A research group out of U.C. Santa Barbara has spent years using drones to track white sharks off our coast in order to predict how close sharks may come to shore.
For the last four years, research assistant Samantha Mladjov has been flying drones for SharkEye. And just minutes after take-off, we found our first one.
"This is a smaller shark. And when I mean smaller, I would say under eight feet," Mladjov said while showing me live footage of a shark just off the coast of Santa Barbara.
Several times a week, Dr. Douglas McCauley and his research team fly drones in Santa Barbara County to gather data on sharks swimming near the coast.
"It's going to be overcast, the waves are going to be high and there's a chance of white sharks," said Dr. McCauley, Director at the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory.
McCauley has been studying sharks for decades and now leads Project SharkEye. The goal is to develop a forecasting tool to help predict what time of the year, day, and ocean conditions are more or less likely to have sharks.
"The same way you create a forecast for weather or a hurricane. Can you do that for sharks? We think we can," McCauley said.
During our 30-minute interview on a cloudy day, we saw three sharks, which McCauley says is pretty normal. With the number of sharks on any given day ranging from zero to 15.
"We have more sharks than ever before in the waves here in California. We have more people than ever before, so hopefully we can use some of these tools of science and technology to make sure that we keep sharing this wild space and keep people going into the ocean but without any incidents," McCauley said.
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