ABSTRACT
Although great strides have been made in understanding shark behavior and ecology due to advances in technology, many technical challenges still exist in quantifying how elasmobranchs behave in response to their environment, conspecics, prey, and predators. Telemetry (acoustic and satellite), sensor, video, and data logger technology have all provided new insights into how sharks move, select habitat, and interact with other species; however, data collection can be arduous, expensive, time consuming, and spatially and temporally limiting. Satellite telemetry (see Chapter 19 in this volume) can provide valuable data on the water temperature and depths that wide-ranging elasmobranchs move through, but this technology does not provide much in the way of nescale geospatial positions or behavioral state. Alternatively, acoustic telemetry (see Chapter 8 in this volume) can provide either short-term, high-resolution position information and corresponding environmental data (e.g., water temperature, depth, activity rate) via active tracking or longer term, lower resolution position information for many animals simultaneously, but over a much more limited spatial scale via passive tracking. Active tracking, in particular, is typically labor intensive and allows for tracking of one individual at a time, whereas passive tracking is much less labor intensive but spatially limited by the size of a stationary array.
