Tiger Shark

"Come quick, someone just speared at 10 foot tiger shark and they are dragging it up at the docks!"
As soon as I heard someone yelling from outside I was throwing on my sandals and running down the path to the docks. Once I got there I saw it: A tiger shark just above the waterline on a ramp leading to the ocean, bleeding from a hole in her head. There was a small circle of locals and students here that was steadily growing, giving it a bit of room. Thinking it was dead, I walked up to it. While I was next to it, it started thrashing around and snapping its powerful jaws. I was pretty startled, and I stood back a bit. The man who had speared it pulled it up further on the ramp by a rope attached to its tail, and then posed for a couple pictures. Afterwards, a few locals began the process of skinning it, while it was still alive. I had pretty conflicted feeling at this point.

For one, I admired the animal. I touched it while her while she was still alive, stared her in the eye, and could tell how powerful an animal she was. Her head was as broad as my shoulders, and when she snapped her jaws I could see just how easily she could remove limbs from a person in the water. Then I glanced over at Val, another local fisherman who was on another dock, scaling his fish with a knife in one hand and his stump of an arm holding the fish down. He lost that arm in an encounter with a tiger shark. One of us from the school asked the men why they were skinning it alive, and the response was: "It would have done the same to us." And I could see from their perspective. It was still hard to watch. A cut was made from the tail to the base of the head, the dorsal fin was removed, and then the skin on the flanks of the shark was cut away. During this time the shark was still moving its eyes, still thrashing around some. The tail was cut off, a lot of the blood was drained, and then the organs were cut out. Sharks have large livers for buoyancy purposes and this one must have weighed at least 70 pounds. The stomach was cut open, and all that was inside was a few crabs.

See, tiger sharks only come into shallow water when they are pregnant or really hungry, and this one didn't have pups. So again, I understand the reasoning in killing the animal. It was actually speared off of Middleton, where I had been snorkeling just days earlier. The head was cut off, the jaws removed as a trophy, and all the useful meat cut from the cartilaginous notochord and split up for the fishermen to eat at home, since it can't be sold here on South. It was an intense experience. I didn't include too many pictures because it is fairly graphic, and I didn't take the time to bring my camera, but a good album one of my friends here took can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2025428&id=1087980106

The next afternoon we went snorkeling at Shark Alley. With the memories of the tiger shark fresh in our minds, we were a little nervous. Shark alley is a reef off the north side of Long Cay that has a sloping gradient into a channel that a lot of pelagic organisms come in close with the tide, such as sharks. We anchored ourselves outside the reef, where jagged rocks thrust above the surface, reminiscent of shark's teeth. We actually saw a shark from the boat before we even got in the water, but none at all during our snorkel. We did however see a spotted eagle ray (Aetobatus narinari), looking rather majestic as it flew through the water. Oh and a bunch of barracuda. They are fine as long as they don't get too curious.

I took my Reef Fish ID test this morning at HDL, off Dove Key. Nothing like swimming down 25 feet past gorgeous purple soft corals billowing in the current, to look under a rock and see if this surgeonfish that just ducked under there is an Acanthuris bahianis or an Achanthuris chirurgus, and then writting the proper scientific name on my slate as I swim up to the surface for air. This test was a bit harder then my last one, since it was in deeper water and there were a lot more organisms we needed to know. I'm about to go work on my community outreach project, I'll talk more about that next post.