If you happen to be in New Zealand this week, the Auckland Museum will be performing a public autopsy on a 9 ft great white shark on Thursday, January 8, in hopes to raise shark awareness.
The autopsy, or necropsy as it’s officially known, will be carried out by Clinton Duffy of the Department of Conservation Marine Conservation Section and Tom Trnski, Marine Curator of the Auckland Museum.
The operation will examine the shark’s stomach contents, as well as take measurements of internal organs. The public are invited to view the autopsy and come face to face with the shark from 11am-1pm in the loading dock at the south-eastern corner of the Museum.
Some smart sharky people did some tests and found out that a shark’s bite is not as powerful as we thought. Their main weapon is actually their sharp teeth, not their jaws. Huh?
Well, according to Dr. Huber, who lead the study, sharks can do a lot of damage simply because their teeth are so sharp and their jaws are so wide. However compared with mammals they have incredibly weak bites for their size.
Huber also went on to say A 20ft great white shark can ‘bite through anything that you come across.”
The crowds came out in droves to see a public dissection of a giant mako shark in a New Zealand parking lot. Apparently, one guy even paid for a front row seat. Watch it.
“Planet in Peril: Battle Lines” airs tonight at 9 p.m. ET on CNN. Hosted by Anderson Cooper and National Geographic’s Lisa Ling, the series takes a look at the environmental conflicts between growing populations and natural resources, including a lot of sharky stuff.
According to BBC news, a woman with psoriasis has managed to get rid of the skin condition by sitting in a pool of flesh-eating fish.
Samantha Grayston, 38, spent six hours a day sitting in the pool at a spa in Turkey. The fish went to work, chewing away the excess cells which are caused by psoriasis, allowing the healing mineral water to reach the skin.
Grayston says her skin looks great and has never been smoother. She even got a suntan for the first time in her life.
Shen paid about $3,700 for the treatment and expects its effects to last 18 months.
Shark poo has been caught on camera for what is thought to be the first time. A crew managed to record the whale shark (the world’s biggest fish) doing it’s business, and then scooped some up for research.
Biologist Mark Meekan calls the stuff “scientific gold” saying, “one way to work out what is going in one end is to look at what is coming out of the other.”
A nearly half-ton mako shark that died in the Mapua estuary in New Zealand on Friday could help unravel the mystery of how the beasts breed.
The 12′ mako shark was found in the Mapua estuary by Denis Crawford (sunglasses) and hauled out by locals. Richard de Hamel from Touch the Sea Aquarium (white hat) coordinated the operation.
The shark had been floating listlessly in the tide, which was strange behavior for makos, believed to be the world’s fastest shark. It had earlier been stuck on a sand bar and then stranded on the beach opposite Mapua, until a man pushed it out into the water again. But it got beached again and died.
From the looks of it, the shark had been mating recently and was most likely carrying a pup, which got the scientists pretty excited since they know very little about the reproductive process of makos.
Remember Tidbit? Well, back in May 2007, the 5-foot, 94-pound shark died after she was given a sedative before undergoing a yearly checkup. But a 10-inch shark pup was found during a necropsy! They initially thought the embryonic pup was either the product of a virgin birth or a cross between the blacktip and a male of another shark species.
In a study reported Friday in the Journal of Fish Biology, scientists said DNA testing proved that a pup carried by a female blacktip shark in a Virginia aquarium contained no genetic material from a male.
Tidbit’s pup was nearly full term and scientists have confirmed that this was second case of a “virgin birth” in a shark.
The first documented case of asexual reproduction among sharks involved a pup born to a hammerhead at an Omaha, Nebraska, zoo.
The pair, aged 74 and 71, met as members of a spearfishing club in Sydney but decided to stop hunting fish in the 1960s and turned to conservation instead.
They began by making a series of ground-breaking films showing underwater life, and were the first people to film great white sharks without using a cage. Some of their most famous footage was used by Steven Spielberg in the movie JAWS.
But after Valerie had a close call with a shark, Ron decided to design a chain mail diving suit. When the suit ended up being too small for him, his wife volunteered to test it.
The pair have won dozens of awards and Valerie was made an honorary member of the Order of the Golden Ark in recognition of her conservation work.
