Tim Hawk | For NJ.com
What he does
Twice a week during the summer, Dunton and his small band of student assistants pack up their fishing gear and head to the water.They'll spend hours at a time fishing with local anglers for sharks. If they're lucky enough to catch one, Dunton will take quick measurements of the shark and determine its sex before performing a quick surgery to insert an acoustic tracking tag in the fish's abdomen. Then, the shark is released.Its a demographic study of Garden State sharks. Dunton's work aims to determine what kinds of sharks pass through N.J., how many there are and how close do they travel to the shoreline. But the tags add another layer, allowing Dunton to track the shark's migration patterns and study the survival rates of sharks that are caught and released from land.
Photo courtesy of Keith Dunton
Why he does it
By catching and tagging the sharks, Dunton hopes to gain a better understanding of New Jersey's shark population.That understanding matters. Dunton called sharks a "big conservation need" because many shark species are in decline worldwide. The decline is spurred by overfishing globally, a big challenge for sharks because they take years to be able to procreate and they only give birth to a few offspring."This is just one step," Dunton said. "You have to study sharks in order to save them."
What he's learned
This is the second summer that Dunton has spent doing this work, and so far he's racked up records on more than 100 sharks caught in New Jersey. Most of those have been sand tiger sharks and sandbar sharks, but other species have been caught as well.So far, sharks tracked by Dunton have been found as far south as Florida and as far north as Cape Cod."I always think of the New Jersey and New York coasts as like an ocean highway that fish like striped bass and sturgeon and sharks all have to follow this coast up to wherever their final destination might be," Dunton said.Dunton has also found a "fairly high" survival rate among sharks that are caught and released by land-based anglers.The migratory patterns fall in line with what other researchers have found in other shark studies. Any major revelations about the sharks, Dunton said, will come with more time and research.