This video shows how shark expert Ramón Bonfil fits motion- tracking satellite tags onto great white sharks—by hand. Read more about it below the video player.

July 21, 2005—For three years Ramón Bonfil, a conservation scientist and shark specialist with the Bronx-based Wildlife Conservation Society, has been hand-fitting South Africa's great whites with dorsal-fin satellite tags. The tags reveal the sharks' day-to-day and long-term movements.

Bonfil's capture technique—seen in this video—includes a heart-pumping face-to-face meeting with the king of the ocean food chain.

"It's a potentially dangerous situation, but we try to minimize the risk for both the scientists and the sharks," Bonfil said. "We don't want to kill a shark by mistake while studying it. Accidents can happen, so we're careful to work on nice flat water without risking more than we should."

—Brian Handwerk

Read the full story and see a great white shark photo gallery.

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