Devanshi Kasana, a Ph.D. candidate in the Florida International University (FIU) Predator Ecology and Conservation lab, was working with local Belizean fishers to tag tiger sharks when the surprise discovery was made.
Belize is a country blessed with an abundance of fabulous coral reefs, to which its newest underwater attraction—the sunken ship "The Wit"—adds another dimension. Angelique Brathwaite has the story.
When Lisa Carne first visited Laughing Bird Caye National Park in 1994, the reef was vibrant and bursting with life, abundant with fish, corals, lobsters, crabs, sponges and sea turtles. After the hurricane, it was a scene of desolation, the seabed a swathe of rubble dotted with a few surviving corals. Hurricane Iris not only killed corals but uprooted their structure, making recovery more difficult.
A team of researchers led by Jason Blackburn of the University of Florida sampled and tested 134 fish living in coastal waters of the Gulf of Mexico, Belize, and Massachusetts for signs of drug-resistant bacteria, using a suite of twelve common antibiotics. Resistance was found everywhere they looked, to varying degrees. Pronounced resistance to an array of drugs was found in sharks in Dry Tortugas National Park in the Florida Keys, for example.
