OCEARCH wraps up ‘unbelievably magical’ final Nova Scotian visit

The research team sampled 10 sharks, and founder Chris Fischer got to soak in some final time on the Nova Scotia coastline

HALIFAXtoday\ Kieran Delamont

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The fourth and final OCEARCH shark expedition to Nova Scotia’s waters has wrapped up after a “huge success,” says its founder. 

“The Nova Scotian expedition was a huge success, being able to sample 10 animals for the science team,” says OCEARCH founder Chris Fischer. “That count gets us up to 83 animals now in the entire northwest Atlantic, and approximately 35 out of Nova Scotia.”

The expedition launched in early September and concludes a four-year research project in Nova Scotia that has upended what Fischer and the shark science community thought about Atlantic Canada’s role in the shark ecosystem.

“Total pioneering of exploration,” Fischer says. “We’ve learned more in the past four years about white sharks in Atlantic Canada than was known up until that time. Four years, you know, that’s an amazing rate of learning.”

It wasn’t all that long ago that there was little awareness of sharks visiting our waters; chief among the various insights gleaned from this research, says Fischer, is just how regularly they are out there.

“Nova Scotia continues to provide predictable access to these white sharks. We found places where they live, we’ve shown the world now, so if a scientist wants to research there, it’s worth the investment,” Fischer says. “They are there, you can go get them.”

Nova Scotia’s shores, with plenty of seals to be had for peckish great whites, are a shark’s dream Fisher says — a veritable feast.

“When we first came up four years ago to Canada, we thought they might be mating up there,” he says. “Now we know they are not. The semen samples of the males are not viable, the hormone levels in the males are low and the hormone levels in the females are low.

“They arrive skinny after a long winter, like many animals that migrate vast distances. They come up here, they bulk up on seals — like many other animals that come to Nova Scotia,” he says. “They’ll slide south, and the mature animals will go down off the southeastern United States and attempt to mate in the late winter, early spring. The rest of them cruise down off the East Coast and are down below Cape Hatteras. Some go as far as the Gulf of Mexico.”

And then, as the spring weather hits, just like plenty of folks from Ontario, they head on back to Nova Scotia.

Surprisingly, despite Fischer’s sense that they have proven just how much science can be done up here, there’s “not really any of the Nova Scotian scientists” working with sharks, he says. Their main university researcher partner comes from the University of Windsor.

It’s been a bit of a stormy season, but the expedition got to work more than half of the days on the boat, which Fischer says is just about what they expect.

“We get pretty good about the weather we had,” he says.

The research project isn’t completely over, with the MC Ocearch planning to return to the northwest Atlantic over the next few years, probing the waters around Newfoundland.

“We have two more editions in the northwest Atlantic,” he says. “The most important thing I’m focused on now is, with the scientists when you get down to this point in the project, they need specific sizes of animals and sexes of animals, and from a specific location in order to complete the research. So we’re down to those kinds of things now.”

And on a personal note, Fischer says he’ll miss Nova Scotia, but was happy to make the most of it this year.

“I went on quite a few more small boat rides,” he says, “up into the islands and stuff, to try to soak it up. Unbelievably magical.”