In the past week, scientists have been cheering at their discovery of what appears to be one of the biggest whale shark groups ever seen in the northern Gulf of Mexico. There were 100 of the amazing creatures feeding on the surface over a deepwater feature known as Ewing Bank, which is located off of Louisiana.

However their cheering was short lived as one of their worst fears was confirmed… They are not avoiding the spill area. Eric Hoffmayer, a scientist with the University of Southern Mississippi, had this to say on the subject, “Our worst fears are realized. They are not avoiding the spill area, those animals are going to succumb. Taking mouthfuls of oil is not good. It is not the toxicity that will kill them. It’s that oil is going to be sticking to their gills and everything else.”

Whale sharks are the largest fish on the planet. They feed by filtering plankton and other tiny sea animals from the water through a colander like feature in their mouths. As mentioned before, it is not the ingestion of the oil that is the major problem, although it is not healthy for the Whale sharks.

“Based on all the information I’m getting, they are doing the normal things regardless of the oil. The idea that sharks have these evolved senses that will protect them — well, they haven’t evolved to detect oil,” Hoffmayer said.

Hoffmayer had been tagging Whale sharks on the Ewing Bank in June of last year. The trackers he managed to get onto the whale sharks showed that some of the animals spent July making their way hundreds of miles toward the coast of Alabama and the Florida Panhandle. If they follow the same pattern this year, it will put them smack dab in the middle of the oil spill.

Not a lot is known about the migratory patterns of the whale shark, and they are not sure exactly how many of them make their home in the Gulf of Mexico.

The best way to get a handle on their comings and goings of the whale shark is by utilizing photographs of the spots and the bars on their sides. These patterns are as unique to the whale sharks as fingerprints are to us.

Hoffmayer has warned that the implications are far more grand than they appear to be.. “Last year we had two sighted off Florida and Alabama that were from Honduras and Belize,” Hoffmayer said. “That means these oil impacts are not only for the Gulf population, but for the Caribbean and maybe even further. The implications are pretty big here.”

He also said that the relatively high temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, and the position of the offshore Loop Current, signifies that the environmental conditions in the Gulf this year, are extremely similar to the conditions which drew the whale sharks to the same area last year.

This all adds up to big trouble for the poor whale shark.. one can only hope a solution is found quickly.

The long caudal fin has puzzled marine biologists, since it has been difficult to see any use for this enlarged fin. Recent research has however unveiled that the sharks’ tail seems to play a vital role when the thresher shark hunt small prey fish. Thanks to its large tail, the thresher shark can easily swat and stun small fish in the water. This is probably also why thresher sharks often get their tails caught in long-line fishing equipment baited with small fish – the sharks are trying to stun the bait but end up captured instead.

The new findings doesn’t come as a surprise; there is for instance a report dating back to 1923 in which a thresher shark is described using its tail to catch food. The new study is however the first one to show exactly how it works.

The research, headed by Dr Chugey Sepulveda, has been carried out by biologist from The Pfleger Institute of Environmental Research in Oceanside, California, USA and the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth.

While filming hunting sharks in the ocean, the research team was able to identify two distinct techniques for stunning prey. The thresher shark could waggle its body and surge forward, effectively forming a wave down its body ending in a tail flick, or the shark could simply position itself alongside the prey and make a sideways strike.

“The common thresher is for now, the only species that this feeding behaviour has been documented for. But we hypothesise that all three actively pursue prey with their elongate caudal fins,” said Dr Sepulveda.

There are three species of thresher shark:

• Common thresher (Alopias vulpinus)
• Pelagic thresher (Alopias pelagicus)
• Bigeye thresher (Alopias superciliosus)

The thresher shark study has been published in Journal of Fish Biology.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118483233/home?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the George T. Pfleger Foundation, the William H. and Mattie Wattis Harris Foundation, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Bycatch Reduction and Engineering Program.

According to NBC News Channel, someone has placed a shark pup on top of a toilet in a public restroom in Beaufort, South Carolina. When the young shark was discovered by two women who needed to use the facility, it was already dead. The women shot a picture of the shark and alerted the facility manager.

Beaufort is a small city located in a marshy estuary adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean on the coast of South Carolina. The species of shark has not been identified, but it was probably caught nearby.

Eight School shark pups have been born at the Kelly Tarlton’s Underwater World, after their mother was wounded by a Broadnose Sevengill shark.

Animal keepers at the public aquarium didn’t even know the female School shark was pregnant, and was amazed to see four tiny sharks swim out of the gouge. When the female was treated for her injury, four more shark pups were found inside her.

Despite being born prematurely, all eight shark pups are healthy. They have been transferred to a predator free area and will be raised by Kelly Tarlton’s curator team until they are strong enough to be released into the wild, something which will probably happen within 6-8 weeks. The pups are currently being fattened up on a diet of herring and mullet.

Interestingly enough, the aggressive Broadnose Sevengill shark may actually have saved the lives of the School shark pups by attacking their mother and forcing them to enter the world prematurely.

“Ironically the fight their mother got into probably saved these pups’ lives! Sharks don’t have maternal instincts and just birth or ‘drop’ their babies and swim off – leaving them incredibly vulnerable. Because we didn’t know she was pregnant, and she would be most likely to give birth at night, we probably wouldn’t have gotten to the pups in time to move them to a safe, predator free area,” said Marine Biologist Andrew Christie, curator at the aquarium.

After being exhibited for two months at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, a young female white shark was released back into the ocean Wednesday this week.

“I’ve always said that these animals will tell us when it’s time to put them back to the ocean. Now was clearly the time,” said Randy Hamilton, vice president of husbandry for the aquarium.

The release was prompted by a change in behaviour; she started acting aggressive towards other sharks in the million-gallon aquarium and during the Halloween weekend she received a superficial bite wound. She also injured a galapagos shark by biting it and was observed chasing the scalloped hammerhead sharks.

“We monitor the behavior of great white sharks very closely while they’re on exhibit,” Hamilton explained. “When we saw a new pattern of aggressive behavior, we decided it was best to release her.”

The young female was the fifth great white shark exhibited and successfully released back into the wild by the aquarium. Monterey Bay Aquarium is the only institution to keep a great white shark on exhibit for more than 16 days, get the shark to consistently take food from the staff, and document the animal’s successful return to the sea.

Just like this young female, the four previously released great white sharks were fitted with electronic tracking tags which make it possible to confirm the shark’s successful adaptation back into the wild. Two of the sharks travelled to the southern tip of Baja California and beyond after being released, while the third one opted for Santa Barbara waters. The fourth shark also stayed near Santa Barbara where it was caught and released by a commercial fisherman just a few days after being released from the aquarium and it was then reportedly in good health.

The female shark released this week has been fitted with two tracking devices; one that will deliver real-time data on her location and one that will collect and store information about her travels, the depths she dives to and the water temperatures she favours for about six months, before it pops free and delivers those data to scientists via satellite.

You can find the real-time data emitted by the first device on the TOPP website (Tagging of Pacific Predators): http://www.topp.org .

The shark was released in offshore waters near the southern tip of Monterey Bay shortly after sunrise.

“Her health is excellent, and we learned a lot while she was with us. Based on past experience, we have every expectation that she’ll do well after release,” said Hamilton.

During her two month long stay (69 days to be exact) in the aquarium, she grew from 5-foot 3-inches to 5-foot 5-inches and put on an extra 20 pounds. She ate mackerel only and would happily gulp down up to three percent of her body weight in a day.

The exhibit of young great white sharks is part of the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s effort to change public attitudes towards the feared white sharks and raise awareness about the threats facing them in the wild. The first white shark was exhibited in 2004/2005 and was seen by over a million visitors before being released after six months in captivity. Collectively, the four sharks exhibited before the newest addition has been seen by almost 2.5 million visitors.

“I can’t overstate the impact of this single animal on advancing our mission to inspire conservation of the oceans,” aquarium Executive Director Julie Packard said of the first white shark the aquarium had on exhibit.

The million-gallon Outer Bay exhibit will undergo renovations starting late August 2010 and it will therefore not be possible to see any great white shark at the aquarium until summer 2011 at the earliest.

In order to survive until it becomes a skilled hunter, a shark pups is born with an enlarged “super liver” that functions as a food source for several months.

This new finding have surprised marine scientists, because shark pups were believed to suffer from a high mortality rate because they had to find food immediately after being born.

“They’re much more likely to survive when they’re born than we previously thought,” says Australian Institute of Marine Science researcher Aaron MacNeil.

Unlike live-bearing sea mammals like dolphins and whales, live-bearing shark mothers do not produce milk for their offspring. Until know, researchers assumed that the shark mothers didn’t invest much energy into keeping the offspring alive once it was born, but the new finding changes this perception radically. The shark mother is effectively sending her young off with a liver so packed with energy and nutrients that it keeps the baby fed for several months.

“It is likely that the liver reserves enable the newborn sharks to acclimatize themselves to their environment and to develop their foraging skills,” says lead researcher Nigel Hussey, “We know that large sharks use their livers as an energy store, but we had no idea that the mother provisions her young with additional liver reserves to enhance their survival.”

The research that led to the discovery was carried out by an international team of researchers headed by the Bangor University in Wales.

Florida anglers are being sharply criticized after a video of them free-gaffing a Mako shark off South Florida this week was made public on the Internet.

In the video, which was uploaded to Youtube and also displayed on the website of a Florida TV station (can be seen below), the anglers can be seen trying to gaff a free-swimming shark. The shark ventured close to the boat after being attracted to a swordfish that the anglers had alongside their vessel.

Since no rods or reels appear to have been used by the anglers as they captured the 748-pound Mako shark, they may have acted in violation of state and federal law. “I’d hazard that I’m not the first to pick up on these fine points of the law but if the video does indeed tell the full tale then these laws need to be enforced,” said Luke Tipple, a marine biologist and director of the Shark-Free Marina Initiative. “If however the fishermen can provide video evidence of them using PRIMARY tackle (i.e. hook and line) to initialize the capture then they would be within their rights to have landed the shark. If this turns out to be the case then I will instead turn this report into a cautionary tale of how the media should be more responsible in reporting on shark harvests, particularly when dealing with species considered by some to be globally threatened.”

The Maldives is planning to ban shark fishing in its waters, a move which would make the Maldives the first nation in the region to enact such a protective law.

The announcement was made by the Maldives Minister of State for Fisheries and Agriculture, Dr Hussein Rasheed Hassan, at the South West Indian Ocean Fisheries Commission steering committee meeting in Mombasa.

“We have realised that it is more economically viable to leave the shark and other sea creatures unharmed because the country currently earns about $7 million annually from the diving industry,” said the minister.

In 1998, the Maldives imposed a 10-year moratorium banning shark fishing around seven atolls that received a lot of vacationers from abroad. Now, the country intends to expand the ban to include all reef shark fishing across the Maldives within a 12 nautical mile radius (22km).

During recent years, the number of sharks in the Maldives has plummeted due to overfishing for the lucrative shark fin market.

“The marine ecosystem is very fragile and that is why we have to regulate activities that coupled with the treats of climate change could adversely affect the major sources of income for the country,” Hassan explained.

The Maldives is an island country consisting of a group of atolls stretching south of India’s Lakshadweep islands. Despite having a population of no more than roughly 300,000 individuals, the Maldives receives over 600,000 tourists each year.

An international team of researchers have shown how one single gene mutation is capable of making the medaka, a Japanese killifish, loose its attractive colours and display a drab grey colour which renders them significantly less attractive to medakas of the opposite sex – unless that potential mate is grey too.

In the wild, medakas come in a wide range of colours, including orange, brown and drab grey.

“We observed that the grey medaka were often rejected in favor of their brown or orange rivals“, says lead author Shoji Fukamachi. “This is the first demonstration of a single gene that can change both secondary sexual characteristics and mating preferences“.

As mentioned above, you don’t have to fear ending up without a mate just because you happen to be a grey medaka – you just have to go out looking for another grey specimen since the study showed greys to be preferentially selective for each other. This preference for choosing a member of your own colour suggests that sympatric speciation could occur in medakas as the colour determining gene is mutated, i.e. new species may form as the medakas choose to mate with specimens of their own colour.

The research is a collaborative effort by researchers from the University of Konstanz, Germany and from the University of Tokyo, Japan. The study has been published in the open access journal BMC Biology.

The world’s first shark sanctuary will be created by Palau, a small island nation in the Pacific Ocean. The sanctuary will measure 240,000 square miles and be a haven for vulnerable shark species like Leopard shark, Hammerhead, and Oceanic Whitetip. Over 135 different species of shark and ray is known to live in this biological hotspot.

“Palau will declare its territorial waters and extended economic zone to be the first officially recognized sanctuary for sharks,” said Palauan President Johnson Toribiong.

Unfortunately, this tiny nation with a population of 20,000 people has only one patrol boat to protect the immense sanctuary from fishermen.

While acknowledging the difficulties, the president still hopes that others will respect Palauan territorial waters – and that the shark haven will inspire more such conservation efforts globally.

“We’ll do the very best we can, given our resources,” he said. “The purpose of this is to call attention to the world to the killing of sharks for commercial purposes, including to get the fins to make shark fin soups, and then they throw the bodies in the water.”

Toribiong said a recent flyover by Australian aircraft showed more than 70 vessels fishing in Palau waters, many of them illegally.