Why Sharks Are Critical to Ecosystem: Atlantic Shark Institute Director Dodd on GoLocal LIVE

Atlantic Shark Institute Executive Director Jon Dodd appeared on GoLocal LIVE, after announcing that four great whites were detected off the coast of Block Island recently. 

"It’s a pretty exciting discovery, because last year we began this research," said Dodd. "It’s a shark array basically -- we’ve got ten different acoustic receivers throughout Rhode Island and seven of those are around Block Island. Last year we just had two around Block Island and we picked up a couple of detections of white sharks."

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"This year we increased that array from two to seven and we just checked the receivers a couple of days ago, and we had four white sharks on the receivers in the last few weeks," he said. "They ranged in size from a small of eight feet to a large of a little over thirteen feet."

"I suspect [the number of sharks detected] is going to rise significantly probably through July and August, knowing these sharks head south again in September, October, November," Dodd added.

Research in Focus

"I think the most important thing — and I think the thing that people really don’t fully understand is the role these sharks play in the balance, if you will," said Dodd. "There have been studies where sharks are taken out of an ecosystem and the balance is thrown into disarray."

"What I mean by that is these fish then might do more damage to coral reef systems, that might attack smaller fish that don’t get to adulthood and reproduce," he said. "So when you take sharks out of the ecosystem there’s a real cascade effect here that upsets the balance and that can have some pretty catastrophic kinds of effects."

"So what we’re trying to do is work with researchers and research teams and we also do some research ourselves but we’re all about trying to figure out what this population is doing, where they’re going, what the numbers are doing, where they reside, where they might give birth, how many young might survive, do they get to a point where they can reproduce and how does that all interconnect," he said. 

"It seems like every time there’s an answer to a question there’s ten more questions — so it’s an interesting process," he added."

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