News

While reviewing footage from camera-equipped tiger sharks throughout the Bahamas, Dr. Austin Gallagher, founder of the non-profit ocean research organization Beneath the Waves (BTW), learned that these sharks were spending significant time in seagrass habitats.

Basking sharks are to get special protection under new regulations that have been introduced in the Republic of Ireland. They are now protected under Ireland's Wildlife Act.

The mysterious Greenland shark – thought to have the longest lifespan of any vertebrate – was granted new, historic protections by the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO) on the final day of its annual meeting. The US and Canada, with support from the UK and the EU, proposed and secured a science-based ban on retaining the species from international waters.

Rarely observed circling formations of basking sharks in Irish waters have been explained as 'speed dating' displays in a new study. Research by marine biologists from the UK's Marine Biological Association (MBA) and the Irish Basking Shark Group reveals that the circles of basking sharks seen in recent years off the Co Clare coast are animals engaged in courtship behaviour, the first place in the world where this has been verified.

The endangered Maugean skate is a unique creature that has only been recorded in Macquarie and Bathurst Harbours in Tasmania, but new research reveals it now only survives in Macquarie Harbour.

By using sophisticated electronic tags, a team of researchers led by Stanford University has assembled a large biologging dataset to better understand how elasmobranchs – a group of marine animals including sharks, rays, and skates – use the ocean depths.

Study used fossil evidence to create a 3D model of the 50ft-long shark and estimated it could have eaten a killer whale in five bites. At around 50ft (16 metres) from nose to tail, the megalodon was longer than a bus, according to the study in the journal Science Advances. That’s about two to three times the size of today’s great white shark.

The whale shark has dethroned Kodiak bears (Ursus arctos middendorffi) to now claim the title as the ‘largest omnivorous animal.’ Scientists from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), CSIRO and University of Tasmania, recently analysed biopsy samples from these star-covered visitors and discovered they are eating a lot – not just plankton and krill, but plant material, too!

While the country prohibits the deliberate fishing of sharks, hundreds of thousands are harvested each year as bycatch. Ecuador’s laws place no limit on such “incidental catch,” and the valuable fins can be legally sold and exported.

Devanshi Kasana and her colleagues were puzzled when they discovered it: a large shark typically thought to live in the freezing Arctic in the middle of a coral reef in Belize. It was the first time a Greenland shark, had been found in the waters of the Western Caribbean.