Week 1

During the first week we stayed in Hernando Beach, Florida. The two professors that have grants for this research rent a house for us to stay in at each location. We stayed in this surprisingly nice little condo.

As per usual we caught a lot of sharpnose and bonnethead sharks. One of the coolest things we caught this week though was an 8 ft. male nurse shark.

A funny thing happened though. Although we all knew he was a male, due to the fact that he was a nurse shark, every single one of us called him "her" while she was on the boat.

Here you can see part of the long line that he was on.

Nurse sharks are cool because they're one of the few sharks that have the ability to not move and still be able to breathe. Most often you'll see them sitting on the bottom.

They also have an inferior mouth, meaning that it's located on the underside of their body. This is because they eat other organisms that hang out on the bottom like crustaceans, other invertebrates, and bottom dwelling fish.

He was super fat. When we rolled him over his belly jiggled.

The yellow string looking thing coming off the base of his dorsal fin is a tag we put on him. Also, the reason he's bleeding a little bit right behind where I'm sitting is where we took a biopsy. Unfortunately for the bigger sharks a biopsy punch doesn't work because their skin is far too thick, so we usually have to cut a little chunk out.

Methods and Such

We have two different methods of catching sharks. The first one is called a Gill Net, which is actually illegal in the state of Florida, so we have special permits to use our equipment. It's basically an enormously long net with six different mesh sizes to catch six different size classes of fish. The mesh is clear so that fish can't see it and swim right into it, catching them on their gills and wrapping them up. This is what part of ours looks like:

The other method is long line fishing. We put out an extremely long line with a hook on it every 20 feet or so. We have four different sizes of hooks that we use. It kind of looks like this:

http://www.afma.gov.au/information/students/methods/images/pelagic_longline.jpg

Both of these methods have pretty high mortality rates for fisheries, however we only let our sets soak for an hour each in order to reduce mortality as much as possible.

When we catch sharks we measure them, tag them, take biopsies of ones that look really healthy, and genetics samples. They're only out of the water for a couple minutes and get released as soon as possible. If one comes up and looks on the brink, we release it immediately after measuring it, we won't wait and do biopsies or anything. The sharks that do come up dead we re-use as bait for some of the long line hooks, so nothing goes to waste.

Bonnethead and Sharpnose

This cute little thing right here is called a Bonnethead shark. (Sphyrna tiburo)

They're not very big (max length at about 5 feet) and we usually catch immature ones, around two feet or so. They make up a big chunk of what we catch out on the boat.

The other shark we catch all the time is the Atlantic Sharpnose Shark. (Rhizoprionodon terraenovae)

We usually catch a lot of juvenile sharpnose sharks, so like the bonnethead they're pretty small.

This is my advisor, Dr. Dean Grubbs, measuring a sharpnose on what I fondly call "the shark cradle."

This is me watching him measure another little guy.

How freaking cute is that tiny little shark?

Intro

So you know what's awkward? Trying to figure out what to say for your first post in a blog.

I started this to keep my friends and family updated on my summer project working with sharks. I'll post a bunch of pictures I'm sure, as well as some random info about what we catch. Stay tuned!