Professor Charlie Huveneers from Flinders University’s College of Science and Engineering is part of an expansive international expedition to study and conserve the great hammerhead shark in French Polynesia.

The TAMATAROA project is a collaborative project with Florida International University and Universite de la Polynesie Francaise, which has so far submitted one paper to Frontiers in Marine Science, while a 12-minute film highlighting this first expedition is currently being produced for national and international broadcast in September.

“The first TAMATAROA mission, which ran from December 2022 to March 2023, was a real success. The project’s many human, technical and scientific challenges were intended to be ambitious, innovative and even unprecedented – yet they have been met and even surpassed,” explains Professor Huveneers.

After more than 1000 hours spent underwater by the research divers, 140 sharks were identified, 60 acoustic receivers deployed, 13 animals tagged, 7 tissue samples taken and 300 hectares of marine habitat mapped.

This first mission confirms the unique nature of this region of the world for the preservation of the great hammerhead shark in the central Pacific – and with more than 100 people actively engaged in this project through participatory science, its awareness-raising and communication aspects are reaching a very wide audience through information panels, events, conferences, school talks, science aperitifs and simple informal exchanges.

After several months of data processing and preparing the next stages, a second mission will be launched in December 2023, to extend the great hammerhead shark monitoring network to other Polynesian atolls. A doctoral thesis project overseeing the scientific aspect of the TAMATAROA project will be launched at the same time, under the supervision of the University of French Polynesia.