In marine science, some discoveries unfold in the lab, others at sea. And some begin with a surprise email from an old colleague. In early 2024, I received such a message from Dr. Chelsea Black. Chelsea, now at Project Hiu in Indonesia, had been an intern long ago while I was working in Mossel Bay, South Africa. She had a mystery on her hands and it involved a serial number to a tag that apparently belonged to a shark from a project I helped plan.
The trouble, however, was that we never wrote down the serial numbers to the tags! It sounds ridiculous, but these tags transmit a different identifier when communicating with satellites, a Platform Transmitter Terminal ID, and that, naturally, is what we recorded. To complicate matters further, the tag was initially believed to have come from a Tiger shark that was landed in a fish market in Indonesia. Could this be a tag of ours? And what was it doing on a Tiger shark?
I immediately got in touch with a few other colleagues and went searching for any record of this serial number. Did we recycle an old tag? Did someone use an old tag for a film shoot? We scratched our heads and questioned out sanity. Eventually unraveling the truth and revealing an incredible journey. Colleagues at Ocearch, Wildlife Computers, Project Hiu, and others involved with the original project dug up old data sheets, searched through email correspondences and chased down purchase and refurbishment orders. It turns out, the tag did belong to us, to a White shark we knew as Alisha!
We detail the incredible story and findings in a Perspective article to Wildlife Research, which you can read here.
The implications are profound. This is the first physical evidence of a white shark traveling between southern Africa and Southeast Asia. It’s also only the second transoceanic journey from South Africa documented for the species, following another that famously travelled to Australia. This newly discovered link broadens our understanding of white shark dispersal, habitat use, and connectivity across the Indian Ocean. It also reinforces just how easy it is to overlook their presence in understudied regions like Indonesia, where they are rarely reported and easily confused with other large pelagic species.
But beyond the science, this story is about connection between continents, between species, and between people. It’s about the long reach of a project we started over a decade ago, and how it found its way back to us through the efforts of conservationists, fishers, and, unexpectedly, an old colleague. It’s a reminder that a project doesn’t end when the last tag transmits. Sometimes it circles back years later, in unexpected ways, with even more to teach us.
We are grateful for the fishers who held onto that tag, for the Project Hiu initiative, and for the long memory of science itself. Moments like these remind us that science doesn’t happen in isolation. Conservation is a shared voyage, one that depends on our collective efforts and global perspective.
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