The proliferation of satellite-based telemetry and its application to studying the behavior and physiology of marine megafauna have greatly expanded our ability to describe basic, yet poorly understood elements of these species’ biology ( Hart and Hyrenbach, 2009 Hussey et al., 2015 Sequeira et al., 2018), and are now being used to better understand the risks they face (e.g., Queiroz et al., 2019) and to gauge how they will respond to a warming ocean (e.g., Bastien et al., 2020). The remote monitoring of marine megafauna is made difficult by the logistical challenges of working in the marine environment, as well as the operational limits of the most recent electronic tag technologies. Our results suggest that 360-degree cameras provide complimentary benefits-and in some cases superior efficiency-than unidirectional video packages, with an enhanced capacity to map seafloor. The resulting data provided detailed information on habitat use, diving behavior, and swimming speed, as well seafloor mapping. Leveraging the three-dimensional nature of the imaging technology, we derived 224 seafloor habitat assessments over the course of the nearly 1-h track, whereby the shark was able to survey ∼23,000 square meters of seafloor over three-times greater than the capacity of non 360-degree cameras. Here we provide, for the first time, an application of 360-degree camera technology to a marine organism, using a large tiger shark as a proof-of-concept case study. However, their utility to serve as robust scientific tools in the greater bio-logging research community has not been fully realized.
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