If you see a shark fin slicing through the ocean, your first thought probably isn't:

“Excellent. The weather station is here.”

Fair.

Hollywood spent decades teaching us that shark + water = everybody get out.

Scientists at the University of Delaware have apparently decided the sharks deserve a redemption arc.

They're attaching sensors to them that measure temperature, depth and salinity as the sharks swim through the Atlantic.

Why?

Because those sharks might help us understand how strong a hurricane is about to get.

Sharknado got the relationship backwards.

We’ve gotten pretty good at predicting where hurricanes are going.

Predicting exactly how powerful they'll become is harder.

And if you're deciding whether hundreds of thousands of people need to evacuate, the difference between:

and

is fairly important.

Part of the answer is hiding underneath the ocean.

Hurricanes love warm water.

Think of it as fuel.

But scientists don't just need to know the temperature sitting right on the surface.

They want to know how much heat is stored in the upper layers of the ocean.

Normally, researchers collect that information using satellites, buoys and robotic underwater gliders.

The gliders work.

They're also slow, expensive and restricted to wherever humans send them.

A shark has a slightly different schedule.

It swims wherever shark business requires.

Up.

Down.

Across huge stretches of ocean.

So scientists attach a small sensor to its dorsal fin.

As the shark dives, the tag records the water around it.

When the shark eventually surfaces, the tag can send that data to satellites.

The shark continues being a shark.

Humanity receives an ocean report.

Nobody had to schedule the meeting.

Scientists have actually done versions of this with animals before.

Elephant seals have been used as roaming ocean sensors in places like Antarctica.

But America's East Coast has an inconvenient shortage of elephant seals.

It does, however, have sharks.

Researchers are testing species including makos, blue sharks, hammerheads and young great whites because they travel widely and some surface often enough to transmit useful data.

One tagged young white shark was already sending researchers information while roaming around Cape Cod and Long Island.

Basically:

Jaws has entered the group project.

Please do not fire the satellites.

This is still experimental.

Scientists cannot tell the shark:

The shark goes wherever the shark feels like going.

Some surface frequently.

Others disappear for ages.

The researchers themselves say the challenge is getting enough reliable transmissions to make the system consistently useful.

So sharks aren't replacing weather satellites, hurricane aircraft or underwater robots.

They're potentially becoming another pair of eyes in parts of the ocean we're bad at watching.

Which is arguably stranger.

Humans have spent decades attaching trackers to sharks because we wanted to know:

Now we're attaching better sensors because we also want to know:

And there's an even nicer bit of full circle.

For most of modern pop culture, sharks were something humans wanted warnings about.

Now they might help give us the warning.

Not bad for an animal whose PR department has basically been Jaws for 50 years.

The monkey supports the rebrand.