Lessons from the fastest-swimming shark on the planet.
Scientists track and study sharks by analyzing environmental water DNA
The method could open a breakthrough for shark research.
These sharks thrive in a real-life underwater volcano
Yes, these sharks live inside a volcano.
Most shark fins and ray gills sold in Vancouver come from threatened, trade-banned species
We’re literally eating the viability of tomorrow’s oceans.
Scientists find deep-sea miniature shark that glows in the dark
We’ve just started discovering the tip of the iceberg in terms of deep sea creatures.
Bamboo sharks really have to put their back into eating — literally
Specifically, they put their shoulders into it.
New ancient car-sized species identified by paleontologists. It was related to Megalodon
Some 20 million years ago, both the Atlantic and the Pacific were haunted by a huge shark the size of a car.
Fossil Friday: C. Megalodon, the true Jaws
The biggest fish in the pond.
Longest-living vertebrate is a 400-year-old Greenland Shark
A groundbreaking study found a giant lurking beneath the Arctic might be the oldest living vertebrate today.
Scientists build a camera with “shark vision”
We now have shark vision.
Human limbs might have evolved from shark gills
Flap your hands like a shark.
Fossil Friday: Helicoprion
Helicoprion is an extinct genus of shark-like, cartilaginous fish that lived from the early Permian (~290 m.y. ago) all through to the massive Permian-Triassic extinction episode (roughly 250 m.y. ago.)
How many friends would a shark have on facebook?
Sharks have a reputation of solitary predators. They’re not the life of the party, sort to say. One new research casts doubt on this assumption, though. The findings suggest that sharks, or at least Sand Tiger sharks, have a complex social structure not all that different in some instances from notoriously social mammals like dolphins, chimps or even humans.
Some deep-water sharks can float up, contrary to conventional wisdom
Researchers at University of Hawaii, Manoa in collaboration with a team from the University of Tokyo were surprised to find not one, but two species of deep-water sharks that have positive buoyancy. Most sharks have a negative buoyancy, meaning if they stop swimming they’ll sink to the bottom, and some researchers have posited that there may be some species with neutral buoyancy. Finding sharks that defy this conventional wisdom is definitely an important discovery. Now the researchers are trying to find out how the positive buoyancy is attained and whether other shark species have this ability.
Sharks act like Math Geniuses
At least in one aspect, sharks behave as world class mathematicians – although the cause may be sensibleness more than cleverness. The behavior associated to both mathematicians and sharks is called the Lévy flight. A Lévy flight is a random walk in which the step-lengths have a probability distribution that is heavy-tailed. In other words, it’s a seemingly complex form of random
Shark Week Lied to Scientists to Get Them to Appear in “Documentaries”
I’ve given up on watching TV years ago – the occasional documentary or football game (guilty) once in a blue moon will do for me. But recently, there are fewer and fewer quality documentaries being shown on TV; not to say that there aren’t any awesome ones being made – there’s excellent documentaries coming out every year, but TV channels
Sharks may confuse kitesurfers with birds and attack them
A new study investigated the circumstances under which a 15-year-old kitesurfing male died after a tiger shark attacked him in the South Pacific. Their analysis suggests that attack took place mostly likely because the kitesurfer’s motion was confused by the shark with a bird overtaking the water. In light of other similar shark attack cases, the researchers advise any kitesurfing in waters known to harbor sharks should be made with extreme care.
Historic day for shark protection
We’ve been telling you on and on – millions and millions of sharks are perishing each year, mostly due to shark finning – people fish sharks, cut off their fins, them let them go, only to suffer a slow, painful, humiliating death, unable to move at the bottom of the ocean. Shark fin soup is a delicacy everywhere from Indonesia
Shark embryos stay still to avoid predators
Sharks are the ultimate predators, comfortably sitting at the very top of the food chain; but even they have their enemies (the biggest one being us, of course), especially when they’re small – nobody fears a small shark. But even in their defenseless period, sharks have managed to find a way to adapt. Australian researchers found that the embryos know
Hope delayed from sharks in the Atlantic
Sharks are in a dire position right now, with their numbers decreasing by the millions each year. However, conservationists failed to win new protections for threatened sharks in the Atlantic Ocean at the annual meeting of a major international fisheries commission; they still have hope for following years though, because for the first time, the International Commission for the Conservation