Teeth of the Tiger

Although I've already posted about tiger sharks, it was a little tough to see because all the pictures were taken at night.  Not so anymore.

This handsome fellow, measuring in at 302 centimeters (about 9 feet 6 inches), was caught on our deep line that we set last week.  A deep line is essentially the same as a longline (discussed in the previous post about tigers) except instead of being stretched a long ways horizontally in shallow water, it is stretched vertically in much deeper water, about 750-800 feet.  We made numerous attempts to get big tiger sharks for a big game fisherman/conservationist named Guy Harvey.  He was at the lab along with a few big-name shark scientists shooting the end of a documentary on tiger sharks.  For those that don't know, Guy Harvey is HUGE in the southeastern U.S.  The people from Florida here acted like they were 14 year old girls meeting JT or something.

 That's Guy Harvey with the camera.  He shoots most of his footage himself and as you can see he gets right on in there.  For a born-rich adventure seeker, he's actually a really nice guy and completely devoted to marine conservation, so it was pretty cool to meet him and hang out with him.  Also didn't hurt that he has a resort and restaurant on the north island, which he brought us to and treated us to a fantastic dinner.

There was also a scientific purpose to catching the shark.  In this picture you see two of the scientists on Guy Harvey's team fixing a satellite tag to the shark's dorsal fin.  The tag will record data on sunlight, water depth, and a few other factors and using all that, the scientists can figure out where the shark swims.  After about 6 months, the tag pops off and floats to the surface and broadcasts the data.

I don't actually have anything to say here, this is just an awesome picture.  The release got a little hairy; instead of swimming down and away, which is what normally happens in these situations, this guy decided to cruise around at the surface for a while, where all the people happened to be.  Guy Harvey's camera man got a phenomenal shot when the shark swam within inches of the camera and opened its mouth real wide.  It swung around after that and came right at me and another volunteer.  I have a video of the whole thing, about 3 and a half minutes long, but it won't load into the post for some reason.  It's pretty wild, so if you're interested shoot me an email and I'll try to send it to you.

Incidentally, while in the process of writing this post, which took over a week, we caught another tiger on a deep line we set for the students from Eckerd College.  She was a big momma...

She clocked in at 336 centimeters (a shade over 11 feet), but she actually should have been about 20 centimeters larger; the end of the tail fin had been bitten off, most likely during mating.

As you can see, this shark is almost as big as the boat she is tied to.  If you look at the picture of the other shark from last week, the difference of only about 30 centimeters makes a tremendous difference in the size of the shark.  Not only is it obviously longer, the difference in width is enormous.  The mouth of this one seemed to be double the size of the smaller male.  It's amazing how much of a difference a few centimeters makes.

There is also a picture floating around of me basically giving her a hug, but I haven't managed to get my hands on it yet, so it'll have to wait until next time.