 |
||||
Shark Questions and Answers• What kinds of sharks have you seen? We have seen different kinds of sharks in different places of the world. Mr. Brown: I have seen about 13 different kinds (species) of sharks while we have been SCUBA diving in the ocean: the great white shark, whale shark, nurse shark, swell shark, mako shark, blue shark, whitetip shark, Caribbean gray reef shark, horn shark, blacktip shark, Pacific angel shark, lemon shark, and bull shark. • Have many nurse sharks have you seen? We have seen lots of nurse sharks in the Caribbean Sea. Nurse sharks rest on the sandy bottom of sea during the day. Nurse sharks won't bother you. One time we took a 12 year old boy on his first scuba dive in the Caribbean Sea. During his dive we found a nurse shark and let him pet it! Click here to see the nurse shark we found on "The Belize Whale Shark Expedition" (DAY 10). • Are there hammerhead sharks in the Caribbean Sea? Yes. Even though there are hammerhead sharks in the Caribbean Sea we have not yet seent them underwater. • Have you been close to a hammerhead shark before? No, but this year, on our next Internet expedition, we hope to go to a small island, off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, to study schooling hammerhead sharks close-up. • Have you ever seen a great white shark? We have seen Great White Sharks in Australia, California, and now, Mexico. Our first time to dive with Great White Sharks was in South Australia. • What is the biggest shark you have ever seen? The biggest shark we have ever seen was a 25' whale shark we studied underwater in Belize. Click here to see the whale sharks we found on "The Belize Whale Shark Expedition". • How long do sharks live? In the last five years new shark studies have revealed that sharks live longer than scientists used to believe! Great White Sharks have been found to live at least 70 years and probably longer. Whale Sharks live to over 100 years and probably as long as 130 years. The oldest sharks in the ocean at Greenland Sharks. Greenland Sharks live in the in the freezing cold Arctic Ocean and live to be at least 400 years old and may live as long as 500 years! • How big can sharks get? The biggest shark is the whale shark which is the biggest fish on our planet. The largest whale shark ever found was about 60 feet long. The largest great white shark ever found was about 27 feet long. The biggest great white shark we have ever seen was a 17' female great white shark on our Mexico Great White Shark Expedition. • Do you like sharks? Yes, because they are fascinating animals and there are still a lot of things scientists don't know about sharks. • Do you like to see the sharks? We like to see sharks underwater. The problem is that the sharks usually don't like to see us. The sharks are more scared of us than we are of them. We are as big or bigger than most sharks and we look very strange to them. As we breathe underwater we make big bubbles that make a loud sound. To a shark we look like a big, scary, roaring monster coming to get them. The sharks are scared of us and turn and swim to get away from us. The only way we can get the sharks to hang around with us is to bring them food to eat. Sometimes they are so scared of us even having food will not make them stay around us. • What if a shark chases after you, what do you do? You have it backwards. We are the ones that chase the sharks to study them and take pictures of them. That is what happened when we found the nurse shark. It swam away and we had to chase it to take its picture! If a shark were to chase us we would turn around and take its picture. • How deep can you go in the sea without any shark attacking you? As deep as you want. The few people that have been accidentally bitten by sharks have been are the surface. On the surface the shark may not be able to tell what you are too well. On the surface a person may look like a seal lion that some sharks like to catch. Underwater, we certainly don't look like seal lions and we make scary noises from the air bubbles every time we breathe. • Did a shark ever attack you before? Mr. Brown: One time a shark did attack me, but it was my fault. I was holding a one foot long horn shark for someone to take pictures of. I was holding the horn shark for a long time and the shark didn't like that. When I let the horn shark go it turned around and tried to bite me, but I punched it in the nose and it swam away. Even if the horn had bitten me it would have hurt very much because horn sharks don't have big, sharp teeth. Horn sharks only have small, flat grinding teeth for eating crabs with hard shells. • If sharks eat sick and diseased fish, how come they don't get sick and diseased? The strong acids in the shark's stomach probably kill all the germs from the sick animal. |
||||
home | basecamp | archives | library other expeditions | kids' page | contact us © 2019, The Ocean Adventure All rights reserved. |