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Robot tracks white sharks, app lets you follow them

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Photographer: ABC News
Copyright 2012 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Posted: 08/20/2012

And you thought Shark week was over.

ABC News reports a  team of marine biologists have deployed a self-propelled Wave Glider robot off the coast of San Francisco that listens for and tracks white sharks.

But the robot is only one piece of the high-tech puzzle: an app for iPhone and iPad lets everyone, non-marine biologists and marine biologists alike, see the information the robot is collecting about the sharks.

The Shark Net app provides images, sounds, and video of white sharks off the coast of California.

Over 4,000 tags have been placed on animals across the Pacific, including sharks, tuna, and whales.

The new Wave Glider joins a number of fixed buoys that have been picking up the signals from those tagged animals.

"The Wave Glider is moving along on a fixed trajectory. If there is a tagged animal within 2,400 feet it will hear that tag and it will relay that information to our ground station," Stanford professor Barbara Block told ABC News.

if you have the Shark Net app on your iPhone or iPad. The iOS app's interactive map lets you see the location of the sharks in respect to the buoys and the Wave Glider.

The app covers 15 white sharks, which the team has been studying for as long as 25 years. There are also 3-D renderings of the sharks, and photos and videos about the project.

The free app is available now in the Apple App Store.

You can read the full article here .

Copyright 2012 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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