The caught shark

Just as a deep sea fisherman was about to cut away a hook from a wide open mouth of a shark to let it go back on its merry way to the sea, the most surprising thing sprung forth.. A human foot.

“Everything was intact from the knee down,” commented Humphrey Simmons, a Bahamian investment banker, “it was mangled, but there was still flesh on the bone.”

What a morbid way to end such a beautiful day of fishing for Mr. Simmons and his two cohorts, who spent the majority of their morning trying to get away from the sea beasts.

When they finally managed to reel in the curiously heavy and bulging Tiger shark, at the Defence Force’s Coral Harbor base and they got around to sticking a knife in him, to see what was what, a headless body came tumbling out of the freshly opened cavity. The leg which the shark so unceremoniously coughed up appeared to belong to the man, as he too was missing a foot. Upon closer examination of the sharks insides, they indeed found the rest of the man; severed right leg, two severed arms and a torso in two sections.

As Mr Simmons’ ten year old daughter calmly pointed out, the shark had the feast all to himself. There were no signs of a struggle, or fighting from other sharks. The theory going around now is that the unlucky man drowned, and then was scarfed up by the shark.

Right whale with calf - The same type of whale as in the story

Well, this is interesting.. A whale which was showing off its moves in Table Bay, jumped up out of the water “Free Willy” style, and what happens? The whale lands on top of a sailboat.

The whale flattened the steel mass and brought down the rigging before gallantly sliding back into the water and swimming on its way.

“It was quite scary,” commented Paloma Werner, who had previously been enjoying the trip with her boyfriend come business partner, Ralph Mothes.

“We thought the whale was going to go under the boat and come up on the other side. We thought it would see us.” Ms. Werner continued.

However, this was not the case, as the boat had its engine turned off.

The manager/scientist of the Cape Town Mammal Research Institute at the University of Pretoria, Meredith Thornton, shed some light onto the subject for us: “Whales don’t see much by way of their eyes but by sound in the water.”

Given that the whale had such poor eyesight, and that the water was particularly rough, Thornton commented that the whale, presumably a young whale most likely did not even realize the boat was in the way.

The hapless couple first spied the whale when it was a stone’s throw away, from their yacht. It jumped out of the water once, and before they could make a move, the whale was only a hair lengths away from the vessel.

“There was hardly any wind, so we couldn’t get out of the way,” countered Werner. “We didn’t have time to take any evasive action.”

This just goes to show you, when you are out gallivanting around, always keep your engines running.

According to China Daily, a male visitor to a hot spring club has had his external reproductive organs nibbled on by fish.

The man, who visited a Dalian spa in China’s Liaoning province, received a treatment where fish is used to clean the skin of spa visitors. These fish normally eat dead tissue only, but for reasons that remain unknown they started to nibble on the man’s private parts.

The damage wasn’t discovered until the injured spa guest exited the bath and the manager of the club noticed that the man was bleeding. The guest was promptly rushed to a nearby hospital to receive treatment for his unusual wound.

The nibbled on spa guest will not be compensated since he violated the club rule about always wearing swimming trunks during spa treatments.

We have not been able to confirm this story so it might be an Urban legend that made it into the China daily.

A number of Japanese citizens living in the Ishikawa Prefecture have made some strange observations during the last few days.

Nanao, Japan, June 4

During the evening of June 4, a man suddenly heard a plopping sound in a parking lot of the Nakajima citizens centre in Nanao. When he looked back, he was surprised to see tadpoles scattered over a car and on the ground. According to Kiwamu Funakura, 36, an official at the centre who went to the parking lot at the time, about 100 tadpoles, each 2 or 3 centimetres long, were scattered over an area measuring about 200 square meters.

Hakusan, Japan, June 6

Two days later and roughly 70 kilometres southwest of Nanao, a similar event occurred in another parking lot. In the morning of June 6, between 20 and 30 dead tadpoles were found on a car windshield and other places in a Hakusan parking lot, with some reportedly having lost their original shape.

Nanao, Japan, June 8

Back in Nano, Takeshi Kakiuchi, 62, a member of the Nanao Municipal Assembly, found six tadpoles on his car and on the ground around his home Monday morning. Kakiuchi’s home is located roughly 4 km from the Nakajima citizens centre.

Nakanotomachi, Japan, June 9

On Tuesday evening, Yukio Oumi, 78, found 13 fish on the back of his truck and on the ground around his home in Nakanotomachi. The fish are believed to be crucian carps, each measuring about 3 centimetres.

Fish and frogs falling from the sky?

The reason behind the strange events has not yet been determined, and the Kanazawa Local Meteorological Observatory says it has no information that any tornadoes occurred on the days when the animals appeared.

Susumu Aiba, professor at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology, says that small-scale wind gusts may have swept over limited areas, swirling up water and any creatures living in it. If the gusts were small enough, they may have been able to avoid meteorological detection.

Another suggestion comes from Kimimasa Tokikuni, the head of the Ishikawa prefectural branch of the Japanese Society for Preservation of Birds. “Birds such as herons or umineko that had these tadpoles in their mouths or gorges might have dropped them because they were startled by something while flying,” he says. All the places where animals seem to have fallen from the sky during the last few days are located in close vicinity to flooded rice paddies, so birds may have caught tadpoles and small fish there in an attempt to feed their young. Herons and other water fowl are in the middle of their breeding period right now.

A rare orange-and-yellow lobster has been found off the coast of Prince Edward Island in Canada. Instead of the drab colours normally sported by lobsters, this female specimen boosts a spotted orange-and-yellow pattern. According to specialists, she’s one in about 30 million.

The colourful lobster is currently housed with roughly 100 other lobsters at Arnold’s Lobster and Clam Bar in Eastham, whose owner Nathan “Nick” Nickerson has named her “Fiona” after his girlfriend’s granddaughter. Getting a name is not the only special treatment she’s been awarded; unlike the other inhabitants of the tank her claws are not bound with rubber bands and she can therefore keep her house mates at bay. Lobsters can be cannibalistic, especially in crowded environments, but Nickerson says Fiona is “not very aggressive.”
Arnold’s Lobster and Clam Bar has not put the rare orange-and-yellow lobster on the menu.

“Gosh no!” Nickerson said. “That would be like steaming a Rembrandt.”

Instead, Fiona has gotten used to fine dining at Arnold’s – she’s kept on a diet of Yellowfin tuna of sushi quality while the other lobsters have to make do with cod fish. Nickerson plans on continuing to pamper her for a while before donating her to the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History in Brewster or to the New England Aquarium.

Nickerson received Fiona as a gift from his fried Michael R. Gagne, sales manager at Ipswich Shellfish Company Inc. who says Fiona is a “once-in-a-lifetime lobster”.

1According to Michael F. Tlusty, director of research at the New England Aquarium, Fiona’s distinctive coloration is caused by a rare genetic mutation. He estimated she might be 7 years old based on her weight, but how she managed to survive for so many years in her eye-catching garb is a true mystery.

“If you’re swimming over a muddy bottom, it would be much easier to see a yellow lobster than a normal-colored lobster,” said Tlusty, who has been studying lobsters for 10 years.

“Why was she able to survive with her coloration?” Tlusty asked. “That’s something we’re not quite sure of.”

A company named Ghost Pros is currently exploring the ship wrecks of Florida in search not of gold, silver or precious stones but of ghosts. The company is using the latest underwater ghost-detection technology, including submersible high powered sonar listening devices. Ghost Pro divers have also teamed up with Tampa’s Sea Viewers, the makers of high definition studio cameras which will be used to develop under water rovers.

“We’re listening to everything and anything we can down there,” says Ghost Pros’ Lee Ehrlich, explaining that you have to know what is not a ghost before you can find one. “[…] before you can tell you need to know what that ship sounds like alone,” he says.

Unlike Ghost Busters, Ghost Pros doesn’t get paid to hunt ghosts, but the search does generate a lot of attention from ghost aficionados and ghost critics, as well as from the general media. Hunting for the para-normal has proven to be an excellent way of creating some very normal buzz for Ehrlich and his companions, who – when not hunting down the ghosts of voyages past – are developing advanced submersibles for search and rescue operations.

As a diver, I would like to recommend any readers of this blog to leave the deep sea ghost hunting to professionals like Ehrlich and his crew. If you start seeing ghosts while scuba diving, make a safe ascendance and wait for the nitrogen poisoning to wear off.

Sarpa salpa, a fish species capable of causing long-lasting hallucinatory experiences in humans, has been caught far north of its normal range. Normally found in the warm waters of the Mediterranean and off the African west coast, Sarpa salpa is an unusual guest in northern Europe. Only three previous recordings exist from British waters, with the third being from 1983 when a single specimen was caught off the Channel Islands.

The most recent specimen of this mind altering Sparidae was caught six miles south of Polperro, Cornwall, by fisherman Andy Giles. When Giles found the strange looking creature entangled in his net he brought it back to shore to have it identified.

Picture by by Sam and Ian

“We were trawling for lemon sole but hauled up the net at the end of the day and almost immediately saw this striped fish”, Giles said. “I had never seen one before so brought it back for experts to have a look at it. But now I realise what it was – and the crazy effects it can have – perhaps I should have taken it into town to sell to some clubbers.”

Instead of selling it to clubbers, Giles could also have brought it home to the dinner table – without much risk of having any mind altering experiences. Within its native range, Sarpa salpa, commonly known as Salema porgy, is a popular food fish and suffering from hallucinations after ordering a plate of Salema in a Mediterranean restaurant is very rare.

According to marine experts, Sarpa salpa has to feed on a certain types of plankton in order to become hallucinogen. In 2006, two men were hospitalized in southern France after eating Sarpa salpa who evidently had feasted on vast amounts of psychedelic plankton before being caught.

“Plankton has very minute amounts of poison and fish that eat a great deal of it can develop this poisoning”, says Oliver Crimmen, fish curator at the Natural History Museum. Sarpa salpa are a popular fish to eat in the Mediterranean and I think the 2006 incident was a rare event.”

So, why can urge a Sarpa salpa to leave the pleasant waters of Africa and head for chilly Britain? According to James Wright, senior biologist at the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth, the fish may simply have tagged along when some other species decided to head north, but it may also be possible that the species is on the rise in northern Europe.

“These are a fairly common fish off Tenerife, Malta and Cyprus but it is very rare to get them this far north. It could be a single fish that was shoaling with a different species, says Wright. But it could be that there are more of them in our waters.”

According to the journal Surgery, a 50 cm (20 in) eel was removed from a man’s rectum at the Kwong Wah Hospital in Kowloon, Hong Kong.

The 50-year old man was admitted to the Accident and Emergency Department complaining about abdominal pain.

European Eel – Picture by Ron Offermans; GNU

Doctors diagnosed him with peritonitis, inflammation of the peritoneum*, and did an x-ray to find out the underlying cause. Interestingly enough, what they saw on the x-ray was an eel stuck inside the man’s rectum.

The eel was still alive and biting the patient’s splenic flexure, which is a sharp bend located between the transverse and the descending colon. Doctors also found a 3 cm perforation over the anterior wall of the rectum.

“On further questioning,” says the paper, “the patient admitted an eel was inserted into the rectum in an attempt to relieve constipation. This may be related to a bizarre healthcare belief, inadvertent sexual behaviour, or criminal assault. However, the true reason may never be known.”

The patient was released from hospital a week later. We have been unable to find any information about what happened to the eel.

* The peritoneum is a serous membrane that forms the lining of the abdominal cavity or the coelom.

No, this fish is not animated by Pixar – it is a very real fish created by Mother Nature deep down in the ocean. Its name is Macropinna microstoma and it has puzzled ichthyologists since it was first described by Chapman in 1939.

Macropinna microstoma, also known as the Barreleye fish, has a fluid-filled dome on its head through which the lenses of its barrel shaped eyes can be clearly seen. The fish lives at a dept of 600-800 metres where it spends most of its time hanging almost completely still in the water.

Even though the Barreleye was described by science in the late 1930s, the transparent dome is a fairly new discovered since it is normally destroyed when the fish is brought up from the deep. Old drawings of the fish do not show the see-through part of the head and the species was not photographed alive until 2004.

Thanks to new technology, it is now possible for researchers to explore the deep sea much more efficiently than ever before and we are therefore learning more and more about the weird and wonderful creatures that inhabit these baffling parts of the planet. It has long been known that the tubular eyes of the Barreleye are good at collecting light; an adaptation to a life deep down in the ocean where light is scarce. The eyes were however presumed to be fixed and the fish was therefore believed to have a very narrow upwards-facing tunnel-vision. Researchers Bruce Robinson and Kim Reisenbichler from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) has now changed this notion completely by providing evidence suggesting that this fish can rotate its eyes within the transparent dome in order to see both upwards and straight forward. Robinson and Reisenbichler observed that when suitable prey, e.g. a jellyfish, is spotted, the fish will rotate its eyes to face forward as it turns its body from a horizontal to a vertical position to feed.

Robinson and Reisenbichler were able to get close to five living Barreleyes using Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) at a depth of 600-800 meters off the coast of Central California. In addition to observing and filming the fish in its native habitat, the researchers also captured two specimens and placed them in an aquarium for a few hours in order to study them more closely.

Live specimens of Macropinna microstoma turned out to have beautifully coloured green eyes; probably in order to filter out sunlight from the surface of the ocean since this would make it easier for the fish to spot bioluminescent jellyfish. Robinson also suggests that Macropinna microstoma might be using its supreme eye sight to steal food from siphonophores[1].

If you want to know more about the intriguing Barreleye fish, check out the paper BH Robison and KR Reisenbichler (2008) – Macropinna microstoma and the paradox of its tubular eyes. Copeia[2]. 2008, No. 4, December 18, 2008.

A 12+ year old female reef shark kept in an aquarium at the Atlantis Resort in The Bahamas managed to jump out of its tank and onto a nearby water slide. She slid down the slide and into the swimming pool, where she was subjected to the chlorinated pool water. The aquarium staff immediately put her back in her own tank in an attempt to resuscitate her, but it was too late. The Atlantis Resort does not keep their sharks in chlorinated water; they use filtered water from the Atlantic Ocean since it is more similar to the natural environment of these animals.

According to the hotel, the shark ended up in the swimming pool after jumping over a 1 foot high and 18 in wide sustaining structure. The event took place at around 9:30 in the morning when the resorts waterscape had not yet opened for guests, so no vacationers were swimming in the pool at the time.

The Atlantis aquarists believe “the shark was startled by an unusual circumstance that we have no way of defining completely”.

Several species of shark are capable of leaping out of the water and the exact reason or reasons behind this type of behaviour are yet not fully understood. The longest sustained series of breaches ever recorded was performed by a Humpback Whale who did 130 separate leaps in less than 90 minutes in the waters around the West Indies.