The USCGC Spar was an 180-foot Coast Guard buoy tender, a relic of the past, just 30 miles offshore Morehead City, North Carolina, in approximately 100 feet of Atlantic Ocean. During the 53 years of her life, she hunted submarines, chased ice floes, and even made a tour of the entire North American continent in one go. She was decommissioned on February 28, 1997, and seven years later, in June 2004, North Carolina's artificial reef program placed her on the bottom of the ocean on purpose.
But what happened next was a surprise: the Spar didn't just turn into scenery. She was an easy target for one of the ocean's most misunderstood predators: the sand tiger shark, and a real-life example for marine biologists. A 2019 peer-reviewed study titled “Citizen science reveals female sand tiger sharks ( Carcharias taurus ) exhibit signs of site fidelity on shipwrecks,” published in the journal Ecology, reveals that sand tiger sharks off the North Carolina coast don't just pass by wrecks, such as the Spar. Female sharks often return to the same wreck, or to those nearby, years later, treating it more as a "home base" than a "pit stop".
