Rig, sometimes known as lemon shark, spotted dog fish, or smoothhound, are found in shallow coastal waters, estuaries and harbours around New Zealand and often caught by recreational fishers. The objective of this project, in partnership with Victoria University Wellington, is to identify the movement patterns of adult rig during their spawning season and to present this information on a website for educational purposes.

Our limited understanding of when rig use estuaries and harbours is not enough to make competent decisions about activities that may affect rig and the environment they live in. This research proposes to track the movements of the adult rig using state of the art real-time GPS transmitting tags and will enable tracking of the sharks as they move through the harbour. The GPS positions are transmitted live to a co-ordinating computer on land that shows the shark tracks on Google Earth.