Shark alerts

A safety feature, permanently free. Two complementary signals:

1. Tagged-shark proximity from OCEARCH, the long-running shark-tracking research organisation.
2. Crowd-sourced sightings posted by users in the app, time-bounded and verified.

OCEARCH tracking

OCEARCH publishes positions for hundreds of acoustically- and satellite-tagged sharks (white sharks, tiger sharks, bull sharks, mako, hammerheads). Each tagged animal has a name, a tagging date, a length, and a near-real-time position trail.

Submarius pulls the OCEARCH feed and shows:

• Tagged sharks within a configurable radius of the user
• Each shark’s species, name, length, and last-ping time
• The full historical track for any selected animal
• Push notifications when a tagged shark transmits a position within range (configurable)

Caveats we surface to the user, because honesty about what the data is:

• Tagged sharks are a tiny fraction of total population. Absence of a tagged shark in the area means nothing about the absence of untagged ones.
• Acoustic tags only ping when the animal surfaces; gaps of hours to days are normal. A “last seen 6 hours ago” position is the known position, not the current one.
• The species mix in OCEARCH’s tagged population skews toward the species they study — large pelagic sharks. Smaller coastal species are under-represented.

Crowd-sourced sightings

Users can post a sighting from the app: species (or “unknown shark”), estimated length, behaviour, photo. Sightings carry a time-decay weight and are deduplicated by H3 cell — multiple users seeing the same animal in the same cell within minutes are aggregated.

Like Waze for sharks: the more users in an area, the more accurate the data.

Permanently free

Shark alerts (both OCEARCH and crowd-sourced) are part of the free safety tier and are not gated by Pro subscription. Per the data-honesty principles, safety features must be available to every user regardless of payment.