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Shark Biology and Conservation: Essentials for Educators, Students, and Enthusiasts



Shark Biology and Conservation: Essentials for Educators, Students, and Enthusiasts PDF

Author: Daniel C. Abel, R. Dean Grubbs

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Genres:

Publish Date: September 1, 2020

ISBN-10: 1421438364

Pages: 448

File Type: Epub

Language: English

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Book Preface

This is not a coffee table book, but if you leave it in plain view we suspect people will thumb through it to take a closer look at our cool photographs and artwork. Nor is it a field guide, but in a pinch it can help you identify more common species, or narrow your choices. And this book is neither a textbook nor a scholarly volume, though you would be excused for concluding the opposite due to the breadth of coverage, scientific citations, and terminology not typically found in coffee table books and field guides.

So exactly what kind of book is this? As the title denotes, we wrote Shark Biology and Conservation: Essentials for Educators, Students, and Enthusiasts for those in need of or curious about accurate information on sharks presented in what we hope is an accessible but not watered-down format. In doing so we do not disparage coffee table books, field guides, or scholarly tomes—a glimpse of our bookcases would reveal shelves of these. But no books in these categories have it both ways; that is, be popular and scholarly at the same time. So, that is in part our goal and challenge.

One of the reasons we wrote this book is an attempt to supplant fear of sharks (known as galeophobia and selachophobia) with respect, and myth with knowledge. We hope to do so by providing a comprehensive overview of sharks, including recent scientific advances that will feed your fascination, calm any fears you might harbor, and explain why sharks are critical to ocean health. We will also broaden the discussion to include the rays, or batoids, an overlooked group closely related to sharks, which are equally fascinating and, in a few cases, are far more endangered than the vast majority of sharks.

The idea for this book arose during Coastal Carolina University’s Biology of Sharks course, a three-week class held in part on wondrous Winyah Bay and at the extraordinary Bimini Biological Field Station. The class has been offered annually since 1996, making it perhaps the longest running shark biology course globally.

The main drawback to the course was the lack of a suitable textbook. To be sure, there are a number of exceptional books on sharks and their relatives. However, most shark-related nonfiction books for nonspecialists are field guides, coffee table books, personal narratives, natural histories, stories of shark attacks, and so on, written mainly for a general audience.

Highly specialized books on sharks are more technical and their content and writing are more accessible to graduate students and specialists than to other students. These provide an exhaustive survey and synthesis of facts and concepts and contain complex graphs and diagrams. Both of us, along with others in the shark research community, use these texts regularly, but generally not as textbooks for our undergraduate courses. Indeed, without this assemblage of more technical books, this book would not have been possible.

The books closest to meeting our needs were Sharks, Skates, and Rays1 by William Hamlett, Biology of Sharks and Their Relatives, edited by Jeffrey Carrier, John Musick, and Michael Heithaus,2 and Peter Klimley’s The Biology of Sharks and Rays?3 We highly recommend these outstanding books but, as great and thorough as they are, they did not hit the sweet spot we were seeking.

Moreover, as we contemplated writing the book for students in our shark biology course, we realized that the shark booklist had largely overlooked a surprisingly expansive market: educators, students, advanced enthusiasts, field biologists, naturalists, and marine biologists who might not have a background in fish biology or sharks. What the market is missing for this group is a comprehensive, systematic overview of the diversity, evolution, ecology, behavior, physiology, anatomy, and conservation of sharks and their relatives written in a style that is sufficiently detailed but not too technical or intimidating.

The field of shark biology has blossomed in the last several decades. The American Elasmobranch Society, the professional organization for biologists and fishery scientists specializing in sharks, skates, and rays, boasts an estimated membership of around 400 and holds well-attended national meetings. Similar societies exist both regionally and globally.

Courses in shark biology have appeared on numerous college campuses. There is even a shark MOOC (massive open online course) called Sharks! Global Biodiversity, Biology, and Conservation. These all have coincided with renewed public interest in this group of organisms, whose populations in some cases are threatened by a number of human impacts and with whom there is an enormous depth of fascination.

This book draws on our combined 65+ years of experience as shark biologists and educators, as well as our extensive connections to the close-knit shark biology community (and the generous and enthusiastic contributions from many of them). We hope you have fun reading this book. Even more, we would deem our time writing it worthwhile if you use this book to expand your knowledge of these wondrous beasts and make it a springboard to educate others, stoke your enthusiasm and passion, and work so that there is always a place for sharks, and all of their relatives (including humans).

One final word about the material covered by this book. To keep the book affordable, the length of this book, including the number of illustrations, was limited. To meet this limit, we made tough choices and shortened some topics and excluded others. We hope we did this skillfully, but if you think that we omitted or devoted insufficient space to key concepts, now you know why.

NOTES

1. Hamlett, W. C. (ed.). 1999. Sharks, Skates, and Rays: The Biology of Elasmobranch Fishes. Johns Hopkins U. Press.

2. Carrier, J. C., Musick, J.A., and Heithaus, M.R. (eds.). 2012. Biology of Sharks and Their Relatives. CRC Press.

3. Klimley, A. P. 2013. The Biology of Sharks and Rays. U. of Chicago Press. viii / preface

The acknowledgment section is the last part of this book that we wrote, our last gasp. After expending every remaining ort of creativity, knowledge, energy, humor, and so on, in our arsenal writing Shark Biology and Conservation, we find ourselves struggling to recognize and offer our gratitude to our family, friends, colleagues, students, editors, and staff at Johns Hopkins University Press, and numerous others, in proportion to their exponential contributions to this book. Some cliches exist because they are truths, and this one is not fake news: We could not have written a grocery list, much less a book, without their presence in our lives and their support.

Let us begin by thanking those colleagues and friends who stepped up, sometimes with unexpected zeal for the project, when we asked, or even volunteered before we could hit them up for favors. All of these talented professional and amateur photographers below willingly offered their works. We thank, in no particular order: Jeff Carrier, Robert Johnson, George Boneillo, Emily Marcus, Marcus Drymon, Lesley Rochat, Annie Guttridge, Chelle Blais, Matt Smukall, Steven Kes-sel, Craig O’Connell, Nick Wegner, Lai Chin, Andrew Raak, Bryan Keller, D. Ross Robertson, Caroline Collatos, Matt Larsen, James St. John, Gavin Naylor, Charles Cotton, Steven Kajiura, Dave Itano, Jason Romine, Joshua Bruni, Ken Goldman, Shmulik Blum, Matt Potenski, Erin Burge, Bob Crimian, Eugene Kitsios, David Gandy, Kathyrn Dickson, Sandra Brooke, Chugey Sepulveda, Lance Jordan, Brendan Talwar, Charles Messing, Jim Luken, Mackellar Violich, Joel Blessing, Nick Whitney, Amanda Brown, Michael Scholl, Laura Stone, and Trey Spearman. In some cases we were saved by Creative Commons photos, and the photographers are cited in figures in which these have been used. We thank Greenpeace and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission for photographs, as well as Shutterstock, Kelvin Aitken of Marine Themes, and Barbel Knieper of Biosphoto.

For permission to use graphics and photographs, we also thank Oxford University Press, NOAA and NOAA Fisheries, and the Bimini Biological Field Station.

Skillful and talented scientific illustrators are rare and expensive to engage. We were very fortunate to have not one, but two principal artists for this book, neither of whom will earn near what they are worth for their contributions to Shark Biology and Conservation. Almost all of the illustrations except those in Chapter 3 were the result of extremely fortuitous serendipity. In the fall of 2017, Elise Pullen became one of Dan’s graduate students. To his surprise, she was already a professional artist. Her work is so detailed and accurate that it may surprise readers that this effort is her inaugural entry into scientific illustration, but we think you will agree that it will not be her last! And her professionalism, enthusiasm, flexibility, and attention to detail ensure a great career for her.

All of the magnificent shark watercolors for Chapter 3 were done by artist Marc Dando, whose reputation as an exceptional wildlife illustrator is long-established. We think you will agree that exceptional is an understatement in Marc’s case. Marc gleefully met our demanding schedule and was among the easiest people with whom to work, in spite of his numerous other impending deadlines.

We also thank other illustrators and colleagues who provided illustrations. These include Mark Grace, Matthew Kolmann, Kurt Smolen, James Gelsleichter, Roi Gurka, and Read Frost.

When we determined that shark behavior was the single topic we were entirely uncomfortable, even unqualified, writing by ourselves, we turned to colleague and friend Tristan Guttridge, a shark behaviorist at the top of his field. By the time this book is published, you may well know him more as a Shark Week personality, but his credentials as a behaviorist are beyond reproach, and we are very grateful for his participation here.

Even after friends and colleagues provided photos and line art for the book, we had numerous gaps to fill. We discovered that we were naive to think that we could write a book with all of the world-class photographs and artwork we would need without a budget. Thanks to the previously acknowledged friends and colleagues listed above, we almost did. A generous grant from the Save Our Seas Foundation, and the active involvement and enthusiasm of CEO Michael Scholl allowed us to engage our two main illustrators and contributing author Tristan Guttridge, plus obtain some additional photographs. Shark Biology and Conservation would likely be destined to be a bargain bin book, wasting the gorgeous photos and illustrations from friends and colleagues, without Michael and the Save Our Seas Foundation’s integral role.

We both are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers of both the prospectus for this book and the first complete manuscript. We hope that the finished book makes them proud.

This book would never have materialized were it not for the opportunities provided by the Bimini Biological Field Station. We thank the staff, past and present, for accommodating our courses and providing access to the wondrous natural world surrounding Bimini to us and more than a thousand of our students.

And a whale-shark-sized thanks and endless espressos on demand to our editor, the unflappable Tiffany Gasbarrini. When we submitted a preliminary manuscript with nearly 500 illustrations, 150 more than our contractual agreement, instead of the venomous response we deserved, she wrote that she was somewhat discomfited with the overage. She gave us mostly free rein throughout the process to write the book we wanted, as long as we kept in mind that it had to be affordable, which meant shortening the verbiage. We are making her a t-shirt with It’s the Word Count, Stupid, on the front. We could not imagine a better editor.

Except for Tiffany Gasbarrini, we have crossed paths with almost all of the Johns Hopkins University Press production and marketing team only by email, and thus we cannot with certainty know that they are indeed people and not Artificial Intelligence. Still we owe them our most profound gratitude for the pride they have obviously taken in publishing our book. When cloning of people becomes a thing, we urge our publisher to replicate Editorial Assistant Esther Rodriguez first. She made our lives as authors so much easier by her general excellence, professionalism, and responsiveness. Some of the Johns Hopkins University Press team that worked on this book have remained anonymous to us. We thank you, as well as managing editor Juliana McCarthy, senior production editor Kimberly F. Johnson, acquisitions associate Meredith Gaffield, production editor Hilary S. Jacqmin, publicity manager Kathryn Marguy, publicist Rebecca Rozenberg, and art director Martha Sewall.

Finally, we thank indexer Michael Tabor as well as our copy editor Liz Rado-jkovic, devotee of the Oxford Comma and cat lover, for her kind, strong editing hand, and her marginal notes of encouragement.

Daniel C. Abel

In addition to the above, I thank Coastal Carolina University for providing the sabbatical leave during which most of my part of this book was written, the Marine Science Department faculty, for taking over my committee assignments during my sabbatical absence, and the department’s staff, especially Tammy Parker, who cheerfully protected me from my administrative loose cannon proclivities. I thank MSCI department chair Jane Guentzel for encouraging this project. I also thank our boat captains Sam Gary, Edwin Jayroe, Richard Goldberg, Jaime Phillips, and Ed Keelin; the legions of undergraduate volunteers willing to awake at ungodly hours just to be a part of the Coastal Carolina University Shark Project; and especially my MSc students past and present. My former MSc student, and Dean’s current PhD candidate, Bryan Keller reviewed the entire manuscript, and Vivian Turner helped with the chapter on swimming in sharks. Numerous friends, especially Terry Munson, William Holliday, and Robert Sturgis, through their interest and words of encouragement, provided inspiration beyond which they could know. Journalist James Borton reviewed the manuscript and offered suggestions based on his considerable prowess as a writer.

I also thank my co-author Dean Grubbs. Dean and I have been friends and teaching colleagues for over 25 years. Dean is many things: consummate educator, passionate and scientifically informed conservationist, keeper of a llama and fainting goat, and perhaps the most knowledgeable and insightful shark biologist on the planet. I would not have ever envisioned writing a book on sharks if Dean had not been a part of it.

More than gratitude is also owed to the professorial giants who modeled for me what a teacher-scholar-citizen should be. There are too many to name, but five of whom I think about constantly are Reid Wiseman, Norman Chamberlain, and Chris Koenig of the College of Charleston, and Jeff Graham and Ralph Shabetai, my PhD co-advisors from Scripps Institute of Oceanography and the School of Medicine at the University of California at San Diego, respectively. They taught me how to think and comport myself like a scientist. Chris continues to inspire me, both from the seeds of wisdom he planted nearly four decades ago about science and life and, more recently, for recommending that I use honey in my caipirinhas. If my undergraduate and graduate students profited in meaningful ways from their association with me, they should thank Chris.

Then there are my late parents, Harris and Ruth, my brothers, Billy and Alan, and my sister, Sara, all of whom made sacrifices and contributions that nurtured my love of knowledge and marine life in my childhood and beyond. And finally, my wife Mary, daughter Juliana, and son Louis. For them, words are inadequate, but I am confident they know how they have sustained me to work tirelessly for a world in which sharks always have a place to swim safely and just be sharks, this book being only one relatively small manifestation.

R. Dean Grubbs

I am eternally grateful to my academic mentors that encouraged but also challenged me throughout my career. This includes my undergraduate advisor Dan Diresta, who encouraged me to lead a scientific reading group on sharks. I thank my friend and confidant, John Morrissey, a masterful lecturer who strongly encouraged me to pursue graduate school, gave me my first opportunities to teach, and helped me push forward when my confidence in this career path wavered. None of my career would have been possible without the opportunities for research and education provided by Sonny Gruber, with whom I conducted my first shark research and developed my first shark biology courses. Dr. Gruber was my academic father and I was privileged to maintain a relationship with him for 30 years until his passing in 2019. I am also indebted to Arthur Myrberg who, in addition to being Sonny Gruber’s doctoral advisor, was my favorite undergraduate professor. Whatever skill I have as an educator comes from being a very poor mimic of the two best I have known, Art Myrberg and John Morrissey. I am also incredibly grateful to my doctoral advisor, Jack Musick, a renowned scientist and naturalist cut in the mold of David Starr Jordan. In a time when naturalists have become scarce in academia, Jack encouraged those tendencies as well as my propensity to engage in disparate lines of research. He showed me that there are still places for our ilk in academic careers. I thank my post-doctoral advisor Kim Holland, who, among many things, taught me the value of balancing one’s professional and personal life, a skill I continue to struggle to hone. Finally, I also thank Captains Tony Pinello and Durand Ward, friends and confidants that taught me much about life and the sea.

I thank the FSU Coastal and Marine Lab administration that has given me the freedom to pursue my research and educational interests unfettered, and the FSUCML staff, without whom none of my work would be possible. I am also thankful to the many colleagues with whom I have collaborated on many projects, some that are highlighted in this book. This list is too long to include as I have been extremely fortunate to have a large number of incredible collaborators. As the academic generations progress forward, I am also extremely grateful to the many undergraduate and graduate students that have chosen to conduct research in my lab. They teach me as much as I them and continually make me proud and make me look better than I am.

I also thank my co-author, collaborator, co-instructor, and friend Dan Abel. Dan is an incredibly talented and humorous writer and educator, and over the many years that he and I taught our shark courses we mused over the possibility of writing this book. Dan (and I) knew it would only happen if he took the initiative to push it forward and I am grateful to him for all of the hard work he put in to seeing this project through and to produce a book of which we are very proud.

Finally, I am especially grateful to my parents Audrey and Ralph Grubbs, who exposed me to marine life through fishing and snorkeling in nearly every family vacation, encouraged my crazy childhood notion to become a marine biologist who studies sharks, and sacrificed to help make it possible. I would not be where I am if not for them.

    Dedication

In April 2019, our friend and mentor Samuel “Doc” Gruber died. No topic in this book escaped his fingerprints, and neither of us would be where we are without having had Doc in our lives. While our sadness at his loss is profound, we hope that dedicating this book to Doc honors his outsized legacy.

    Authors’ Note

Readers of this book know exactly which fish we mean when we say Great White Shark. There is only one such species, and it is easily distinguished from even closely related species like the Shortfin Mako and Porbeagle. Scientifically, the Great White Shark, which more accurately is called the White Shark, is known as Carcharodon carcharias everywhere in the world, in accordance with the rules of scientific nomenclature that assign a unique two-part name to every species.

But do you instinctively picture one specific animal called a Sand Shark? In the Southeast United States, the name Sand Shark is used by local residents for numerous species that include Blacktip, Sandbar, Dusky, Silky, Atlantic Sharp-nose, and Blacknose Sharks, and even Guitarfish, which are not sharks but rather are rays, a closely related group. Or perhaps even what is pictured in the figure below. Basically, any shark that is not a Hammerhead and is found nearshore in the Southeast United States, especially near sandy beaches, has been called a Sand Shark.

And that is more than merely a trivial problem, since assigning one name to numerous different species can easily lead to cases of mistaken identity with serious consequences. In Chapter 11, for example, we discuss a case where grouping the Dusky Smoothhound and Spiny Dogfish both as dogfish in managing a fishery nearly led to potentially catastrophic consequences for the latter.

The problem is this: in science, a species is a precisely defined, unique entity, with its own distinct genetic makeup, distribution, life history, behavior, environmental requirements, and so on. Calling two different species by the same common name denies at least one of them its unique biological heritage.

A species is a real concept in nature, not a human construct. For sexually reproducing organisms, a species consists of individuals that will interbreed with each other, are reproductively isolated from (i.e., do not interbreed with) other species, and which will produce offspring that are viable (capable of surviving until adulthood) and fertile (capable of having offspring).

And every species is assigned its own unique binomial (two-part) name, by a rigorous process specified in the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN). Each and every reader of this book, excluding artificial intelligence, is a Homo sapiens and nothing else, no matter your race or nationality. Homo sapiens is the species name. Homo is our genus, and sapiens is our specific epithet.

Among sharks, we have both studied Carcharhinus plumbeus, which is variously known as a Sandbar Shark, Brown Shark, and yes, Sand Shark. There are over 500 named species of sharks, and a total of over 1250 species of sharks and shark relatives—the skates, rays, and chimaeras (or ghost sharks).

The result of using a standard system of nomenclature is an organized classification that scientists and policymakers all over the world can reliably use when studying an organism, determining its habitat requirements, assessing the health of its populations, making policy decisions, and so on.

This takes us to our dilemma: whether to use common or scientific names, or both, in this book. Whether, on the one hand, to risk alienating readers happy with the use of a common name and perhaps intimidated or otherwise put-off by difficult-to-pronounce names derived from Latin or Greek, or on the other hand to betray our fealty to scientific accuracy.

We lied. It really is not a dilemma to us. We will use scientific names at least the first time a species is mentioned in every chapter (except Chapter 1), but not in every instance. When we do use them, we will also include widely accepted common names.

Speaking of common names, the latest convention, in accordance with the American Fisheries Society’s authoritative Common and Scientific Names of Fishes from the United States, Canada, and Mexico, is to capitalize the first letters of all common names. Although not all publications use this convention, we do in this book, except when we refer to a group of sharks in the same genus or family. For instance, it would be hammerheads or threshers, but Scalloped Hammerhead and Bigeye Thresher.

There is a second major issue as well that we need to address. This is a book about sharks, but much of what is true about sharks also applies to their close relatives, the skates and rays, with whom sharks are classified as elasmobranchs. Rays and skates are so closely related to sharks that the former are sometimes called pancake sharks. Sharks, skates, and rays together are closely related to a more obscure group called chimaeras or ghost sharks, and collectively sharks, skates, rays, and chimaeras are known as chondrichthyans.

So, how to proceed? Chances are, you bought this book because you wanted to read about sharks (Sharks, after all, is in the title) so we will focus on sharks. Occasionally we will broaden the discussion by referring to elasmobranchs or sharks and their relatives. And there are times when we discuss only skates and rays, given their close relationship to sharks, and when we do this, we usually call them rays or batoids.

There, now that that is settled, let us focus on this superb assemblage of cartilaginous fishes, especially the sharks!


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