According to a news release from The Institute for Ocean Conservation Science, female lemon sharks return home to give birth. This is the first time that this behavior has been confirmed in sharks. To reach this conclusion, researchers captured, tagged and released more than 2,000 baby sharks during a 19-year period. The work was done in Bimini in The Bahamas.

The findings imply that local and international conservation efforts can make a huge difference in the fight to recover the world’s coastal shark populations. To supply Asian restaurants with shark fins, sharks have been exploited. Shark fins are used in a soup that has great cultural importance, but no nutritional value.

“We used each shark’s individual DNA fingerprint to construct a large family tree,” said lead author Kevin Feldheim, the A. Watson Armour III Manager of the Pritzker Laboratory for Molecular Systematics and Evolution at The Field Museum, in a statement.

“We found that newborn sharks captured in the mid-1990s left the safety of the islands when they were between five and eight years old. Yet, despite leaving and visiting many other islands in their travels, these sharks ‘remember’ where they were born after a decade of roving, and are able to find the island again when they are pregnant and ready to give birth.”

Scientists had thought that female sharks have this capability to “remember” the place where they were born, but it had never been confirmed because its extremely hard to track sharks from birth to maturity. The study was eventually successful because of the efforts of hundreds of student volunteers.

“The lagoon in Bimini is almost like a lake,” noted project founder Samuel Gruber, president and director of the Bimini Biological Field Station Foundation. “I realized that we had a chance to capture nearly every shark born into the lagoon each year, and this gave us the unique opportunity to see if the females actually come back to give birth. However it took us nearly two decades and countless hours in the field and laboratory, but we finally answered this long-standing question and many others with this paper.”

Sharks mature over many years, which is one of the reasons why they are very vulnerable to overfishing. Proof that sharks use the same birthplaces highlights the significance of preserving local nursery habitats. The finding that some sharks are linked to certain areas also suggests that individual countries can implement strategies to protect sharks that return to their territory to give birth.

According to the news release, The Bahamas recently enacted a law that will help maintain an annual $80 million shark tourism industry.

The study’s findings are described in greater detail in the journal Molecular Ecology.

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