Sharks are full of surprises, say NMFS scientists
Shark Week on television is over and that’s too bad, but sharks don’t know it so they continue to frighten and fascinate us. In case you haven’t had enough, here comes the National Marine Fisheries Service bearing platters of sharky info hors d’oeuvres.
Don’t be scared. These stories are about huge but typically non-threatening sharks that are smart enough not to mistake humans for the stuff they like to eat, like plankton and sardines. Nobody looks like plankton, and even the fishiest among us don’t much resemble sardines.
Whale sharks first: Fishing-doers who go far offshore are eligible to see one swimming slowly, very slowly, just at the surface. That’s pretty exciting, because if anything can make an ocean suddenly feel small, it’s a fish the size of a bus, brown-skinned with rows and rows of white freckles, right up alongside your boat.
We know that part from experience. We learned the rest from one of the NMFS’s easy-to-swallow reports called “Six Surprising Facts About Whale Sharks.” Our favorite Surprising Fact is about the schools of tuna that hang out with whale sharks. You can fish for them — the tuna, you know — without competition because whale sharks don’t eat tuna.
Just as dolphin like swimming around a blue-water weed line, or tarpon alongside a lighted bridge, tuna are attracted to a whale shark. If those fish could understand it themselves, NMFS scientists think they would try to explain it like this:
“Tuna are among the fastest-swimming fish in the world, and it is odd that they associate with such slowmoving giants. Perhaps tuna follow in the hope that the whale shark will lead them to food. Whatever the reason, tuna do provide a valuable service to the sharks.
“When tuna feed on small fish like sardines or anchovies, they circle their prey, and the small fish react defensively by forming a dense, swarm called a bait ball.
“When they do this, it's not uncommon to see a whale shark standing on its tail in the middle of the bait ball, sucking the densely concentrated fish into its mouth. The whale sharks would not be able to feed on the small fish without the help of the tunas.”
If you have to know why whale sharks don’t eat tuna, that looks like a good reason, doesn’t it?
Both of our other two sources are veteran NOAA sharkman Tobey Curtis, lead author of a recent study on the species recovery of great whites. He hosted a Twitter chat session that’s posted on the agency’s website. It’s light Q & A stuff but with links to more important things like Mote Marine Laboratory’s cancer research into the strong immune systems of sharks. Also interesting: Curtis’ views on marine protected areas.
The third item is Curtis’ report on sticking basking sharks — almost as big as whale sharks — with satellite tags to track their movements, which helps scientists to figure out their food and habitat preferences. The work is done in shallow waters off New England, where basking sharks go in summer and are easily taggable.
Here are links to the shark reports:
www.nmfs.noaa.gov/stories/2014/08/8_12_14surprisingfacts_whale_sharks.html.
www.nmfs.noaa.gov/stories/2014/08/8_11_14sharkchat_curtis.html.
www.greateratlantic.fisheries.noaa.gov/stories/2014/ plankton_feeders_are_sharks_too_.html.
A new pier for fishing doers
We prefer to check out new fishing venues thoroughly, in person, before putting them in the paper, but will make an exception for the new fishing pier at Miami Beach’s South Pointe Park. It was opened in mid-August, and we haven’t heard much about how well it fishes — or how poorly, which looks like a possibility due to silt from the dredging project to deepen big-ship access to the Port of Miami.
It’s in a great spot alongside the north jetty of Government Cut, where all sorts of sport fish swim. In addition to cruise ships and tugboats there’s a lot of boat traffic to and from the big Miami Beach Marina, so we anticipate quite a lot of wake and rebound near the pier.
That won’t stop many experienced pier fishing-doers, who learn to cope with conditions at the cost of losing alot of terminal tackle until they learn what the bottom lets them get away with. Good thing sinkers are cheap. We’re interested more in access, how others observe or ignore the specialized courtesies of pier fishing and how much airspace we must reel a hooked fish through in order to bring it to the deck. One shouldn’t need a deep jigging boat pole to bring in a small snapper at low tide.
We also judge a pier by its width — whether it’s safe to walk past the casters without tolling a gong to remind them someone’s behind them. We wonder in this case if it’s long enough at 300 feet.
It has standard amenities: shaded seating, fish-cleaning and bait-cutting stations. Some other things to like sight unseen include a three-rod limit per person and places to dump trash and your fish and bait scraps. It would be more than joyful to discover that the Parks and Recreation Department has those emptied as often as necessary.
Being a municipal facility, the pier has a lot of rules. Look them up at http://web.miamibeachfl.gov/parksandrecreation/scroll.aspx?id=57993.
Access is from the south end of Washington Avenue, at the park’s western end.
Turtle poacher strikes again
This has been such a great year for sea turtle nests and nestlings on Florida beaches that there’s money in poached turtle eggs.
No, not poached as in semi-softboiled on an English muffin or good ol’ Southern biscuit with a slice of Canadian bacon and a drooly Béarnaise sauce. They are poached as in taken illegally — snatched from beach nests protected by state and federal laws.
In August, a woman described by Florida Fish & Wildlife officers as “a concerned citizen” sighted James Odel McGriff, 55, at Diamond Sands Beach, just off State Road A1A in St. Lucie County. She called in her tip, describing the man and his car.
When officers met the man, they and their tracking dog retraced his steps until they came upon a turtle nest that had been tampered with and a backpack containing 299 eggs. With a biologist’s help they re-buried all but a dozen eggs, which they kept for evidence.
Without a turtle present for positive identification, the eggs were judged to be either from a green turtle or loggerhead. Both kinds were nesting in the area.
By the time they booked McGriff in the St. Lucie County jail, they’d looked up his record and found that he was arrested in 2002 for selling a dozen poached turtle eggs to an undercover officer and for possession of another 27 dozens. He was sentenced to 43 months in prison for that.
Because McGriff is a repeat offender, FWC asked the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to have him prosecuted on federal charges, said FWC spokeswoman Amanda Phillips.
Although it’s tempting to joke about poached eggs, anyone who thinks of copying such a crime should know that FWC will not be amused.
“We take these matters very seriously,” said Capt. Jeff Ardelean, supervisor in the FWC’s West Palm Beach office. “Stopping those who attempt to poach and commercialize our endangered species is one of our highest priorities.”
Although active nests are commonplace this year, all five species of marine turtles in Florida waters are classified as endangered or threatened. Messing with them or their nests is a crime.