For the first time since 1947, a new species of cartilaginous fish has been described from Californian waters. The new species – Hydrolagus melanophasma – belongs to a group of sharks known as Chimaeras or ghostsharks.

Chimaeras are fairly closely related to the true sharks, but their evolutionary lineage branched off from the true sharks nearly 400 million years ago. Just like sharks, ghostsharks have cartilage skeletons instead of bony skeletons and they carry out internal fertilization using claspers. Unlike the true sharks however, males of the Chimaera group are fitted with retractable sexual appendages on the forehead and in front of the pelvic fins. Most known species also have a venomous spine in front of the dorsal fin.

The new species, the Eastern Pacific black ghostshark, was caught and preserved as early as the 1960s but hasn’t been formally named and described until know since its taxonomic relationships with other Chimaeras remained unclear. It is now placed in the genus Hydrolagus – the water rabbits – a genus named after the grinding tooth plates used by its members; plates somewhat similar to the teeth of a rabbit.

You can find out more about Hydrolagus melanophasma in the September issue of the journal Zootaxa. The article in which the new species was described is the result of the combined efforts of a team of scientists, including Academy Research Associates David Ebert and Douglas J. Long, graduate student Kelsey James from the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, and Dominique Didier from Millersville University in Pennsylvania.

Scientists say they are baffled by the large number of whale shark sightings reported this summer in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Reports have been pouring in from all over; from Clearwater to the Florida Panhandle and along the Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana coasts.

“The sheer number of anecdotal reports from the public is amazing. There’s obviously something going on,” says shark scientist Bob Hueter who heads the Shark Research Center at Mote Marine Laboratory.

It is common for Whale sharks to gather in the plankton-rich waters off the Yucatan Peninsula during the summer, but this year numerous whale shark sightings have been reported from the eastern and northern parts of the Gulf as well. The concentrations spotted off the Yucatan Peninsula are also higher than before with hundreds of Whale sharks being seen in a single location.

According to Mote Marine Laboratory records, there were just three Whale shark sightings in the Florida Gulf in 2005, two in 2006, five in 2007, and three in 2008. This year, there have been 12 sightings just from July to mid-August.

According to Heuter, the large Whale sharks may have been attracted by a change in the massive “loop current” in the Gulf that took place this year, and there is also a stronger than usual upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water off the Yucatan that may play a role.

“That changed the oceanography a bit, and it could have driven some of these animals up into the northern Gulf,” Hueter explained.

Eric Hoffmayer, a biologist with the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory on the Mississippi coast, said his lab has gotten reports of 30 sightings in just the last two weeks. On Aug. 1, there was a reported sighting of more than 100 whale sharks congregating about 60 miles off the Louisiana coast.

“We don’t know what’s going on,” said a baffled Hoffmayer.

Many of the sightings have occurred when there was a full moon.

As mentioned above, record sightings are being reported from the waters off Yucatan as well. An aerial survey last week did for instance reveal over 400 whale sharks in a relatively small area near the Isla Mujeres. The Yucatan aggregation is an annual phenomenon, but it usually takes place near Isla Holbox and the group tends to be much smaller.

Thousands of Greenland sharks get caught and die in nest off Greenland each year, but their meat is toxic to humans and the carcasses are therefore thrown back into the sea.

Researchers at the Arctic Technology Centre (ARTEK) in Sisimiut in western Greenland now hope to find a way of turning the oily flesh of these enormous fishes into biogas for Eskimos.

The Greenland shark can reach a length of seven meters (23 feet) and weigh up to a tonne.

“I think this is an alternative where we can use the thousands of tonnes of leftovers of products from the sea,

including those of the numerous sharks,” says Marianne Willemoes Joergensen of ARTEK’s branch at the Technical University of Denmark.

Joergensen, who is in charge of a pilot project based in the Uummannaq village in northwestern Greenland, says a mixture of shark meat, macro-algae and household wastewater could serve as biomass for biofuel production.

“Biofuel is the best solution for this kind of organic waste, which can be used to produce electricity and heating with a carbon neutral method,” she explains.

According to estimates, biofuel from the sea could supply Uummannaq’s 2,450 inhabitants with 13 percent of their energy consumption.

But the biofuel project is not uncontroversial.

“[It] is not a good idea, not at all“, says Danish WWF ocean mammal specialist Anne-Marie Bjerg who wants to see other sustainable energy projects undertaken instead.

“We know very little about the Greenland shark, which lives in a limited geographic zone, the Arctic,” she said. “We are opposed to the commercial use of marine mammals*, such as the Greenland shark, which is not universal and whose population size is unknown.“

AC Comment:

*The Greenland shark is not a mammal since it does not feed its young milk. Mammals are animals whose females are characterized by the possession of mammary glands. The Greenland shark does however give birth to live young. Just like many other sharks, it is an ovoviviparous species. Much remains unknown of the Greenland shark’s reproduction and life cycle.

When the writers of the movie “Shark Attack 3: Megalodon” decided they needed a book on sharks to set the stage for their newest b-flick, they didn’t make up a phoney professor and write the necessary lines on their own. Instead, they used a very real book written by a very real Manhattan based marine conservationists – and slipped in fake pages to make it sound as though the writer of this 1991 bestseller believes that C. megalodon is still around. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t sit well with shark expert Richard Ellis who disliked seeing an adulterated version of his book “Great White Shark” turning up on the big screen. Ellis is now suing the film’s distributor Lions Gate Entertainment, asking for a halt to the film’s distribution along with $150,000 in damages.

Who is C. megalodon?
Megalodon was an enormous shark that died out long ago. The oldest known remains of this species are about 18 million years of age and the shark is believed to have gone extinct in the Pleistocene epoch, probably about 1.5 million years ago. It is the largest carnivorous fish known to science. The maximum size of this prehistoric shark is a controversial subject, but most experts agree that it could reach a length of at least 18 metres (59 feet) and weigh at least 70 metric tons.

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Subphylum: Vertebrata
Class: Chondrichthyes
Subclass: Elasmobranchii
Order: Lamniformes
Family: Disputed; either Lamnidae or Otodontidae
Genus: Disputed; either Carcharocles or Carcharodon
Species: C. megalodon

Larry, a 3-foot-long Tawny nurse shark (Nebrius ferrugineus) has been moved from his cramped dwellings in a Burbank pet store to the Birch Aquarium, a public aquarium and museum capable of offering him much more spacious accommodations. The Birch Aquarium is a part of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, which in turn is part of the University of California in San Diego.

Larry’s move to a new home is the result of Burbank resident Stephanie Field spotting Larry at the Scales ‘n’ Tails pet shop in Burbank.

“I swore to him I would get him out of there”, Field said.

After discussing the situation with PETA and an animal shelter, Field went back to the store to talk to the owner Vahe Issaian. She had decided to purchase Larry and set him free in the ocean off the coast of California, but Issaian explained to her that doing so would only serve to kill the shark.

“That’s when I found out Vahe is a really good guy,” Field said.

As it turned out, Issaian had been trying to find a new home for Larry for quite some time but without any success. Issaian had first brought him to his pet store in 2001 when Larry’s owner left for military service and could care for his big fish any longer. In 2002, Larry was purchased by a couple from Valencia with whom he stayed until 2008.

“They had it for five years, and I picked it up in mid-2008 because they were remodelling their home and didn’t have an eight-foot wall for the aquarium,” Issaian said.

Since then, Larry had been living at Issaian’s other Burbank store, Millenium Pets. Trying to find a new home for a shark that can reach a length of 10 feet (3 metre) is not the easiest thing in the world since few people have enough space to devote to such a gigantic pet.

Finally, it was Field’s mother who suggested calling the Australian Consulate and this set the wheels in motion. After talking to the consulate on Wednesday morning, Field received an e-mail that same day telling her that progress had been made and that she could stop making calls.

On Tuesday, assistant curator Fernando Nosratpour picked up Larry from the pet shop and moved him to his new home. Larry will now spend two weeks in quarantine before he’s introduced to the other sharks.

Always research pets before you buy them

Adult Tawny nurse sharks can reach a length of 10 feet (3 metres) and getting a nurse shark for your hobby aquarium is not a good idea unless you have a HUGE tank. Nosratpour says that the Birch Aquarium do receive offers now and then to take nurse sharks that people have bought without first researching how large they will become as adults.

“Most public aquariums can’t take them anymore,” he said. “Pet stores can’t take them, and you can’t ship them back to where they are from. But people still buy them, and that’s a problem.”

The Tawny nurse shark is found in the Indian and Pacific Oceans in a region stretching from the northern coast of Australia and almost all the way to the Red Sea. It is the only now living member of the genus Nebrius and can be distinguished form other nurse sharks by its angular fins. It is listed as “Vulnerable” on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

Shark tours have become increasingly popular in Hawaiian waters, but tour operators that feed shark to assure their presence are now facing opposition from several different directions.

Sharks are an integral part of Hawaiian folklore and some Native Hawaiians consider sharks to be ancestral gods, aumakua, who helps fishermen by chasing fish into nets and guiding canoes safely back to shore. Tour boats feeding sharks for entertainment is therefore viewed as disrespectful by many.

“The disrespect of the aumakua, that’s what hurts us the most,” said Leighton Tseu, a Native Hawaiian who considers sharks ancestral gods.

Surfers and swimmers are on the other hand more worried about the potential hazards of teaching sharks to associate people with food. There are also fears that shark feeding will attract larger numbers of sharks to these waters and that the practise of feeding them will lure them closer to shore than before.

A third concern has been raised by environmentalists – how does daily shark feedings affects the ecological balance of Hawaiian waters? George Burgess, shark researcher at the University of Florida, says shark populations are likely to increase in areas where tours feed sharks daily, and that an inflated shark population might consume more prey, depleting other marine life. Burgess also fears that the feedings may attract so many sharks to those spots that sharks become scarce in other regions. This is naturally a large problem, since sharks are apex predators necessary for the overall balance of the ecosystems in which they exist.

Carl Meyer of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology does not share Burgess’s concerns, at least not for Hawaiian waters. Research carried out by Meyer shows that a majority of the sharks found at Haleiwa, a popular tour site, are Galapagos and Sandbar sharks – two types of sharks rarely documented attacking humans. Most of Hawaii shark attacks are carried out by Tiger sharks, and these sharks only account for 2 percent of the tour site’s sharks. Meyer’s research also shows that sharks at the North Shore tour site have not made any changes to their seasonal breeding and migration cycles since the feedings started.

Legal matters
Feeding sharks in Hawaiian waters is prohibited by state law, while federal law – which governs waters between 3 miles to 200 miles from the coast – prohibits the feeding of sharks off Hawaii and Pacific island territories like American Samoa. Fishermen are however allowed to bait sharks, and scientists engaging in government-funded research are also exempt from the ban.

The National Marine Fisheries Service in Honolulu is currently investigating Hawaiian tour operators offering shark safaris.

After being boosted by the recent heat wave, massive amounts of zooplankton is now attracting record numbers of basking sharks into British and Irish waters.

Last year, 26 basking sharks were reported from the most southerly headland of Cornwall during a 10 week long period. This year, 900 sightings have been recorded since the beginning of June.

“Last year we had a really poor year because of the weather. But even though temperatures have obviously picked up, we never expected to see the sharks in such large numbers,” saysTom Hardy of Cornwall Wildlife Trust, coordinator of the south-west basking shark project.

Record breaking numbers of basking sharks are being reported from the other side of Irish Sea as well. In June alone, the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group reports having seen no less than 248 basking sharks.

“In a three-day period we tagged more than 100 sharks in just one bay in north
Donegal,” says Simon Berrow of the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group. “You only ever see five or six of these creatures on the surface, which doesn’t reflect what’s going on under the water.”

From the Isle of Man, 400 sightings have been reported since early May.

‘”We saw a lot more in May than is usual and after a couple of quiet weeks sightings are picking up again,” said Fiona Gell, marine wildlife officer for the Isle of Man government.

Very little is known about the basking sharks, but the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group is currently carrying out a pioneering tagging project in hope of furthering our understanding of these basking giants. Simultaneously, the 47 wildlife trusts found across the UK, the Isle of Man and Alderney are working to identify basking shark hotspots.

No less than 215 anglers from throughout the UK participated in the 2009 Scottish Sharkatag organised by the Scottish Sea Angling Conservation Network (SSACN).

The Sharkatag had three goals:

– To highlight the perilous state of the endangered shark species.

– To gather data to support claims for their protection.

– To press politicians and fisheries managers to recognize the needs of the sea angling community and its contribution to the Scottish economy.

The information gathered during the Sharkatag will feed into SSACN’s Scottish Shark

Tagging Programme; a program dedicated to broaden our knowledge of shark, skate and ray stocks in Scottish coastal waters.

Attending anglers caught, tagged and released various shark species from boats, kayaks and the shoreline of Solway in South West Scotland, and what they found was worse than expected.

“It really worries me that many of the tope packs have failed to

show this year“, says Ian Burrett, SSACN’s Project Director. “The whole region seems to be void of the expected male breeding stock and the fish caught were mostly immature females, typically under twenty pounds and a few solitary females in the 50-60 pound range; Luce Bay was especially poor for the time of year.”

The Tope shark (Galeorinus galeus), also known as the School shark, Soupfin shark and Snapper shark, is a type of hound shark found at depths down to 550 metres (1800 feet). It can reach a length of 2 metres (6.5 feet) and is listed as Vulnerable at the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

The situation was equally worrisome for several other species of shark and ray.

“Around two hundred tope, smoothhound and bull huss were tagged over the three days and that can only be described as poor compared to what the total should have been, says Burrett. “Combined with the lack of rays tagged, only three throughout Sharkatag, it shows how urgently plans are needed to helpprotect and regenerate the stocks. Twenty year ago virtuallyevery boat would have recorded several mature tope and rays.”

You can find more information at the Scottish Sea Angling Conservation Network’s website www.ssacn.org and the website of SSACN’s Scottish Shark Tagging Programme www.tagsharks.com.

This Monday, a Megamouth shark (Megachasma pelagios) was caught by a Taitung fisherman off the coast of Taiwan.

According to National Taiwan Ocean University’s Department of Environmental Biology and
Fisheries Science, the shark, which was netted off the county’s Chenggong coast, is only the 42nd that has been caught or sighted worldwide and the ninth in Taiwan since the species was discovered in 1976.

Mega mouth shark exhibited at the Aburatsubo Marine

The shark was identified by marine biologist Tien from the Eastern Marine Biology Research
Center (a part of the Council of Agriculture’s Fisheries Research Institute). It was 3.9 meter long, weighed 350 kilograms, and its mouth measured 75 centimeters across when opened.

The shark has now been purchased for NT$18,000 (US$549) by Chen Wen-jung, owner of a local shark museum where the fish will be displayed as a preserved specimen. Wen-jung said he has collected dozens of shark specimens but that this was his first Megamouth.

In late March 2009, a 500-kilogram, 4-meter long Megamouth shark was caught off Burias Island in the Philippines and turned into kinunot.

Big-mouthed but elusive
The Megamouth shark remained unknown to science until November 15, 1976 when a 4.5 meter long specimen became entangled in the sea anchor of a United States Navy ship about 25 miles off the coast off Kaneohe in Hawaii. Since then, the Megamouth has continued to be a rare sight and this deep water shark has for instance only been recorded on film three times.

The Megamouth is named after its gigantic mouth which it uses to filter out plankton and jellyfish from the water. When feeding, Megamouth swims around with its mouth wide open in a fashion similar to the Basking shark. The mouth is surrounded by luminous photophores, which may act as a lure for plankton or small fish. Megamouth can also be recognized on its large head and rubbery lips.

The famous Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed near Bakersfield has tantalized the imagination of scientists and laymen alike since it was first discovered in the 1850s. How did a six-to-20-inch-thick layer of fossil bones, gigantic shark teeth and turtle shells three times the size of today’s leatherbacks come to be?

Was this a killing ground for C. megalodon, a 40-foot long shark that roamed the seas until 1.5 million years ago? Perhaps a great catastrophe like a red tide or volcanic eruption led to animal mass-death in the region? Or is this simply the result of Sharktooth Hill being used as a breeding ground for generations of marine mammals throughout the millennia?

A research team consisting of palaeontologists from the United States and Canada are now offering their take on the Bone Bed, suggesting it is not the result of a sudden die-off or a certain predator. Instead, the North American team sees it as a 700,000-year record of normal life and death, kept free of sediment by unusual climatic conditions between 15 million and 16 million years ago.

The research team bases its hypothesis on a new and extensive study of the fossils and the geology of Sharktooth Hill. Roughly 3,000 fossilized bone and teeth specimens found in various museums, including the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM) and UC Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology (UCMP), have been scrutinized, and the researchers also cut out a meter-square section of the bone bed, complete with the rock layers above and below.

“If you look at the geology of this fossil bed, it’s not intuitive how it formed,” says Nicholas Pyenson, a former UC Berkeley graduate student who is now a post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia. “We really put together all lines of evidence, with the fossil evidence being a big part of it, to obtain a snapshot of that period of time.”

The existence of a 700,000-year window through which we can catch a glimpse of the past is naturally magnificent news for anyone interested in evolution and Earth’s history.

When the Central Valley was a sea

When the Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed formed between 15,900,000 and 15,200,000 years ago, the climate was warming up, ice was melting and the sea level was much higher than today. What is today California’s Central Valley was an inland sea with the emerging Sierra Nevada as its shoreline.

After closely examining the geology of the Sharktooth Hill area, the research team was able to confirm that it had once been a submerged shelf inside a large embayment, directly opposite a wide opening to the sea.

Several feet of mudstone interlaced with shrimp burrows is present under the bone bed, which is typical of ocean floor sediment several hundred to several thousand feet below the surface. Inside the bone bed, most of the bones have separated joints, indicating that they have been scattered by currents.

“The bones look a bit rotten, as if they lay on the seafloor for a long time and were

abraded by water with sand in it“, says UC Berkeley integrative biology professor Jere Lipps.

Many bones also had manganese nodules and growths on them, something which can form when bones sit in sea water for a long time before they are covered by sediment. According to the team, the most likely explanation for this is that the bones have lain exposed on the ocean floor for 100,000 to 700,000 years while currents have carried sediment around the bone bed. The prevailing climatic conditions at the time have made it possible for the bones to accumulate in a big and shifting pile at the bottom of the sea.

“These animals were dying over the whole area, but no sediment deposition was going on, possibly related to rising sea levels that snuffed out silt and sand deposition or restricted it to the very near-shore environment,” says Pyenson. “Once sea level started going down, then more sediment began to erode from near shore.”

The team discards the breeding-ground hypothesis due to the scarcity of remains from young and juvenile animals. Hungry Megalodon sharks being the main contributors to the bone pile is also unlikely, since few bones bear any marks of shark bites. If the bone bed was the result of mass-death caused by an erupting volcano the absence of volcanic ash in the bed would be very difficult to explain, and the presence of land animals like horses and tapirs that must have washed out to sea make the red-tide hypothesis equally thin.

Amazing remains from the past

The Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed covers nearly 50 square miles just outside and northeast of Bakersfield in California and is one of the richest and most extensive marine deposits of bones in the world. Studied parts of the bone bed average 200 bones per square meter, most of them larger bones. Ten miles of the bed is exposed, and the uppermost part of the bed contains complete, articulated skeletons of whales and seals.

Within the bone bed, scientists have found bones from many species that are now extinct and the bed provides us with invaluable information about the evolutionary history of whales, seals, dolphins, and other marine mammals, as well as of turtles, seabirds and fish. Sharktooth Hill is naturally the sight of some impressive shark findings too, including shark teeth as big as a hand and weighing a pound each.

A small portion of the bone bed was added to the National Natural Landmark registry in 1976 but the rest is in dire need of protection.

A collaborative effort

The research team, who’s study will be published in the June 2009 issue of the journal

Geology, consisted of:

– UC Berkeley integrative biology professor Jere Lipps, who is also a faculty curator in UC Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology.

– Nicholas Pyenson, a UC Berkeley Ph.D who is now a post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia.

– Randall B. Irmis, a UC Berkeley Ph.D who is now an assistant professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah.

– Lawrence G. Barnes, Samuel A. McLeod, and Edward D. Mitchell Jr., three UC Berkeley Ph.D’s who are now with the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.