Sharks evoke fear and apprehension in some people, but there was only excitement in the air as a group of young researchers from Dalhousie University set out to tag sharks near Eastern Passage, N.S. early Wednesday.

The team hopes that by tagging blue sharks off the coastline, they will be able to track and monitor their patterns - something that has never been done before.

Two hours into the trip, the team had their first bite on the line, and it was exactly what they were looking for – a juvenile blue shark.

It was a race against time to run water over the animal’s gills to keep it alive while the team made a small incision to insert the tag, which will then transmit a signal to receivers off the coast of Atlantic Canada, dubbed the Ocean Tracking Network.

“They are going to stay in there for the duration of the shark’s life, but we will get about six years of data which will hopefully tell us, depending on how close the OTN receiver is, where that shark is, how long, what time of year the shark spent its time there and we should hopefully get that pattern for all 40 sharks that we catch over the next six years,” says Dalhousie biologist Brendal Davis.

Globally, the Ocean Tracking Network is following tuna and sharks, including some attention-grabbing research across the border.

“Now we’ve got collaborators from Massachusetts who are tagging Great White Sharks that we’ve been detecting moving up along the coastline here in Halifax over the last year or so what we’re doing…it’s all about understanding our ecosystems,” says Fred Whoriskey, executive director of the Ocean Tracking Network.

The six-foot shark was quickly stitched back up and released back into the water, carrying not only the tracking tag, but high hopes for researchers.

“There’s so many questions we don’t know about with sharks, yet they’re caught in such significant numbers, I mean, over 100 million sharks are killed each year for the shark fin trade…and blue sharks are a huge percentage of that catch,” says Davis.

The $51,000 in funding for the project comes from what some may consider an unlikely source – the Canadian oil and gas giant, Encana.

However, the partnership makes sense to researchers, who hope information about the blue shark’s migration patterns will give companies like Encana the information to explore, without interrupting those critical patterns.

With files from CTV Atlantic's Jayson Baxter