Free Republic

Real-time buoys to be placed off 3 beaches. WELLFLEET — With little fanfare, shark detection technology on Cape Cod took a small step forward last weekend off Newcomb Hollow Beach, the site of last year’s fatal shark attack on bodyboarder Arthur Medici. Cape Cod and regional public safety officials have been hoping for years to employ a kind of souped-up version of what they already have, an acoustic receiver attached to a buoy that can not only detect signals from tagged great white sharks but relay an instantaneous alert to lifeguards and beach administrators. One such device was deployed off...

The sky was winter gray, but researchers took advantage Friday of a relatively rare day with calm seas and little wind to retrieve 18 acoustic shark detection buoys off the Outer Cape and another eight or nine in Cape Cod Bay. Although these buoys primarily record signals from sharks whose tags emit a unique identifying signal, they also record water temperature. Shark researchers Gregory Skomal of the state Division of Marine Fisheries and Megan Winton, a doctoral candidate at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s School of Marine Science and Technology, hope to use this temperature data to create a computer...

WELLFLEET -- An acoustic receiver, attached to a buoy, that uses email to alert officials and lifeguards to the presence of a tagged white shark is in place in the waters off Wellfleet’s Newcomb Hollow Beach and will soon be installed off Nauset Beach in Orleans and Head of the Meadow in Truro, according to shark researcher and scientist Greg Skomal, of the state Division of Marine Fisheries. The device can detect a tagged shark if it swims within 100 to 200 meters of the buoy, he said, but issues no alert when non-tagged sharks, population unknown, swim by, meaning...