Girls Smell Like Skunk

Shark tagging today was a full day experience of being on the water and waking up early. This however was one of my favorite days of the trip even though the swells and waves on the boat were rough at some point. We embarked our journey today early so that we could get as many lines and opportunities as possible within the one day. We had to start by gearing the lines with bait a weight to the bottom and a line to the top for the buoy, this was simple enough and was only a taste of what was to come later when pulling up the lines.

After throwing out the ten lines to let them sink we went into the shallow to kill time to potentially get the sharks more interested in the bait overtime as the blood and oils from the bait spreads to get more interest. Letting them sink showed results since as we started to pull up lines with baits one after another that were partially chewed, completely gone, or completely gone and lines were frayed from bites onto the line. There was minimal success in the first round of lines until the ninth line where we pulled up the weight and saw the line was tight meaning there was most likely something on the other end of the line. There was a shark on the end of this line and it was a nurse shark. Measurements and samples were taken while tags where placed on the dorsal fin of the shark.

Two other sharks to follow later in the day both of which were sandbar sharks. In total three sharks were caught between 5 groups, all of the sharks showed up on the last two groups which consisted of only the males from our group. This means that the remaining 3 groups which all consisted of girls were skunked for the day as we returned to dock.

#girlssmell #girlsdroolguysrule

More information on what research and findings about NOVA’s shark research can be found at : https://cnso.nova.edu/ghri/index.html

If you are interested in all the other shark species that reside in florida that we didn’t catch today you can look here: http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/sg062