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Catherine Macdonald, director of the University of Miami's Shark Research and Conservation Program, believes researchers have finally found a great hammerhead nursery. It's not in some remote corner of the state's remaining protected mangrove forests, but in one of the most developed stretches of the state's southeast coast: Biscayne Bay, which stretches south from Miami to the Florida Keys.

In a recent study published in Conservation Science and Practice, researchers from the University of Exeter in the U.K. worked alongside local partners in the Congo to unveil many surprises among the fishermen’s catches.

The Shark League member groups are heralding conservation advances for imperiled Atlantic sharks and rays at this year’s meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) while warning that new measures are still insufficiently cautious to properly safeguard such inherently vulnerable species.

It likely first evolved in vertebrates roughly 460 million years ago, when sharks and other cartilaginous fishes separated from bony vertebrates like ourselves, researchers report today. The bitter taste receptor identified in a pair of shark species may mirror a sort of all-purpose bitterness detector that our common ancestor possessed.

A new Shark League gap analysis highlights where shark fishing and trading nations are falling short after decades of conservation commitments made through the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES, a global wildlife treaty) and the International Commission for Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT, a regional fishery management organization).

A new study demonstrates that large predatory fishes like sharks, tunas and billfish make a surprising number of visits to the deep ocean — particularly the mesopelagic zone, which is found between 200 to 1,000 meters below the surface.

Some unexpected shark strandings and subsequent surprises following autopsies have ironically taken marine biologists millions of years back in time as they look to the future with concern.

It follows scientific warnings the salmon industry is having a “catastrophic” impact on the Maugean skate, an ancient fish thought to be found only in the vast harbour on the state’s west coast.