388 
Fishery Bulletin 115(3) I 
Figure 5 
Tracks of 3 oceanic whitetip sharks ( Carcharhinus longimanus) tagged off northeast Brazil in the Atlantic Ocean at a 24-h 
interval in March 2012, (A) AOCS5, (B) AOCS6, and (C) AOCS7, and (D) the proportion of the 3 behavior types of vertical 
movement across those tracks. The 2 colors for each month indicate the first and second halves of the month. 
Table 2 
Summary of data on the spike dives performed by oceanic whitetip sharks ( Car- 
charhinus longimanus) during monitoring with pop-up satellite archival tags in 
the Atlantic and Indian oceans in 2011 and 2012. 
Number of deep Max depth Duration Descent rate Ascent rate 
ID 
spike dives 
range (m) 
(min) 
range (m/s) 
range (m/s) 
AOCS3 
4 
237-365 
21-45 
0.55-1.00 
0.10-0.24 
AOCS4 
4 
232-340 
35-75 
0.14-0.49 
0.12-0.22 
AOCS5 
3 
154-193 
40-55 
0.19-0.23 
0.08-0.12 
AOCS6 
2 
181-277 
45 
0.17-0.40 
0.09-0.12 
AOCS7 
18 
153-405 
30-65 
0.44-1.05 
0.15-0.26 
IOCS1 
6 
257-317 
35-50 
0.22-0.89 
0.14-0.17 
In our study, indication of an increased vertical 
activity during the night also was found (see Fig. 1). 
Moreover, oceanic whitetip sharks are known to feed 
on mesopelagic squids (Backus et al., 1956), and stable 
isotopes in a recent study have indicated that there is 
an almost equal importance of squids (44%) and larg- 
er pelagic teleosts (47%) in their diet (Madigan et al., 
2015). Deep excursions of oceanic whitetip sharks are 
rare and are, therefore, unlikely to account for such a 
significant portion of a mesopelagic species in the diet 
of this shark. This fact indicates that type-I behavior 
indeed can be linked to feeding on prey from the deep 
scattering layer during the night. 
Variability in vertical movement patterns has also 
been reported for several pelagic fish species. Blue 
sharks are known for their marked diel migration to 
shallower waters during the night, but 5 distinct ver- 
tical behavior types have been described recently for 
that species (Queiroz et al., 2012). These behavior 
types ranged from the general, known diel pattern to 
their inverse and included patterns for which no diel 
differences were apparent, as we have described for 
