Following miss Costa: Examining digital natures through a shark with a twitter account

Abstract

This paper aims to make sense of Miss Costa, a female white shark with a Twitter account. In 2016, she was captured, tagged and released off of Nantucket, Massachusetts by a relatively new non-profit organization called OCEARCH. OCEARCH named Miss Costa after a corporate sponsor (Costa sunglasses) and created a Twitter account under her name. Today, @MissCostaShark has over 18,000 followers and tweets regularly. Tweets often include screenshots of maps showing where Miss Costa has recently been in the ocean, information that is available because OCEARCH fitted her with acoustic, accelerometer, and ‘smart position and temperature transmitting’ (SPOT) tags. Throughout the paper we trace and critically consider practices of following Miss Costa, from researchers and environmentalists that seek to catch, tag and test her, to digital storytellers and other media purveyors that want to photograph, record and ‘share’ her virtually; to online audiences who watch her movements and like and retweet ‘her’ stories, experiences and opinions. We argue that the novel and specific combination of digital technologies and practices used by OCEARCH (animal tracking and social media) constructs Miss Costa as a form of digital nature that is individualized and spectacularized. The resulting effects on shark science, ocean conservation and human audiences are far from straight forward and demand critical attention.