Shark rescue at Skittle Alley - by Ben Reilly

Today has been the best to date - our aim was to catch lemon sharks larger than 1.2m for visiting scientist, Evan Byrnes, who is using respirometry to study metabolic rate in sub-adult lemon (Negaprion brevirostris) sharks.

We started the day slowly baking in the sun but protected by the shore from the wind. We chose a spot where the water rushes out of the mangroves when the tide is falling, the theory being that as the water became shallower the prey would be forced to the fringes of the mangroves, thus less protected and more vulnerable to attack from larger lemon sharks.

We had interest immediately, in the form of juvenile lemons and a nurse shark, which were not what we were looking for. The tide slackened off and the water barely moved. We decided to move 50 yards west to another outlet where our chum could flow out to sea, enticing all those with good smell to our drive thru! Again the juveniles hounded us and with the sun reaching its peak ferocity and the wind whipping up we all started to lose hope and patience. Evan offered round his Skittles to his demoralised crew. Ryan, another volunteer, dropped one into the bottom of the boat which had a slurry of fish blood and guts in the bottom. Upset that he had let this tasty morsel go he gifted it to the shark gods and prayed for a lemon. Almost as if the lemon god had heard us an overjoyed Ryan shouted out, pointing in the direction of a good sized shadow. Within minutes, the little beauty was caught and pulled in to the edge of the boat, tail-roped and held in position by its dorsal fin. A quick measure to check his size and at 125cm, he was big enough for trials. We wrapped a DIY stretcher under the shark, pulling 2 poles together and lifting him up in the hammock from the water to a transport tub on the boat. The hook was quickly removed before we took a 5 minute journey back to the Sharklab beach, where the reverse stretcher technique got him safely into a semi-captive pen. After a few mandatory high 5's we returned to what we had now christened 'Skittle Alley'.

We returned to find a second lemon shark already hanging around our bait box. We set the lines and waited. Before long, number two was in the bag, just marginally bigger than the first at 127cm.

It was getting late and we were ready to pull the lines when Riley, a fellow volunteer with her feet dangling in the water, noticed something swim underneath her. Feet quickly out of the water we all dashed to look. With the sun setting and the wind breaking the surface it made it difficult to work out. It was a shark but we were unsure of the species - it was big and odd. Assistant manager Hannah realised that the shark had got something wrapped around it.

Metal gasket found wrapped around the 125cm lemon shark (Negaprion brevirostris) © Ryan Cake

It was a lemon, but not as we know them. Time and time again he circled, dragging up sand as he went along. Still no one knew what the obstruction was. We agreed dinner, now waiting for us, would have to wait a bit longer. We were going nowhere until we had freed this shark. Finally he bit, and we got him to the surface only to reveal a metal gasket, a thin piece of metal that goes between the top and the bottom halves of an engine, was stuck around the pectoral fins and up to the dorsal fin. The damage caused by this man-made product wasn't immediately visible until we managed to cut it off. We grabbed a camera to document the injuries as they unfolded. We managed to cut the loop encompassing the body off and gently peeled it away until we got to the pec fins, where we had to slide them an inch out of the tissue - it had cut in like razor blades.

Laceration from the metal gasket on the belly of a lemon shark © Ryan Cake

Having trouble freeing the loop from the sharks belly, we turned him into tonic immobility and were aghast at the sight of an inch-deep laceration around the circumference of his girth. The metal gasket only held in one place, from skin that was healing over the top of the metal. Enveloping the foreign object, obviously this shark had worn this necklace for some extended period of time. Finally he was free and with hook removed, he swam away strong.

This shark was previously caught and tagged in April 2018, so it will be interesting to see if we meet him again and to see his recovery. Evan was in no uncertain terms sure that he would now make a full recovery. We returned for dinner, story telling and bed with a good feeling of having helped one of god's creatures out!

Smiles all round after freeing the shark!  © Ryan Cake

Tiny tiger on the line - by Rosie Poirier

Arriving at the airport to the Sharklab and meeting the five other faces with whom I’d be spending the next two months, five girls whose passion for the oceans had brought them to the Sharklab, none of us sure what to expect, but we knew we were excited. We boarded a small plane that would take us to a remote island and to the Sharklab we had all heard so much about and were ready to learn and to contribute to.

Arriving we found ourselves amidst power outages, island-wide fuel shortages and mosquito swarms and realised that despite everything the Sharklab carried on, because the natural world out there didn’t stop, and so neither could we. We had come to contribute to an ongoing legacy of shark and ecosystem research that the current staff and all those who had been a part of the Sharklab for the past thirty years had been contributing to, and we were learning that with field research comes a lot of diligent, creative, fun, exhausting and exhilarating hard work. Field research bends the confines of society’s boxes that tell you your workday starts at 9 am and ends at 5 pm and your work stays within those hours. Marine science asks that you are ready to observe at all hours of the day, to witness the world of nature and the mysteries of the lives within it. And if you want to witness it, record it, understand it, and share knowledge with the outside world then you have to bend those societal work confines and be ready to be out there any time of the day or night, through the rain and the hot weather, in the night and in the early mornings and be ready to see things that few others may have ever had the chance to see.

My once in a lifetime moment came as I was going out for my first longline check with the Sharklab. These research longlines are put out once a month to contribute to shark population research and once set, needed to be checked every four hours for 24-hours. My group’s assigned time to go out was 2 am, a time I was quite excited about since sharks are more active at night and I figured I’d be more likely to see something. We woke up and headed aboard the boat in the dead of the night with lightning flashing in the distance, to check the five longlines. The previous group had seen four sharks during their 10 pm check so we had high hopes. We checked the lines quickly without seeing any sharks and I started to feel disappointment as we neared the end. This would have been my first longline shark work-up and tagging but now it seemed like we wouldn’t be seeing any sharks. We passed by a section of the line and nearly missed the shark caught in it because it was so tiny. We pulled up alongside to see the little body of a juvenile shark with the most beautiful dappled patterning along its body.

Juvenile tiger shark caught on a scientific longline  © Sophie Hart - BBFSF

My heart skipped a beat as I realised I was looking at the shark I had dreamed of seeing for so long, a tiger shark, and realised that my first encounter with one was nothing as I had imagined it would be. Not a large, imposing predator in front of me, but just a tiny shark trying to survive the first year of its life. We worked up the shark alongside the boat and I held the dorsal fin to secure it while it was measured and tagged. The little shark was 73cm long and perhaps the smallest tiger that was ever seen at the lab. Clemency, our principal investigator aboard the boat said we’d be lucky if we ever saw a tiger that size again in our lives. They are very rarely seen and somehow, I had been blessed with this precious moment. A moment that would have never been experienced had I not been up at the middle of the night seeking to advance and increase our understanding of sharks and the natural world that we all share.