Greenland, the world’s largest island, is a country of wild extremes: uninhabitable wilderness at its core, and delightfully warm and charming people living in harmony with it. Climbers come to scale its spectacular sheer rock faces, scientists come to see what the melting ice can tell us of the planet’s future, and many visitors come away with a whole new perspective on life.
To Track Bull Sharks, First Hit Their Snooze Button
21.09.2023 - 18:37 / atlasobscura.com
Bull sharks, says marine biologist Ryan Daly, “like to bite.”
Daly and colleagues catch the famously ferocious fish off the coast of southern Mozambique and fit them with transmitters as part of a long-distance tracking project to reveal more about the animals’ habits. The team uses strong lines and circle hooks—harmless to the sharks—baited with striped bonito fish, thick rubber mats to protect the inflatable boat from sharp teeth, and something called tonic immobility: essentially, a shark’s Achilles’ heel.
“Once you can get a shark upside down, they pretty much just fall asleep,” says Daly. “It’s pretty incredible.”
It’s still unclear why sharks are prone to this state, but it may have evolved around mating behavior, with the male shark grabbing the female shark by its pectoral fin and flipping her over so that she relaxes. However, both male and female sharks experience tonic immobility—it may, says Daly, simply be that sharks are not wired to be on their backs.
“I think it just confuses them,” he says. “But it’s really helpful for us to be able to work on the sharks and tag them.”
Tonic immobility is a “weird and wonderful thing,” says Toby Rogers, a doctoral candidate and research manager with the Cape Town-based conservation NGO, Shark Spotters. He suspects it may have evolved as a way for sharks, especially smaller species, to play possum, feigning death when threatened. “It’s potentially a survival trait,” he says.
Knowing a shark’s immobility trigger is one thing, but for Daly’s team, turning the creature upside down while aboard an inflatable craft out on the ocean is another. Occasionally, the rubber mats aren’t protective enough, and the sharks bite into one of the pontoons. “It’s not ideal,” Daly says, “especially when it happens in the middle of nowhere and you need to fix it yourself.”
The pontoons of the inflatable boats used by the team do have separate chambers, so if one is ruptured, the others keep the boat, and the team, afloat. But a well-aimed shark bite “kind of deflates the team as well as the pontoon,” says Justin Blake, a marine biologist and tour guide who’s part of Daly’s tagging team. “Now you’ve got to get back, clean the boat, dry it, fix it, and it’s always a pain. It’s like fixing a tire puncture. It’s never quite the same again.”
The team’s goal is always to catch and flip the shark as quickly and smoothly as possible. “As soon as the shark goes into that catatonic state, it’s not going to harm itself, you, or the boat,” Blake says. Once the shark takes the bait and the line is hauled in, bringing the animal alongside the pontoon, a rope is hooped around the tail and two or more team members reach into the water and, holding onto one of its pectoral fins, manually
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