Tiger Sharks, by Nick Luz

            I’ve been at the station for about two and a half days. It’s 3:30 in the morning and my alarm is going off. I attempt to quietly crawl out of my top bunk and gather my things that I’ve already packed up and left by my bedroom door. Why am I up at this absurd hour you ask? It’s that special time of the month where we set our long lines, and I’m on the 4am crew to go check them. I had a mix of different feelings as our boat was pulling away from the dock: excitement, tiredness, nervousness, hopefulness, did I already mention tiredness?

I must admit, I actually wasn’t that confident we were going to get anything on our long line check, and I’ll tell you why. When I told someone at the lab with a slight twinge of excitement in my voice that I was on the 4am check, he just looked at me and said “Dude that’s the worst check…the last time I was on that we didn’t catch anything and you can’t even go back to sleep once you get back from your check.”  I tried to just brush that comment off and ignore it, but obviously it was still implanted in the back of my head as we were pulling away and out in to the field.

After a short 15 minute ride full of anticipation to our long line sites, we finally arrived. Finally! My first time out in the field at the renowned Bimini Shark Lab, this is what I have been waiting for ever since I found out I earned the opportunity to volunteer! All that was left to do was actually have a shark on the line and get the chance to be a part of the workup. As we cruised along the first couple lines checking and counting the floats, it wasn’t looking so good. The baits had remained untouched since the previous check at midnight. I wasn’t feeling defeated yet, we still had three more lines to check. Sure enough, on the third line, a float was down! We quickly turned the boat back around and collected the line and started pulling it up closer to the boat. The person hauling the line in to the boat said “We got a tiger on the line!”

A tiger shark! A real life tiger shark! Tiger sharks have always intrigued me, and were definitely the species I was looking forward to seeing most here during my time at the lab. I found it kind of unbelievable that my first work up in the field was going to get to be with a tiger! I’ve been a SCUBA diver for more than 10 years and have been immersed in the ocean for much longer than that. I have seen a lot of sharks throughout my diving career, including thresher sharks, white tips, black tips, gray reefs and even whale sharks to name a few. However, in more than 10 years in the ocean, I have never seen a tiger shark, so you can imagine my excitement! As it came up to the side of the boat and we were getting prepared to work it up, I was assigned the task of holding the dorsal fin.

What no one told me about tiger sharks is that they actually have some of the roughest skin out of any shark species. Naturally, as I went to try and grab the dorsal fin, it kind of gave a little thrash and roll while my forearm was still pressed against its body, resulting in a little thing we like to call shark burn. Imagine rug burn, but now imagine that rug was secreting urea mixed with salt water. Yeah, it’s not exactly the most pleasant of sensations, but I honestly didn’t even realize that it had happened until after we had completed the work up and released the shark.

I could not believe that the first shark I got to work with was a tiger shark! I honestly could not have asked for a better start to my work in the field. Obviously, I had to get a picture with my very first tiger, but remember it was also around 4:45 in the morning…so the lighting isn’t the best, but hey at least I know what it is!

Whenever I think back to this first long line check I got to participate in, I always forget that we also caught a blacktip on this check, which is also super cool for the research going on at the lab right now. Rachael, the lab surgeon, got to implant an acoustic transmitter inside this blacktip, which is important because we are trying to get around 20 transmitters out in this specific species for one of the PhD projects going on right now.

After we got done working up the blacktip, it was time to return back to base. Even with two shark workups, we got back to the lab with enough time for me to squeeze in an hour-long nap before our actual workday started! In that volunteers face! Two awesome sharks on the “worst check” AND we got back with enough time for a little snooze! The awesome part about the rest of the day is that we got another two tiger sharks on the next couple checks! One got released fairly quickly due to some stress, but the other was doing well so I was able to get in the water with it and take a couple pictures.

It’s rather humbling being next to an animal I’ve admired for such a long time, especially since this particular one was bigger than me! It’s safe to say I’m looking forward to working with the tiger sharks over the next 4 months, and I’m really excited to start working with the hammerheads once they start to come along also!