Not everyone is on a first name basis with great white sharks, but Dr. Greg Skomal is. He's even got the names of many of the sharks that visit the Cape Cod area year after year.

“Julia likes to come back every year around Memorial Day,” Skomal said. “Unless it’s a cold spring, and then she’ll delay her visit by two weeks.”

Skomal gave a presentation called “Seeing Deeper into the World of the White Shark” on Friday evening at the Marion Music Hall. The lecture was hosted by the Marion Natural History Museum.

Skomal’s lecture focused mostly on his own experiences tagging and studying sharks in the Cape Cod area. Skomal lived on Martha’s Vineyard until about five years ago when he moved to Marion.

As sharks return to the Cape and with the rise of technology in the last decade, Skomal and his team have had the chance to tag and study sharks in new ways to learn more about them than ever before.

Between 2009 and 2015, Skomal and his team have tagged 80 sharks. He said that while traditionally researchers use chum slicks, or a combination of dead fish and blood, to bait sharks to tag them, “chum slicks don’t work when there’s a seal buffet.”

So instead, Skomal’s team uses an airplane to find sharks, and then a boat goes out and tracks down the shark. His main area of study is off of Orleans and Chatham. Last year they saw 141 sharks in the area.

With all the new information that is available with tracking, Skomal said there is an effort being made to balance human activity and shark activity on the Cape. The researchers are trying to use the information they receive from the tags to predict behavior and hopefully to minimize interaction between sharks and humans in the water.

To get the information from the sharks’ tags, the researchers set up tagging areas in the ocean around Cape Cod, and Skomal said he knows he’s not the only one curious to see if great whites are coming to visit Marion.

“I will personally put [a tagging area] in Sippican Harbor,” he said. Adding, “Sharks do come to Buzzards Bay.”

He said that in the past the only way to study sharks was by taking the bodies of dead sharks caught by fishermen and cutting them open to examine and try to learn. However, this method was only good for learning about age and maturation in the fish, not about reproductive habits or where sharks swam to and why. It also made it harder for researchers in the Northeast to study sharks because the seal population had been wiped out, so there were not many sharks to be found.

But after laws were put in place to protect seals, the population has rebounded and sharks returned to Cape Cod, which has given scientists predictable access to great whites.

Skomal also shared photos and video footage he has shot both in his own research and in collaboration with The Discovery Channel. He showed video of himself tagging sharks, of sharks eating seals and of sharks that he had tagged swimming.

Most recently, he has been researching what the great whites that go deep diving in the mid-Atlantic do and eat when they disappear to depths too great for cameras to follow.