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Great White Shark RFID/Satellite Tracking Shows Long Journeys, Many Beach Visits

Lucas123 writes "Marine biologists from OCEARCH, a non-profit shark research project, have been tagging scores of great whites and other shark species with an array of wireless technologies, gathering granular data on the sharks over the past year or more. For example, Mary Lee, a great white shark that's the same weight and nearly the same length as a Buick, was tagged off of Cape Cod and has made beach visits up and down the U.S. East Coast and Bermuda. She came so close to beaches that the research team alerted local authorities. The team attaches an array of acoustic and satellite tags as well as accelerometers to the sharks, which collect more than 100 data points every second — 8.5 million data points per day. The data has provided a detailed, three-dimensional view of the shark's behavior, which the team has been sharing in real time on its website. OCEARCH plans to expand that data sharing over the next few weeks to social networks and classrooms."

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  1. Sysadmin here for sharks-ocearch.verite.com! by ithinkurokayiguess · · Score: 5, Informative

    I love you guys. I'm spinning up extra capacity for sharks-ocearch.verite.com as we speak. So sorry for the slowness. Thanks for stopping by!

    1. Re:Sysadmin here for sharks-ocearch.verite.com! by ithinkurokayiguess · · Score: 5, Informative

      The site is currently running in Rackspace's datacenter in Chicago. The beautiful thing about the cloud is if there's more traffic than usual you can just spin up more server instances. Not to say the site is designed for any kind of scale, but fortunately the site data is fairly static, so I can fake scalability with some ugly rsyncs :)