicated to studying great white sharks. White sharks were a common bycatch species and many fisheries prior to the 1990s. In the 1990s, there were some protections put in place federally that made it illegal to target or fish for white sharks in U.S. waters. And with those protections, their populations have been able to slowly begin recovery over the last several decades. “This year is the first year we've used the live receiver technology, and those have not yet detected any sharks in real time. As far as the what we call passive acoustic receivers, we have picked up a total of 39 individual white sharks in the one and a half years of data.“