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.
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.
Anyone who has faced an agitated shark has felt the power of communication through body language. The response is so immediate and so physical, that emotion, expressing through body language, is revealed as an important medium of pre-vocal communication among animals.
Brown-banded bamboo sharks can sense electrical fields even before they've hatched from their egg cases.
Despite being confined to the small space within the egg case, where they are vulnerable to predators, embryonic sharks are able to recognise dangerous stimuli and react with an innate avoidance response.
Normally, an embryo pulses its gills actively. But when researchers turned on electrodes to produce an electric field near the egg cases, the unhatched sharks froze and stilled their gills for several seconds.
‘Banba’ a female basking shark tagged in July with a satellite transmitter off Malin head, Co. Donegal has just released its transmitter west of the Cape Verde Islands, over 5000km away from were it was originally tagged.
The movement by the shark ‘Banba’ into warm tropical waters off West Africa coupled with similar findings by Mattew Whitt working with Scottish Natural Heritage and leading American shark biologist Greg Skomal in the western Atlantic, questions the validity of the established theory that basking sharks inhabit temperate waters only.
