Once upon a time in NoBo...
North Bondi is a classic dive site with little or no options for parking and often not much marine life but great rock topography - not everyone's favourite but some of us love it.
Once upon a time, the Grey Nurse Sharks took up residence there for a 6 week period - we dived it non stop during this time as it was amazing to be with these sharks on a local shore dive.
As we were doing these dives, logs were being recorded automatically by the dive computer and uploaded (as per standard operational procedure), with additional information on the sharks being added to separate fields.
This produced stanard graphs where dives with sharks could be shown in one colour (blue) and without in another (orange). Since we used to dive this site at least once a week, when we refreshed the graph display many months later, we were able to look at the trends over time and think about what the influences could be.
Since the dive computers also record temperature, we superimposed this on the graph.
There is some correlation in that we can see the temperature range that seems to suit the sharks - exprienced GNS observers have confirmed that they do not like water going below certain temperatures so there is some sense in the data.
In general, shark behaviour is in need of a lot more research (and funding to enable the research). Being able to superimpose temperature is an interesting example of finding more information in standard dive logs - we can do more with the citizen science projects though.
We also took many photos of the sharks during this time and submitted them to Spot a Shark.
This enables them to track the sharks movements and health by using the unique spot patterns along their sides to identify individuals. Effectively, it is like a fingerprint and anyone with a camera can contribute to process as it is a citizen science project.
The diagram below is from the Spot a Shark website as part of the guidance on what to include in the shots.
In general, we know how important sharks are for the health of our suffering oceans - the more data, the better and since many of us enjoy taking photos anyway, it is a simple process to upload the shot.
As a bonus, don't forget that there is info stored within the dive computer that can be useful as well - we often don't know what it would be useful for at the start but it can be a very useful reference in the future.
