A new study co-led by URI shark researcher Brad Wetherbee has yielded the first long-term satellite tracking of tiger sharks, revealing previously unknown migration patterns that are more similar to birds, turtles and marine mammals than other fish.

Tiger sharks had long been believed to be a mainly coastal species. But the sharks Wetherbee and his colleagues from Nova Southeastern University tracked made 7,500-kilometer, round-trip journeys every year between two vastly different ecosystems: the coral reefs of the Caribbean and the open waters of the North Atlantic.

And they returned reliably to the same areas each year, a discovery with significant conservation implications.

The team attached tags to sharks near Bermuda that stayed in place for up to three years. The tracking showed that adult male tiger sharks in the Atlantic spend their winters in Caribbean island locales, including the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos Islands, and Anguilla. During summer, they travel into the North Atlantic, often more than 3,500 kilometers and as far north as southern New England, though well offshore in nearly the middle of the ocean.

The only other instance when researchers have found a broadly similar, repeated migration pattern between coastal and distant open water regions is with the warm-bodied, great white and salmon sharks in the Pacific. White sharks migrate in the winter from the California and Baja coasts to a mid-Pacific open water area dubbed the White Shark Café. “We joke that tiger sharks, not being media stars like white sharks, wouldn’t be comfortable in a café and prefer to hang out in their truckstop in the mid-Atlantic,” says Wetherbee.