The tiger shark is one of the species that does occasionally attack people.
But this footage shows them to have a certain amount of grace and beauty that one might not suspect from a creature known as the “garbage man of the sea.”
They tend to eat just about anything– as you may remember from Jaws. In that film, the amateur bounty fishermen catch a big tiger shark and claim it as the beast that has been terrorizing Amity Island. Hooper, the marine biologist played by Richard Dreyfuss, demands that he cut open the shark to see what it has been eating. He finds a Louisiana license plate inside.
One would expect an animal that eats things like license plates to be very dull and brutish.
But when you look into the eyes of these tiger sharks, you see something one would never expect to see in a fish.
It’s a kind of glimmer of intelligence. It’s not quite mammalian, but it’s more of a spark than one would find in a largemouth bass or a bluegill.
Tiger sharks are one of the species targeted by shark finners, and in North American waters, they have been heavily persecuted.
I remember seeing one when I was a small boy. It has been captured by a charter fishing boat that had seen the shark devouring a loggerhead sea turtle. (Tiger sharks are excellent sea turtle predators. Sea turtles are one of their favorite prey items.)
The boat’s captain had seen the shark eating the turtle, but he decided to not to catch it.
They didn’t have a very good day out pursuing billfish, so on their way back, they cast lines for the shark. They snagged it, and after a struggle, they hauled it in.
They had not caught a great blue marlin that day.
The fishermen had been failures.
But now they had tangled with a murderous beast of prey.
They had vanquished the great sea monster, and now they could come back to port as heroes.
Knowing that such a creature could live in the water in which people swam scared me a bit. When I was younger, I used to have dreams about being attacked by a big shark that grabbed me with its jaws in the surf.
Even today, I won’t swim in murky ocean water off the coast. I don’t mind swimming in clear ocean water– one of my favorite days was when I went snorkeling in Hawaii.
But I won’t get in the water if I can’t see to the bottom.
However, as I look at the spark in the eyes of these tiger sharks, they seem less scary, less menacing. I feel for them in the way I have felt for wolves and other terrestrial carnivores.
Just as the land needs tigers and wolves, the ocean will need tiger sharks.
That tiger sharks sometimes attack people should not given us license to exterminate them.
Look into those eyes, and the being that is a tiger shark is revealed.
A commonality is there.
I just didn’t expect it.
sharks eat or bite metallic objects because they confuse their electro-receptors by reacting ionically to the saltwater –
they ‘look’ alive, to a shark – imitating the trickle of electricity produced by muscles.
the electro-reception of sharks did not evolve around steel motors, human trash and propellers, so the chemical-reactions of metal + saltwater are confusing.
their electro-reception is why sharks often do so poorly in aquaria; they start banging their rostrum into the tank walls or internal features [like fake cliffs] and become disoriented, then start losing co-ordination.
if the keepers ignore the deterioration, the shark will begin to lose weight, become anorexic, and die.
the Monterey Bay aquarium [i think] holds the record for keeping a Great White healthy –
and COST + increasing predation decided the staff on releasing their still-healthy shark.
their GW grew much faster than anyone had expected, too –
she grew over a foot and gained over 100# in just 6-mos.
the release was timed in part because they feared that even greater size would only make it more dangerous to the shark [body weight, organ damage, etc, during transport].
if U look at the photo here – head-on –
http://tinyurl.com/6cfdq2
the damage to her rostrum is clearly visible, even tho this shark was still orienting, eating and proprioceptively normal.
she was tagged and tracked for a month post-release, and obviously was feeding normally – so she survived captivity and release.
– terry
terry pride, APDT-Aus, apdt#1827, CVA, TDF
Sharks can be a bit scary but nowhere near as scary as the actions of our own species towards them. To kill them for their fins alone is a shameful thing. To kill them for the glory of killing a “monster” is just as bad.
Thanks for your addition Terry as well. I didn’t know about that project at all…do now!