AOTW #6: Carcharodon carcharias

Ladies and Gentlemen! I am absolutely DELIGHTED to present to you... the proverbial Creme de la Creme of the icthyological realm. The KING of fish! The descendant of the great beast MEGALODON. I give you.... The Great White Shark!!! 

If you know me well, you may be wondering why I haven't done this AOTW already... I mean, it IS my favorite animal ever! My answer is simply- I haven't the slightest idea. 

The great white shark. In my opinion, easily one of the most beautiful animals on the face of the earth. This beast of legends and lore is not what many people think, though. A monster, it is not. A maneater, it is not. Interesting, it sure as dern heck is!

C. carcharias (yes, I've memorized the spelling of that) belongs to the Carcharodon genus, in which it is the only species. Great whites are the largest of the lamniformes (or, commonly, mackerel sharks), which are pretty much the text-book shark that most people think of when they hear the word shark. But the main issue is that the picture they see in their mind is usually similar to this one. Over thousands of years, humans have attributed the great white's fearsome appearance to a habit of eating human flesh, which is extremely inaccurate. In fact, sharks spit humans out when they get a taste because we don't taste very good! The main reason a great white ever has to attack a person is when he or she is floating at the surface in a wetsuit. Why is that? The answer is pretty simple! Sharks eat seals, and from 40 yards away, and the sun shining from above, you look pretty darn identical to a seal. And once that happens, a hungry shark goes into beast mode. The shark will roll its eyes back into their heads in order to protect them and just torpedo up at whatever it is that it may be going for. My point is that sharks don't just go around attacking people for the fun of it. 

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, I'll get to the facts and all that good stuff. The great white shark is the largest predatory fish in the ocean right now, and is one of the primary predators of marine mammals. As I said before, they eat mostly seals and sea lions. It so turns out that I live very close to one of the 3 largest concentrations of pinnipeds (seals, sea lions, walruses, etc.) on earth. This, in turn, means that I also live near one of the 3 areas most inhabited by C. carcharias. These three areas are off the coasts of Southern California, South Africa, and Australia. 

Since we're talking about WHAT great whites eat, what about HOW sharks eat? Sharks are very unique in many ways, especially in their feeding behavior. Many great whites, especially those living in the regions previously mentioned, actually JUMP clear out of the water in the attempt at catching seals. This is simply because seals are fast, and slippery, and the further out of the water the shark gets, the better grip it can get on the seal. This video shows the surreal occurrence in slow motion. It really makes you realize how powerful and breathtaking C. carcharias really is. I think it's one of the most beautiful natural phenomena on earth.

Great whites eat seals, because apparently seals taste good. why do YOU think that you almost never hear of a shark actually consuming a person? It's simply because humans don't taste very good. Not enough meat or fat, whereas a seal has a thick layer of blubber, and lots of muscle underneath.

That brings me to my next topic, which is what kind of impact have sharks had on people, and vice-versa? For thousands of years, probably ever since humans stepped foot on earth and came in contact with sharks, great whites have been on the sharp end of the stick, and mostly because they don't look very nice. And then, to magnify the issue, sometimes a shark attacks a person. Ever since the first shark attack, humans have automatically associated the word "shark" with evil. What has this led to on the sharks' side? Millions of sharks just killed for the sake of killing, because a lot of people think that sharks need to die, that they are the devil's beasts, blah blah blah. And if you've read my other posts, you know that even the slightest unnecessary change in a marine ecosystem can throw everything off. Imagine what happens when millions of one of the most important animals in the food chain are killed?

I went on a little rant for a while there, so I'm just gonna get back to the facts. Sharks are really unique animals and have a lot of really cool characteristics that no other animals have. For starters, sharks have a very interesting set of teeth. in fact, sharks don't really have teeth in their mouths, per se. A shark's teeth are actually hardened, dense scales. The main difference between a shark's teeth and most animals' is that shark teeth don't have roots, which means they are relatively easy to be broken or pulled out. To compensate for this, sharks have another unique dental characteristic. A shark's teeth grow in endless rows, as if on a conveyor belt. The image above is a model of a cross section of a great white's jaw. You can see here how the teeth flip up out of the jaw and around it, and this is a process that doesnt end until the shark dies. Their bodies are constantly making new teeth.

As I've already spent a lot of words ranting, and this post is getting quite long, I'm going to end it here, and continue in another AOTW! :) Thank you for reading! And if you want to learn more about C. carcharias, Google is a good start :) Have a great day!!

Adopt-A-Shark...???

Sharks are, without any doubts or second thoughts, my favorite of all animals. No, not the man-eating sharks you see in false media depictions, like in "Jaws" or "Deep Blue Sea". I'm talking about the group of animals, belonging to the superorder Selachimorpha, who are, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful groups of animals on earth. Sharks are a very important part of any marine ecosystem, in ways that most people would think of as negative impact. Sharks are up at the top of the food chain in most of the oceans, which means that they have very few or, in most cases, no natural predators. As a result, they are the ones who eat the most, but they are naturally not as abundant as the animals who are a bit lower on the food chain. The only problem with humans is that for thousands of years, the common person has looked at sharks as "sea devils", and other names which suggest that sharks are evil. Sharks are NOT evil! They don't even like the taste of humans! My point is that sharks are not the ones to look out for, it's the people killing them out of fear of the unknown. We should be protecting sharks, if anything! This leads me to tell you about a program I recently stumbled upon while browsing MarineBio.org 

You may have heard of "Adopt-a-road" programs in your city, or seen those commercials that plead for you to donate a small amount of money every month to feed children in some remote place on earth, but I bet you haven't heard about the new program recently started in Miami, Florida, in order to help the conservation of the native shark species in that area. This article  is all about the program. Don't get all excited, there! No, you cannot actually adopt a shark to have as your pet. But what you can do is donate a sum of $2000.00 for a satellite tracking device to be attached to a shark off the Florida coast. So why should you donate your hard-earned money to this research program? Because first of all, sharks are one of the most important parts of the SW U.S. ecosystem. In fact, they are the most important in most ecosystems on earth. You may not know this, but the animals at the top of the food chain are just as important as plants, if not more so. Nevertheless, they are still the group of species in an ecosystem with the smallest population. This leads to the second reason to donate, which is that the research that will no doubt come out of this program could lead to new conservation measures, such as keeping zones of the coastal waters that have a high concentration of sharks off-limits to fishers. This would help to keep the native sharks abundant in the coastal waters, so they can continue to play their role in nature. Check out this article and decide for yourself how much you care about these amazing animals!


Read more: http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2011/05/18/2019489/floridas-adopt-a-shark-program.html#ixzz1MpCPyRtV

Thanks for reading!

Old Skool Jaws & The Lonely Whale

I read this article today. A guy was mining in a tunnel (He was actually doing another miner's work for him), and he's just mining (pun intended) his own business when all of the sudden a rock falls, uncovering an 18 inch piece of a shark's jaw! Biologists are not sure what species the jaws came from, but they know it was from the Edestus genus, and it probably weighed about 2 tons. This interesting genus of oceanic sharks includes many species, many of which have oddly shaped jaws. One species, dubbed the Scissor-Tooth Shark, has a coil of teeth on its lower jaw instead of the normal jaw configuration for most sharks. They fed on ancestors of dolphins, whales, and probably other sharks and large fish of the late Carboniferous period. The jaws were filled with razor sharp teeth. Hold on, you may be wondering how a shark got to Kentucky. It's really a lot simpler than you may think. According to geologists, millions of years ago, much of North America was covered by water, and there was only a small piece of land which was above water. I think I speak for myself and you, perhaps, when I say that the shark is cool and interesting and big and all, but I'm glad it's extinct... pretty sure we'd need a bit of a bigger boat. (hehe Jaws FTW)

This is an artist's rendition of what the scissor-tooth shark, or Edestus Giganteus, could have looked like based on the fossils that have been found. Check out the size of those chompers compared to the man behind it!

I found another story  about a whale named Alice. Scientists are baffled by this one animal.  "What's Alice's problem?", you may be asking. She's a lonely whale. Most whales, with the sperm whales and blue whales being the exception, travel in pods of up to hundreds of whales. Alice has neither been seen in a pod, nor seen with a mate. Marine biologists aren't even sure if Alice is a female, and they can't classify her beyond the fact that she's a baleen whale. Now, she isn't reclusive or antisocial on purpose. She has an odd predicament, though. Her calls are too high-pitched to be heard or recognized by other whales! Alice's calls are about 35 to 40 hertz away from the average whale's calls. Scientists are trying to figure out why Alice has this strange call, and whether she has some sort of disorder or if she's the only known individual of some presumed to be extinct species of whale. And if they don't find a Mr. Alice, she might well be the last of her kind. I think it's a bit sad that this gentle giant might be alone for the rest of its life. What do you think about this? Hey, maybe this panda would like to be friends with Alice.