Demon Fish: Travels Through the Hidden World of Sharks by Juliet Eilperin

Author:Juliet Eilperin
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
Tags: Science
ISBN: 9780307379795
Publisher: PANTHEON
Published: 2011-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Male and female sharks don’t intermingle frequently, according to scientific surveys. And researchers are beginning to learn that the nitty-gritty details surrounding when they do spend time with each other—to have sex—are harsh. These revelations highlight a central fact about sharks: they cannot be anthropomorphized the way some other creatures have been. They are vastly different from humans in how they behave, and won’t ever warm the hearts of the public the way penguins can.

For centuries humans have recounted only the most fleeting observations of interactions between male and female sharks. While Aristotle might have composed the first written record of shark sex in the Western world, a fur seal observer with the New Zealand Department of Conservation evoked a similar theme thousands of years later. After witnessing an incident in 1991, A. Strachan wrote, “I have unwittingly been fortunate to witness a mating [between two white sharks]. I had thought at the beginning they were fighting as one animal appeared to be attempting to grasp the other with its great mouth, making great gouges in its side.”10

Many scientists don’t like to talk about shark sex, because they worry it will only reinforce the popular perception that these creatures are brutish and unrelenting. But one day I coax Chapman to give me a lecture on the subject, despite his reluctance. We are sitting in an idyllic setting—out on a dock in Belize looking at the Caribbean—and there are dozens of other things he’d obviously rather discuss. But I’m after the facts, and he obliges me.

Shark sex is, as Chapman puts it politely, “very rough.” Some of this reflects simple mechanics: male sharks have a pair of reproductive organs called claspers, which they insert into a female shark’s reproductive opening, or cloaca. (No matter how sharks gestate their young, they need to engage in internal fertilization in order to produce their offspring.) These claspers, which harden as a male becomes sexually mature, have tiny hooks inside them, which allow them to hold the female alongside as they’re mating. On top of that, during courting among larger sharks the male is usually biting the female to keep her around. This stems from the fact that, with a few exceptions, the female is almost always resisting the male’s advances. Marine biologists have an easy time determining if a female has been mating in the recent past because her skin will be raw and possibly bleeding. Female sharks build up defenses, to the extent they can, to cope with such a brutal coupling. The skin of most mature female sharks is measurably thicker than that of their male counterparts, and the fact that females tend to be larger also helps them withstand the beating they take during sex. Smaller shark species often mate by intertwining their bodies rather than the male dominating the coupling, a slightly less violent form of courtship.

When mating season rolls around, female sharks—at least those that have been observed mating, a rare event in itself—tend to stay in shallow water.

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