Tiger shark Galapagos

Courtesy of the Charles Darwin Foundation

In January, marine scientists from the Charles Darwin Foundation captured and tagged several tiger sharks near the Galapagos Islands for the first time ever. The goal of the project was to gain a better understanding of the sharks’ migratory movements in an effort to improve conservation efforts around the world.

One of the sharks, a thirteen-foot female dubbed Yolanda (after Yolanda Kakabadse Navarro, president of WWF-Ecuador), recently returned to islands after what appears to be a pretty interesting journey. According to data available at www.ocearch.org, Yolanda roamed as far as 600 nautical miles north of the archipelago to the Hess Deep Rift. From February to June, she circled Bachus beach on Santa Cruz, where she was presumably hunting the many green sea turtles that nest there. She arrived back in the Galapagos Marine Reserve two weeks ago, just in time for turtle nesting season.

Check out this short video of January’s shark tagging efforts and see Yolanda for yourself: