Shark Research and Conservation Associate Researcher Dr. Owen O’Shea recently attended the 30th annual meeting of the American Elasmobranch Society in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Dr. O’Shea presented his paper ‘novel observations on an opportunistic predation event by four marine apex predators’ co-authored by John Mandelman of the New England Aquarium, Brendan Talwar of Florida State University and Edward Brooks, program manager at The Cape Eleuthera Institute.
This research paper highlighted an encounter between four species, including a great hammerhead, bull, tiger and Caribbean reef shark, as they all competed for a common food resource and CEI researchers just happened to be there, with their cameras pointing in the right direction. The video showed how the bull and tiger shark shared access to the resource, while seemingly actively discouraging the hammerhead and reef shark.
These types of behaviors are incredibly rare to document and so the opportunity to present such data at a conference of peers was a great opportunity to highlight an aspect of the broad portfolio currently managed by the shark program at CEI. For more information please visit http://www.ceibahamas.org/research/sharks/.