July 15, 2011

So, I had to work a half day today to make up for taking yesterday off to go diving. They really only have 1 true day off each week, Thursday is a half day. So anyway, Jonathan left for Dubai on Wednesday evening and gave me a job to do today. he wanted me to get into the shark lagoon and get an accurate "fin count" of how many male and female blacktip sharks we have. Sweet!! Can't think of a better way to spend a day than to sit and let sharks swim around you!

I spent the first 20 minutes on the highest rock I could find near the edge of the lagoon trying to get a total fin count from the surface. The trick in doing this it to make sure you're not counting the same shark 5 times as they continually swim around you. Knowing how many total there are will kind of help you keep track. This was very similar to what I did with the National Marine Fisheries in Santa Cruz one summer - only we were snorkeling in the Noyo River counting salmon. But luckily I had the experience of doing this with salmon to train me how to snorkel and count different fish and keep track of them so as to not recount the same shark several times. It's like when I ask Gianna to count how many arms her stuffed octopus has and she just keeps counting around and around until she runs out of numbers that she knows.

Anyway, I finally decided that there are 9 blacktips in the exhibit and from the looks of it, most of them were female, only 1 or 2 males. I slowly slid into the lagoon with a heavy weight belt around my waist to keep me underwater without having to flail around. I found a nice nook in a little pile of rocks and had a seat. Blacktips are extremely skiddish and even when I was just standing in the lagoon, not moving, they would swim in my general direction, realize that I was there and go shooting off in the opposite direction. I don't know how they even recognize my feet as something other than a rock (unless they are scared of rocks too) but they do. The problem is that they take off so haphazardly that they can run into things (walls, other fish, actual scary rocks) and hurt themselves. They also expend a great deal of energy bolting off like that and can become very stressed out, so we have to be very slow and deliberate when entering their exhibits. So I sat and became as much of a non-scary rock as I could. After about 20 minutes of sitting patiently, they finally started swimming back in my general vicinity. I got some good pictures and video and came up with a final score of Girls 7 - Boys 2. When the big, 5 foot long eel came out of his rock and started swimming around, I decided it was time for me to get out. I don't mess with the eels, from my experience, they are NOT skiddish and will come right up to you and use their teeth.

I was hoping to get enough good pictures to compile a bit of a database to ID the individual sharks but many of the pictures were too blurry or far away to make out any distinguishing features. Many times scientists use things like scars to ID animals, but these guys don't have many of those since they don't have much of competition and I don't think they have reached breeding age, which is when most of the scars appear.

I also found another zebra shark egg case which didn't seem to have hatched yet, but I don't think there's anything inside. We took it out of the lagoon and put it in a tank in the aquarium to show Jonathan tomorrow.

Not bad for my day off!