Saving Seafood

Baby sharks grow up in New Jersey’s back bays. Climate change could threaten the nurseries

July 31, 2026 — New Jersey’s back bays, those lush wetlands that sit between the barrier island beach towns and the mainland, are home to unknown numbers of baby sharks that feast on the American eel, crabs and small fish that thrive in the coastal salt marshes. Giving birth to litters in those food-rich shallow waters like Little Egg Harbor is just about all the maternal care given to the shark pups by their mothers, who swim back out to the Atlantic Ocean soon afterwards.

The tiger shark, the sandbar shark and the smooth dogfish return each summer to the Jersey coast to give birth between June and July, utilizing the safety of shallow waters that are free from predators that would devour their newborns. Although the smooth dogfish can grow to 3 feet long, the babies are no larger than 12 inches at birth and litters range in size from four to 20 pups. The dogfish are benthic feeders, meaning they forage along the bottom of the marsh.

“We all have our favorite shore towns,” said Adrianna Zito-Livingston, an ecologist who works as the climate adaptation project manager for the New Jersey Nature Conservancy. “We come back year after year. The sharks are doing the same thing.”

The Nature Conservancy is working with Monmouth University to research the health of the salt marshes that have become eroded due to the impacts of climate change. As part of that work, researchers like Zito-Livingston are tagging the sharks with acoustic trackers that are then monitored by listening stations placed along the Jersey coast. She said the sharks provide a good indication of the health of the salt marshes.

“In a lot of ways, sharks are a canary in the coal mine,” she said. “They’re top predators and healthy sharks with a good distribution are indicative of healthy, diverse ecosystems.”

Read the full article at WHYY

Unraveling the mysteries of great white sharks

September 6, 2016 — Meeting a great white shark in the wild is nothing like you expect it would be. At first glance it’s not the malevolent beast we’ve come to expect from a thousand TV shows. It’s portly, bordering on fat, like an overstuffed sausage. Flabby jowls tremble down its body when it opens its mouth, which otherwise is a chubby, slightly parted smirk. From the side, one of the world’s greatest predators is little more than a slack-jawed buffoon.

It’s only when the underwater clown turns to face you that you understand why it’s the most feared animal on Earth. From the front its head is no longer soft and jowly, but tapers to an arrow that draws its black eyes into a sinister-looking V. The bemused smile is gone, and all you see are rows of 2-inch teeth capable of crunching down with almost 2 tons of force. Slowly, confidently, it approaches you. It turns its head, first to one side and then the other, evaluating you, deciding whether you’re worth its time. Then if you’re lucky, it turns away, becoming the buffoon again, and glides lazily into the gloom.

There are more than 500 species of sharks, but in popular imagination there’s really only one. When Pixar needed an underwater villain for its animated film Finding Nemo, it didn’t look to the affable nurse shark or the aggressive bull shark. Not even the tiger shark, which would be more appropriate in Nemo’s coral-reef home. It was the great white shark — with its wide, toothy grin — that was plastered on thousands of movie billboards across the world.

The great white shark is the ocean’s iconic fish, yet we know little about it — and much of what we think we know simply isn’t true. White sharks aren’t merciless hunters (if anything, attacks are cautious), they aren’t always loners, and they may be smarter than experts have thought. Even the 1916 Jersey Shore attacks famously mentioned in Jaws may have been perpetrated by a bull shark, not a great white.

We don’t know for sure how long they live, how many months they gestate, when they reach maturity. No one has seen great whites mate or give birth. We don’t really know how many there are or where, exactly, they spend most of their lives. Imagine that a land animal the size of a pickup truck hunted along the coasts of California, South Africa, and Australia. Scientists would know every detail of its mating habits, migrations, and behavior after observing it in zoos, research facilities, perhaps even circuses. But the rules are different underwater. Great whites appear and disappear at will, making it nearly impossible to follow them in deep water. They refuse to live behind glass — in captivity some have starved themselves or slammed their heads against walls.

Read the full story at The Week

Thanks to ‘Dr. Shark,’ researchers can learn and let live

June 24, 2016 — A UNE researcher known as ‘Dr. Shark’ develops a method that allows fish data collection without killing the specimens.

A decade ago, when James Sulikowski first came to the University of New England, scientists who studied shark reproduction had to kill and gut their specimens to unlock the secrets of how these elusive fish gave birth.

Sulikowski wanted to learn more about the reproductive process in hopes of bolstering shark numbers, and didn’t like the idea of having to kill pregnant sharks and their unborn young to do it. That study method also made it impossible to study the reproductive habits of endangered sharks, such as the basking, hammerhead or tiger shark, even though information about how these threatened groups lived and loved would have helped policymakers protect their mating or pupping grounds and possibly help stabilize their populations.

Scientists had begun using blood samples to supplement their shark necropsies, measuring hormone levels to establish the stage of pregnancy, but Sulikowski, a father of three, thought researchers could go further. About five years ago, he turned to the same kind of sonogram technology that doctors use to monitor pregnant women – complete with a transducer, an image screen and conductive jelly – and adapted it for use on pregnant sharks, as well as other elusive or endangered fish species, such as sturgeon.

“There is so much that we still don’t know, like where different species of sharks go to give birth,” Sulikowski said, “and so much that we think we do know, like the length of gestation for our local spiny dogfish that we are just now learning through the use of this technology and tagging that is just plain wrong. I love that. I love challenging accepted science. For me, it’s always about being inquisitive, testing what we think we know, asking what we don’t and figuring out new ways to come up with answers to questions we didn’t even know to ask just a few years ago.”

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald