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Science Animals
Scarce Sharks Netted
For more than 100 years the only known specimen of the Borneo river shark was a dried and mounted exhibit in a museum in Vienna. Now ten more can be found in a tank inside the house of a fisherman on the Kinabatangan River in Sabah, in the Malaysian part of Borneo. Some of the credit goes to Sarah Fowler, an ecologist with the World Conservation Union in England, who like other living scientists had never seen a river shark in Malaysia—even though she very much wanted to and even though people in fishing villages had occasionally reported finding them in their nets. “We had tried a lot of fishing, but we hadn’t caught any,” says Fowler. “It was obvious that we needed to work with people who were out fishing every day of their lives.” One family agreed to preserve any sharks they caught in a tank of formalin until Fowler’s next visit. Early this past year, they showed Fowler’s team a small shark with beady black eyes and a blunt snout—it looked exactly like the museum specimen. Since then the family has caught ten sharks, all about a foot long and probably newborn, which means that sharks are breeding in the river. Fowler thinks that adult Borneo river sharks may grow, like river sharks in other parts of the world, up to nine feet long—too big for the fishermen’s nets.
Action Alert --
Sharks In Your Waters Need Your Help!
Support critical state conservation measures for imperiled coastal sharks
Sharks are Vulnerable
Unlike most other fish, many sharks are highly vulnerable to overfishing because they grow slowly, mature late, and produce a small number of young. Their populations therefore can become overfished rapidly and, once depleted, can require decades to recover. Many kinds of sharks congregate in nearshore "nursery grounds" to give birth or "pup." At these times, aggregations of pregnant females and juveniles are especially vulnerable to fishing. Often these same areas are also used year-round as a safe place for newborns, and in some cases, juveniles return year after year to the same coastal areas to feed and grow.
Sunday 25 July 99
Endangered salmon listing has construction plans on ice
Construction projects ranging from complex highway expansions to simple dock repairs are stalled indefinitely as regulators struggle with a new mandate to revive salmon arteries laced through the state's urban heart.
The logjam of road and marine construction projects began two months ago as the full weight of the Endangered Species Act fell on the Seattle area for the first time. Projects that previously would have been rubber-stamped are taking at least twice as long to get approved, and although no project has been turned down yet, some could be rejected if deemed harmful to salmon.
[ Complete Story Salmon and Construction Projects ]
E C O N E W S U P D A T E
30 JULY 1999 -- The US Navy may be confident that its new sonar system is animal friendly, but some conservationists and scientists aren't so sure. They say the Navy's state-of-the-art system, designed to track down near-silent enemy submarines, has not been researched adequately to determine if its loud "pings" disrupt the feeding, mating and communication patterns of whales and other sonar-sensitive marine mammals. "We feel that the testing they've done has not been comprehensive," said a Greenpeace spokesman. The Navy has issued an environmental impact study of the new sonar system which says tests of the system off the California and Hawaii coasts revealed "negligible" effects on marine life. But other critics, such as
National Geographic Society explorer Sylvia Earle, contend the
Navy's research has been too limited.
[ The decline of an ancient mariner
Is New Sonar OK For Whales?
More on this story
A crab's bad tidings for land dwellers ]
It looks like a rusty helmet, an artifact half buried in the sand. But closer inspection reveals that this piece of ancient armor is alive, rocking slowly back and forth as the animal lays thousands of green, BB-size eggs in a hole she has excavated at the water's edge. Surrounding her, clasped to her shell or wrangling for position, several smaller males are in motion too, spewing out microscopic sperm that will fertilize the eggs. Surveying this scene on a Delaware Bay beach, marine biologist William Hall quips, "It may seem crude, but it works."
