Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Feeding Tiger Shark - 2

This time from Fiji!

Shark Diver have discovered this astonishing document which carries the description this video was shot in February 2008 in Fiji by a guy I know. They throw dead horse and cows in the ocean, so sharks will eat them (Fiji is small so they'd rather have sharks take care of the bodies instead of burying them. Nice video, a bit gruesome. Enjoy!



Difficult to say where it was shot, tho the sizable piece of land in the background may indicate that it was off one of the main islands.
Anyway, very cool!

As per my comment on Underwater Thrills, there's plausible but so far unsubstantiated anecdotal evidence that Fiji's Tiger Sharks have learned to capitalize on the periodic floods during the wet season by aggregating at the river mouths.

2009 is the year where our Bull Shark research is gradually been extended to the principal rivers. It will start with TEK, i.e. obtaining Traditional Ecological Knowledge through interviews with the local population. Promising rivers will then be analyzed to a greater degree, mainly with the aim of identifying the local Bull Shark nurseries. For that, we will selectively deploy acoustic receivers coupled with the tagging of pregnant females.

The Tiger Shark aggregation being a testable hypothesis, we may well decide to go ahead and divert a couple of tags and put them on our Tigers instead. Not decided yet (that's up to Juerg), but I shall keep you posted as things unfold. As always, it's going to be a matter of priorities and of available resources both in terms of money and time. Keep in mind that research money is scarce, Juerg is already mega-busy without having to add yet another species and also, that we're trying to run a dive shop on top of that all.

But I sure would like to do it!
As always, keep watching this space!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

The background look familiar to me its no other than Taveuni, i suspect it was taken on one of the cattle farm near the Vuna area. Good footage though..

DaShark said...

Thank you, very interesting!

If so, and if they really do that regularly as per the original comment, it may explain some of the past incidents there.