Geographic Profiling On Sharks

In order to find out and prove that sharks don't actually hunt at random, a Thornhill researcher and a groupo of American colleagues used a forensic profiling technique known as geographic profiling, which is often used to find serial killers, to find the exact hunting places of some sharks.
It had been recently discovered that sharks might have much in common with human killers, such as stalking prey.

Geographic profiling can't determine where a specific shark is, but it can show info that sharks' hunting ways are not random. If sharks' hunting skills were random, then sharks would be a primitive species, going to where its food (mainly seals) are most concentrated. Actually, sharks tend to have one place where they stalk prey, without having to travel directly in their prey's path.

The idea to use geographic profiling for tracking sharks came to R. Aidan Martin (died February 2007) of British Columbia, while reading a CSI crime novel about a cop using geographic profiling to hunt down serial killers. The guy who invented this technique lived in Vancouver. He is Kim Rossmo, former Vancouver beat cop, currently professor of criminal justice at Texas State University.

Geographic profiling works by locating the scenes of various linked crimes, then, computational models help locate the criminal's base of operatons, an "anchor point". This then reduces the search area into smaller search area to look for the suspect.

Geographic profiling has been done on bats and bees before, and have worked. Same with the sharks. It turns out that they do have central hunting point. They kept returning to the same point to feed.

The scientists plotted the sites of 340 shark attacks on seals around the Seal Island off the coast of South Africa. Also, with sonar maps of the reefs and sea floors in the area, they plotted the points of the shark attacks. Then, they sent the info into Kim Rossmo's program. They found out that the points added up to some distinct and commonized hunting patterns..

The program can churn out info if search patterns are affected by an anchor base, and also where the base is. The anchor base is somewhat of a balance of being able to detect prey, being able to get prey, and have less competition while feeding.

Another thing is that only the bigger sharks have anchor points for feeding. Smaller sharks are more spread apart while feeding.