Since we adopted Ziggy in March, 2026, we've received our first data back.
Ziggy has been detected 474 times since she was tagged in February, more than any of the other ten sharks in her study. Some sharks had only been heard from 13 times in total.
One shark out of eleven, and she accounts for close to a third of everything the researchers recorded.
Turns out we picked well!
Five and a half months of tracking data on Ziggy, and the summary is short: she doesn't go anywhere.
She runs up the coastline and comes back. Runs down the coastline and comes back. Every single time researchers have looked for her since February, she's been in the same small stretch of water.
A 146 cm shark with one address.
How do you track an animal in the ocean when there's no signal down there?
You don't. You bolt a listening station to the seabed and wait. Ziggy's tag emits a sound. Every time she swims past, the receiver logs the time and date. No wifi, no uplink, nothing transmits to anyone.
Then someone dives down, brings it up, and plugs it in over Bluetooth.
A distributed sensor network with no network. Months of latency. Retrieval by boat.
We know exactly where Ziggy lives. We're not going to tell you.
She has spent five and a half months in one small bay in the kelp forests around Cape Town. Publish that location and you've handed a map to anyone who wants to target her.
Spotted gully sharks exist nowhere else on earth but this coastline. The whole species lives in one narrow band of water, which is exactly why the research matters and exactly why the coordinates stay private.
People keep asking where the name came from.
We ran a naming contest internally. “Sharky Mc Sharkface” was on the ballot. “Ziggy" won — for the lightning bolt in our logo, but also because we help you build your game in a flash.
She's spotted like a Dalmatian, which means researchers can identify her on sight even without the tag.
Ziggy has gone quiet. No detections for a few weeks.
Either she's moved for the first time since February, or she's swimming past that receiver every day and the data is still sitting on the seabed waiting to be collected.
There's a bigger question underneath it. If she's spent five and a half months in one small bay, researchers want to know why. The next time they find her, an ultrasound will show whether she's pregnant — and whether that bay is a nursery ground nobody has documented.
Her tag has ten years left on it.
We’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
