So I asked leading shark ethologist and behaviourist, Professor Samuel 'doc' Gruber to elaborate. After pointing out how much pain women feel when they give birth, making the point that suffering has no effect on reproduction, he reminded me that sharks evolved their mating behaviours and the physical structures involved, separately from other animals.
"We found that newborn sharks captured in the mid-1990s left the safety of the islands when they were between five and eight years old," explained Dr Kevin Feldheim, the A. Watson Armour III Manager of the Pritzker Laboratory for Molecular Systematics and Evolution at The Field Museum and the lead author of the study.
Jim Abernethy, owner and operator of Scuba Adventures, was the dive operator who showed all of the others that sharks are peaceful animals who want nothing to do with humans as a food source.
He spends most of his time with wild sharks during dives from his liveaboard ship, The Shear Water, at remote sites in the vicinity of the Bahamas, and is on land for only about 40 days a year.
Shark finning refers to the removal and retention of shark fins while the remainder of the living shark is discarded in the ocean.
NBA All-Star Yao Ming pledged to stop eating shark fin soup at a news conference on August 2, 2006. However at that time Yao's comments were largely unreported in the Chinese media.
Underwater photographer Peter Verhoog of the Dutch Shark Society is on a mission—a mission to save sharks. He wants to raise awareness for sharks and their fate among a wide audience. One of the ways to do this is to show people not only the beauty of sharks but also shark behaviour and their sometimes worldwide migration and feeding patterns.
Discovery Channel's Shark Week has begun again. The week-long shark extravaganza was first shown in 1987, and has become a major feature of Discovery's programming. Since its inception, it has been highly profitable for the network, but at what cost?
On the Ethology of Reef Sharks
A difficulty in obtaining information about the natural behaviour of wild animals is that detailed observations of the activities of different individuals is necessary over long periods of time. This is especially hard to achieve with sharks.
Sharks have a very different set of senses than we do, yet the eyesight of the free swimming species is good, so when they look at you, they are seeing you. But you may have the impression that they are using senses other than their eyes most often, and indeed, apart from our shared good eyesight, it is impossible for us to imagine how sharks experience their liquid realm.
In a new study, scientists have revealed the diving behaviour of sharks appears to be influenced by the moon, water temperature and time of day. The study was conducted with grey reef sharks, a species commonly found on coral reefs in northern Australia and the Indo-Pacific. Tagged near Palau, about 40 grey reef sharks consisting mostly of adults of females were followed by scientists from UWA and the Australian Institute of Marine Science, who recorded their movement and diving patterns over a two-year period.
The reasons for shark attacks and the question of when and where they might occur has always been the subject of intense scientific interest in the effort to make seaside recreation as safe as possible.
Beautifully adapted to an ambush predator existence, wobbegongs rely on their exquisitely cryptic coloration to avoid detection and catch their prey by surprise.
