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Welcome back to Aquarium of the Podcific. Today we are going to learn about sharks.
I'm really excited we have one of our aquarists, Rachel Munson, and she's going to be joining us. She oversees Shark Lagoon home to most of our sharks that we have here at the Aquarium. And there are sharks in there that you can't touch. But the aquarium is also home to lots of shark species you can touch and although that might seem really spooky to some people, I promise, the bamboo sharks are very cute.
I think some people have really conquered their fears by visiting the aquarium and touching the shark a little I'm really proud of them.
I'm proud of them too.
I'm proud of you, if you're listening,
It's interesting because you know, we have so many people who are probably afraid of sharks or have this overarching fear, and then we have someone like Rachel whose whole job is to interact with them and train them and dive with them. And she gets in the water with some of our really, really big animals with no fear whatsoever. So we're going to ask her all about that. And whether or not she feels like she's in danger when she's in our Shark Lagoon habitat. I think it's going to be really good time.
Yeah, absolutely. Sharks get a really bad reputation. But I've learned so much from Rachel just working with her personally about how lovable they are and how sweet they are. And they're really adorable. So I'm excited for you all to listen and find out more about sharks today.
We also have a shark named Fern? Yeah, which is very cute. And Baby
and Baby and Gatsby.
They did such a good job naming them.
They did a really good job with the names and shout out to Theo who is the sea turtle that we learned about a couple weeks ago that also lives in Shark Lagoon
He rules that habitat
Which is funny to think about, because he's just a little guy
A week, right. Great. Yes, sir. Yep, I get in there quite a bit. The tank gets pretty dirty. And unfortunately, the sharks don't clean up after themselves. So I've got to do it. And yeah, a lot of people do think diving with sharks is very dangerous. And some people think I need to wear chainmail or something insane. Or something. Totally, you're in there. Yep. The only thing that we have is we do have one safety diver. But really that safety diver is just to make sure that the working diver doesn't bash into the
The sharks way. Because like, you know, the sharks will swim in and doing their thing. And sometimes when you're working, you can move quickly, especially if you're using a power tool and you're trying to go up to the surface. And if there's a shark up there, they might get bumped. And that would be so sad.
Kind of like a shark bouncer. Yeah, I do.
Oh my god, I've never heard of it referred to as that. And I can't like think of anything else now. It's perfect.
Yeah, we'll have to we'll put a link in the show notes where you can actually watch our shark lagoon exhibit on camera. Thanks to explore.org. So you might be able to catch Rachel in there diving or some other members of our team. Yeah. Shark bouncing. Cool. Erin, do you have a couple of questions for Rachel today?
Sure. So first and foremost, why sharks?
I love sharks a lot because of the misconceptions a lot of people have about them, and that they're very dangerous. And they just like, go after people like they're the like, basically paint them out to be these monsters. And it's a bad rep, they really do. It's really such a shame and to like work with them and get to realize that they are complete opposite of that the most like chill, relaxed animals that just want to do their own thing. They want nothing to do with people. And a lot of people tend to think of like, oh, well, you work with sharks, and then aquarium setting, and they must be totally different than out in the ocean. And that's not the case. These are, you know, animals that are displaying natural behaviors. Even in this exhibit as well, though a lot of the the sharks out in the ocean also are very chill and not something that people need to watch out for, actually is sharks that need to watch out for people. Sharks are under threat by a variety of sources, whether it be overfishing, habitat loss, and then ocean acidification and temperatures rising. All of these things have negative impacts on to sharks, which is detrimental not only to sharks, but also the entire ecosystems as well.
Yeah, we're probably causing more harm to sharks than they've ever caused to us. They get such a bad reputation. And do you think that some of that is maybe species specific? What species do we have here at the Aquarium?
Yeah, so the bad reputation definitely comes from a particular species, the you know, Jaws was made about it. So great white sharks. But a lot of people look at a shark. And they all they think that all sharks are great white sharks, and there are over 400 different species of sharks, and they all have very different body shapes and behaviors. And they all act very differently from one another. So they all have to inhabit a very similar, you know, habitat or space. And even sharks that look very similar, like body shape. They even have very mind new behaviors that allow them to eat different prey in that same area. So these animals are really not competing with each other very often for resources. But yes, unfortunately, the big ones tend to give a bad rep for the little ones, like we've got teeny tiny little Bamboo sharks that our guests can touch. So we've got Bamboo sharks of epilate sharks and our small touch exhibit that our guests can touch. And those guys when we get to four feet maximum, they're very little. And then some of our bigger sharks, we have zebra sharks, blacktip reef sharks, a sandbar shark and then a grey reef sharks. The biggest one of that batch is the zebra shark. Ours largest zebra shark is probably our individual named baby. She's no longer a baby anymore. Totally. She is seven feet long and about 120 130 pounds. So pretty big, but her mouth is teeny tiny. Maybe the size, like a little smaller than the size of a fall, maybe half the size or so like so. The very small things like clams and squid as small pieces of fish to
and the location of their mouth too it's kind of towards their bottom right. So yeah, we're focusing on slow traveling animals of the ocean floor,
right? Yeah, exactly. That's an ad.
That's pretty cool. And each of those you've mentioned that the individual species have their own sort of personalities, and demeanors? Is that the same with individuals? Do they each have their own personality as well? Yeah, within
that species? Yeah, definitely. We have like, for example, the black tip reef sharks, we have two individuals and one is older, and she's less so wise, like, I can't fool her at all. We have to do routine exams on our animals to make sure that they are nice and healthy. So we try to get them into our husbandry pool area, which is where we can corral them so our veterinary team can take a close look at them. But this older individual we named her it's more of an identifier than a name or her name is shark lagoon female. That's what we used to have two black tips, one in propery and then one in Shark lagoon. Anyway, so we call her shark Call you lovingly shark lagoon wants nothing to do with the husband report whenever when she knows we need to do an exam on her. Whereas the younger one Barbara she gets a nice name
a shark named Barbara
Yeah. But Barbara she doesn't care she has no fears will go into husband pool anytime
They're very individualistic, which is cool think about. I have found that our older animals tend to be wise to the game when it comes to like veterinary say just like your dog, right you're like, Just think oh, we're going to the dog park and they know exactly when it's the veterinarian. Yes. And you can do it every day. And they still know. And it's the same with our animals like the seals and sea lions. Exactly. They're wise to our game too smart, especially the ones who have been around the block a few times like we've been through this. Yeah. So when you're doing exams in the husbandry pool, I know that sometimes we might utilize something called tonic immobility. Can you tell us a little bit about what that is?
Yeah, so sharks go into tonic immobility, it's where when you flip them onto their backs, they go into a catatonic state. And they kind of go into like a restful stay at a calming period. It's really great because we can flip these sharks into tonic immobility. And we can do exams without having to pull them out of the water and put them into a med pool where we have anesthesia in the water to kind of make them go to sleep. So this is great. So it's very minimally invasive, very stress free and it makes it a lot easier for us and them to put them into tonic immobility. And we can do blood draws, we can do ultrasounds and then I've even seen our veterinarian Dr. Adams do sutures and like little like more for like pectoral fins and like yeah, small things like that enough. Definitely not like a massive surgery, but is so uh huh. Yeah, for sure. It's
a quick little fix, just flip over. That's interesting. I don't know if do we know how that evolved with sharks? Or why they have that as an adaptation?
They're not entirely Well, I haven't done too much research research recently. But from what I know that it has been used for females for breeding purposes, but males can do it too. So I'm not too sure if like the gene is just so closely ingrained with that behavior that it doesn't matter. Male or female.
That's interesting. Do they ever flip themselves back out of it? Or is it basically until you? They do? Oh, yes.
Sometimes they're like, Okay, I'm done. You're like, actually, we're not done. I'm sorry. And then there's like, examples, like our zebra shark Fern, where she's not fully asleep. Totally feed her when she's in tonic immobility. Oh, yeah.
I'm a nap and a snack.
Nap and a snack. Exactly.
Love that for her. Good for fern. Yeah. You can even reinforce that behavior with totally, yep. I think one of the misconceptions that we have is that sharks need to constantly be moving also to breathe and just to live is that true of all species of sharks or any species of sharks?
No. So not all shark species need to continually swim in order to breathe. What they do need is continual water flow over their gills. So there's some sharks that have special adaptations that allow them to push that water over their gills. For example, our zebra sharks have little spiracles that's a hole on the side of their heads right close to their eyeballs that draws water and pushes it right over their gills so that they can continually breathe. Whereas the black tip reef sharks they do need to continually swim in order to breathe. So like the that swimming and breathing behavior is so well ingrained that they often like add, like say, for example, you need to anesthetize a black tip reef shark, when you're trying to wake them up, you do need to move them in order to get them to breathe again. So it's really cool behavior.
That is interesting. I'm just imagining the shark with like water wings as you're sort of. That would be kind of cute. I think that we should invest in shark water wings. Boom, done. What are the lifespans of some of the species that we have here? How long lived? Will they be?
We have species that can live pretty long. Anywhere between late 20s or early 30.
Wow. Yeah.
And it's really hard to find longevity studies. It's just like, especially on specific species. So I'm not too sure if this is a normal thing. From what I understand it is like talking to other aquariums and other researchers that this is a pretty typical for a tropical species. But there are like as we said, there's 400 different species of sharks. Depending on where a shark lives, it really affects their longevity. So tropical species, they tend to not live as long as like for example, I temperate or cold water shark species like that. Greenland shark those guys are crazy. Yeah. So insane they can live to like 400 years or something insane sounds common
with cold water species right they live longer it's like the cold keeps them cold stay fresh longer.
The metabolism is so slow I just doesn't do anything.
I know that's true for octopus too, our Giant Pacific Octopus is longer lived than the tropical species. Cold water versus warm water.
Yeah, if only they lived 400 years that would be great. Might be a little bit crazy. Scary. Yeah, maybe there's too smart. But those Greenland sharks are very interesting. If any of our listeners have not seen a picture of a Greenland shark go look them up. They're odd looking. They look like they live to be
Hi Pacific listeners Madeline here recording this on my phone. So apologies for the change in audio quality. But I wanted to give some context for this next moment coming up. So we're talking about the Greenland shark. Our audio engineer Scott is looking at the Greenland shark on his phone and accidentally played some music in the background and I think it's a really fun moment. So I wanted to leave it in. But that way you have a little bit of context for what we're giggling about. Sing it Scott
Sharks they look like they are 400
I want to see it actually. Yeah,
you've never seen one?
No, don't think so. I know I'm trying something it probably if it's what's the spookiest shark. That's what I want to know.
Oh, like a goblin shark is pretty clearly. I think cookie cutter sharks are spooky only and that's what they do.
Yeah. Yeah. I've seen that. That is spooky.
Spooky sharks.
Like a Halloween edition. Yeah.
This spookiest version of each animal
it has to follow up with how adorable they actually are.
in theory spooky. But yeah, reality very cute. But Greenland sharks are a little spooky, Why do they live so long? What are they doing with all that time?
Just sleepin'
Floating around. Yeah. So weird to think about a 400 year old shark and yeah, oh my goodness, you have seen the birth of America. So sure,
that's totally what they worry about that? Yeah. They're
like, Oh, what's America doing up there?
What are they doing now? Okay. So some shark species are extremely long lived and tropical species are probably a little less so because of a faster metabolism. But yeah, those Greenland sharks man, they live forever, and we should definitely look up pictures of them. Cool. Another question that we had for you is how can you tell the difference between a male and a female shark.
So male sharks have what are called claspers and they are a modified pelvic fin. So if you look at a shark from the side, their side front fins are pectoral fins, and the next one's back our pelvic fins. And males have little extensions from that called clasp errs. They're used for mating purposes. And females do not have those. Okay,
is that pretty standard across species,
across species and even rays have this same thing too
And actually, we were just going to ask if sharks. Sharks are pretty closely two pretty closely related to things like rays and skates, right? Yeah. And so what is that whole family called? Like? What? How do we classify those guys?
Yeah, they're called elasmobranchs. They are a type of cartilaginous fish. So sharks rays skates are fish. But rather than having a bony skeleton, like most fish that you think of, they actually have a skeletal system that's entirely made up of cartilage. And that really helps them to make them nice and light and very flexible, which is really handy and swimming and makes them go a lot faster, and occupy really interesting locations, like think of like a ray who can like burrow underneath the sand and things like that. And they also have a really cool adaptation, they have what are called the ampullae of lorenzini. They are these tiny jelly filled pores that typically are located around this now, but you can find them around the body as well. And they allow them to detect the electrical impulses in the water. So that can be from like the heartbeat of an animal that they're trying to find. Or maybe a predator that's coming by and they want to get away from that really quickly. Cool. It's so cool. And then a lot of sharks and rays have what are called dermal denticles. They are scale so they are like I said they are a fish. So they do have scales but they are not a normal scale. They are are modified and that they have dentin on it, which is where the name dermal denticles comes from. Dermal denticles in Latin loosely translate to skin teeth. And so dentin is the same material that you find in your teeth and sharks and rays have these more pronounced in sharks than rays dermal denticles are very, very fine and very small. But with sharks, you can see it pretty well, especially with our zebra sharks. They've got really large dermal denticles that you can see they're beautiful. But those large dermal denticles really helped to protect sharks from scrapes and abrasions. And then with pelagic or open ocean swimming sharks, it allows them to swim faster the water.
Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I don't think I realized it made them faster through the water. I think every time I've gone to an aquarium that has like a shark skin you can touch everyone is so surprised by how rough their skin is as a result of those
like sandpaper.
Yeah, exactly.
sharks that are in our touch pools rough to the touch, like if you feel them,
you know, I don't think so especially because I've handled Fern, our zebra shark who I think her skin is super rough. So in comparison, the bamboo sharks is not as much so but I find it very noticeable when you go from the tail when you like touch on from the tail to the head. Because you really get a chance to feel that abrasiveness of their skin. When you go tailed ahead. It feels nice and very soft.
Against the Grain. Yeah, yeah.
their denton grain. Seekers. Yes. Interesting. So we talked a little bit about it when you were talking about training, but what type of husbandry and vet care goes into taking care of our collection of sharks, especially acknowledging how many different species we have, and they have different needs as well?
Yeah. So for the husbandry aspect, so they all have very different diets, especially in terms of the size of their diets, like for example, the bamboo sharks, they get very teeny tiny food pieces, they have very small teeth. These teeth are actually lie flat along their jawline so that they can catch slippery prey, like small fish and squid, but also they're able to crack open hard shells like crabs, and things like that. So very versatile teeth. So but because of that they eat very tiny prey items entirely hold they don't really like rip and tear from a prey like you might think of when you think of a shark, like a lot of people tend to think of great whites and Tiger sharks and they're like, oh, all sharks must eat that way. That's not the case at all. So another example is that zebra sharks eat in a very similar way as Bamboo sharks. They're also a part of the same they are also part of the same family of sharks. Hence, the very similar body shape and mouth shape to
like have suction when they eat. I think I've seen Fern eat before and the squid was there one second and then gone.
Totally Yeah, she's got really powerful throat muscles. And that helps her because she is a nocturnal predator. She spends a lot of time in the reefs, and she'll nudge her nose through the wreath looking for sleeping prey. And she'll use those powerful throat muscles to basically pull that prey out of it sleeping. Cool.
Shark boogie man. She's so cute. Like, if you guys have ever seen Fern before, she's one of the cutest animals. In here since the aquarium open. She
has Yeah, she's a charter species pretty impressive.
But she's the Boogeyman.
To sleeping fishies.
They don't know what hit em
they know they don't. And then our blacktip reef sharks, they are a lot more free swimming. They swim really fast. So they actually do more of like a traditional hunting for their prey. And we use that to our advantage when we are training them, we use a target for them. And we move it through the water and we let them chase it before giving them their food, get some exercise in for the day. And then trying to think what else so we make sure their food, they get a really good diet and we want to make sure that they also get lots of their vitamins in as well as their exercise and for the day as well as enrichment. We do all sorts of different enrichment and by changing up their habitat, we can go in and give them different food items. We can hide their food and different contraptions, and then further veterinary care. All of our animals do need to be seen by our veterinarian at least once a year so our larger sharks and rays we try to train them to swim into a stretcher so that we can easily get our hands on them in a very stress free manner. And then other animals like our blacktip reef sharks, they are easier to train into our husbandry poles we do that instead.
Very cool. So everyone has their own method of being seen by the that in some way, shape or form, and everyone's trained in some way to, which is cool. I guess I didn't appreciate that you are trying to mimic the movement of their prey items when you're doing a target and a moving target is much more reinforcing for a shark that wants moving prey than this one.
So yeah, I found that out in an interesting way. This is when we rip our beautiful Santa tiger shark. Yeah, one of our black tip reef shark was excellent at stealing food from him.
And I realized, Oh, she likes to like chase her food.
So I had to modify her feeding style a little bit for that.
Keep her away from him too. Yeah, that too. That's funny. Well, we have a lot of shark species here at the Aquarium. But I think some of our listeners might be wondering, what are we doing conservation wise for sharks at the aquarium?
Yeah, well, we're doing a lot we are. We participate in the study that does artificial insemination research on sharks. We have done this with our bamboo sharks and zebra sharks. And we have had a successful artificial insemination from our zebra shark fern. We actually have one of the offspring here at our facility at her her name is Gatsby she lives in our tropical reef habitat. And all of this has really great implications for conservation work for the animals out in the oceans. We're not there yet. But we're really hoping to get to that point where we can impact the ones out in the ocean to and then also you can at home, make sure you choose sustainable fishing sources. If you do eat fish to eat sustainable fish is the best way to go. You're making sure that you don't have bycatch. And that can include sharks, rays, and other animals, which is so bad. So bycatch is basically any unintended catch of something like say, for example, you trying to grab tuna or some other delicious fish item, and you actually get somebody else in there instead, if you choose a sustainable fishery source, they make sure that there's very limited if no bycatch involved. And and then Yeah, so like, there's other things too, like if you're paying attention to the fish that you're consuming, some are endangered species. So making sure that it's not endangered species or has negative impacts on the ecosystem there. Yeah, that's
there's a lot of things that people can be doing just in their day to day lives. And I believe they realize they can be helping in an animal like a shark in the wild, which is pretty cool to think about. We did also have some questions for you from social media, we asked our listeners, what would you ask a shark expert if you had the opportunity to ask so we're gonna switch over to Madeline so she can ask those questions.
Okay, cool. We had someone asked, do sharks lay eggs? And what are shark eggs made out of?
Yes, so sharks do lay eggs, not all shark species. So we have our zebra sharks and our bamboo sharks, at least in our tropical shark lagoon habitat, I'm not going to include all of our temperate ones. So those ones do lay eggs that you can see. And those I actually did a little bit of research on this question. So it looks like the composition of the eggs really varies depending on the species. But it looks like there's a highly ordered unique halogen containing fibrils. And then in some species, there's more of a keratin base. So depending on the species, it's either more keratin or more collagen. So that's pretty much what they're made out of. And most of the shark eggs are in a really unique shape. They also known as mermaid person. They've got this cool tendril and they use that tendril to wrap it around a coral to help it stay put so that they doesn't get washed ashore. So it's a really cool adaptation. But yeah, not all sharks can lay eggs. Like
we have a couple of cool videos on. I know TikTok for sure of I think Fern laying some eggs in Shark lagoon, and it's fascinating to watch.
It's really insane. Cool.
Awesome. Next question is how do sharks sleep?
So sharks? Do they sleep? Yeah, good question. Yeah. sharks don't sleep in a very traditional sense, like you and I go to sleep. So what they have instead is an active and restful period. And their active stage as you would imagine is when they are hunting or foraging or interacting with her other tankmates in the example of shark lagoon, and then restful periods is where they're swimming. Or, for example, are zebra sharks. They just kind of lay at the bottom of the exhibit. That's a restful state, but they don't have eyelids so their eyes are still open. Yeah. And you can tell when a shark especially like a black tip reef shark is having a restful period when you're diving the exhibit because they just kind of aren't really paying attention. So this is where are having that safety diver so important to protect the sharks? Sure. Yeah.
So funny. You kind of touched on this earlier. But can sharks be trained? And what do you train sharks to do here at the Aquarium?
Yeah, sharks are very intelligent, you can train them. And we train our sharks to do a variety of different things, we can train them to be target trained. That means they come to a particular object that we call the target, it can be anywhere from like a white wiffle ball to a Bucket Lid. And that really helps to make sure that we bring our sharks directly to us so that we can provide them the correct food and in the correct way that they need it. And then we can also train our sharks to be stretched or trained. That's where we train them to swim through a stretcher, which is basically a sling with two poles on the end. And that way, we can do our veterinary exam very easily, or you can train them to swim into our husbandry pool. And that allows us to again, do our veterinary exams nice and easily. So a lot of it is not only really great for our animals, because it challenges them to try and figure out how to get their food, but also it helps us with our husbandry needs to
awesome. What do we feed our sharks here at the Aquarium? We feed
our sharks restaurant quality and sustainable seafood. They get a variety of different diets based on their natural food items. So like, for example, our larger sharks, they get a lot of fishy things like mullet, mackerel, Mahi Mahi, and then our zebra sharks, they get more of your invertebrate so they eat a lot of squid and clams. And then for our little guys like the bamboo sharks, they eat more shrimp.
Do you find that they have favorite foods? Really? Oh, favorite foods?
Well, the black tips the gray reef and the sandbar they love mullet really favorite thing? Versus the zebra sharks don't really like Molot they really like Mahi Mahi. Yeah. They have excellent. But they don't really like squid even though they should be eating squid. So it's like the veggie. So sometimes I have to sneak it in in between pieces. And then the bamboo sharks really like mackerel.
That's interesting. I wonder preference what drives those preferences, but
it does change over time. Like they have different like periods where I've noticed where they have more of an interest for fishy foods versus more invertebrates. And I suspect it has to do with like their egg like laying cycles and things like that. What they're craving. Yeah, I kinda
want pickles and ice cream today. I'm laying a
big day ahead. Yeah. Cool. Um, how good is their sense of smell?
They have a great sense of smell. And while it is super great, I don't know the total number of like, you know, they can smell one cent and the gal million gallon or something. And yeah, I try to get away from the whole drop of blood. Because it's really not what they're smelling. It's more of like the the food proteins that they're keying into. Yeah, cuz a lot of people are like, Oh, my God, if you have a cut on your hand, should you be swimming with the sharks and like this, no big deal, they really don't care. It's like, the proteins in your blood are not a food item for sharks, so they're not actively looking for it. So you're fine with a cut. I have dove many times in Shark lagoon with like, you know, I'm pretty clumsy human being so I get cut on my hands. And none of the sharks have taken any interest in me safe at all my hands. And, yeah, so their sense of smell is good, but not nearly as good as their sense of hearing, they're hearing as much better. They're actually very sensitive to hearing so much so that when you're building and designing an exhibit for them, you really have to take into consideration sound and noise and vapor vibrations from like pumps and other filtration components.
And they carry so much more underwater too. And it's funny when you're diving here, you can hear all these things that you don't typically hear in the air and you're like, Oh, what is that? Totally. That's interesting. I don't think I realized that sharks can hear so well. What is that for? What are they listening for?
Well, they can hear like struggling prey. Which is why partly they say that if you're out specifically more like at dawn or dusk and you're just like splashing around like a crazy person. That's not a great thing because it attracts the sound of sharks that are they gonna want to come and investigate and see what you're doing. So it helps with detecting prey primarily.
Well, they seek out weaker or fish or weaker animals or maybe something that's a little older because it's easier to catch.
Yep, definitely they are predator and most predators do identify and pick out the the food item that's going to be the easiest for them to handle. Especially with sharks like they have a huge seems like a huge ocean. There's plentiful food options, right. But that's not really the case. And they really have to find a prey that they can take down and the has to basically let them survive for the next couple of days, sometimes couple of weeks and then larger sharks, they go for it without food for months at a time. So they really need to make sure that when they spend the energy to catch a prey that is worth it for them.
Yeah. Well, we know sharks are predators, but does anything prey on sharks?
Yeah, there's a lot of things that prey on sharks, especially depending on the size like the bamboo sharks, pretty much everything will prey on those. They're so tiny. There's other like bony fish groupers will eat them other large sharks, other large arrays. I'm sure marine mammals will eat them too. And then so it really depends on like, the size of the animal and I'm not too sure if there's many things that eat zebra sharks. I'm not sure about that one. But I know with blacktip reef sharks, they've got other groupers blacktip reef sharks, even though they have a very Sharky look to them, and a lot of people think they're very scary. They're so skittish because of their small size. And yeah, they have a lot of things to watch out for. Yeah.
What about sharks and other sharks? Is that ever a situation? Oh, yeah, sure. Do they ever prey on each other.
Yeah, larger sharks will prey on smaller sharks, but it's usually like it has to be a substantially larger shark to prey on a smaller shark. And the sharks that we have in our exhibit are all similarly sized. So there's no concern with sharks preying on other sharks in our habitat. But out in the ocean, if like, say, for example, a black tip reef shark was swimming, and they saw a teeny tiny little bamboo shark, they might try and snack on it.
Well, in Shark Lagoon here at the Aquarium, we have our sharks house with two other tropical fish. And then also, as we mentioned earlier, a sea turtle. Yeah. How is that dynamic in the habitat?
It's very easy. The sharks really don't mess with the fish altogether too much. We feed them regularly, so they don't really have much of a food drive to go hunt for food. And then also, like we were talking about earlier about how sharks really want to make sure they're preying on things that are struggling, as long as we keep our fish healthy, and nice and strong. They are not going to be the sharks aren't gonna mess with those guys. And then the sea turtle. He is massive. Which is funny because all of Ridley he's an olive ridley sea turtle and olive ridley sea turtles are the smallest turtle sea turtle species. And he's he's like, what? Oh, gosh, how much is the way and maybe a little under 100 pounds? I have to double check that
They're smallest turtle species?!
Yes he's big
I don't think I knew that. Because I've only ever known one and he's enourmous, wow
So he really pushes the other sharks around. It's his home. Definitely.
He's the boss
There's no concern. And then of course, we make sure we don't put shark species that are known to prey on turtles in this habitat with him.
What kind of shark species would that be?
Tiger sharks. They do love turtles. Yeah.
Cool. Two questions about kind of how sharks evolved do Are they able to change their appearance to hide from predators? Or do they have any evolutionary traits that allow them to better succeed in the ocean from predators,
sharks don't really have the ability to change their colors. But they do have like, depending on the species, different adaptations that allow them to either swim really quickly away from a predator or to blend in with their environment, thinking of like an angel shark or wobbegong, where they've got like crazy skin colors to them and like texture that allows them to blend in with their habitat. So it really depends on the species.
I like the idea that there are sharks that are like just look at all my frills, they'll distract you and I'll slowly swim away
jazz hands to beautiful
I love this question. What stops sharks from swimming backwards? Does anything? Professionally Rachel does.
Um, this is such a funny question to me. Because like there's so many animals out in the world. Should that don't really swim backwards? And like sharks specific? I know everyone needs to know why sharks can't swim backwards. Well, they're just designed to swim forwards. I don't know what to say.
They're always moving forward. Yeah. Rise and grind. Never look back.
I mean, they could quickly turn around and go backwards.
I think it's active state, grind. They aren't sleeping,
oh my god. But I will say like, with, especially the Epaulette sharks, they have specially modified pelvic fins. Those are the secondary fins on the side of their bodies. Those are modified that allow them have a wider range of movement and motion. And they can actually walk so they can go forward. And they can kind of go backwards to not super well, but they can go backwards do
have a backward shark, we've got one yeah, they can go out of the water.
All the places.
I think this is a really important question to wrap on. What would happen if all sharks vanished from our oceans?
the oceans would be in a very sad state. Sharks are crucial for our ocean ecosystems. They are a top predator in most cases. And they really helped to make sure that there's a nice variety of different species of animals, whether it be lots of different fish or invertebrates. So without sharks, you lose all of that. And you lose the diversity of our oceans, you lose diversity of our ocean ecosystems. So like reefs, what are known to collapse from the loss of sharks, so they have huge impacts on our oceans.
I think as we go along, what we keep hearing week to week is like, if we lost the species entirely, the entire ecosystem would change. And it just goes to show how interconnected really everything is and you know, you take you can't take out an apex predator like a shark from an ecosystem and expect it to not collapse because they play such an important role.
Well eat sustainable seafood.
Yes. Number one
Reduce the amount of plastic you use for free now I like that one's another really big one, too.
It's important for really all the animals out there. Yep.
Really. Cool. Thank you so much, Rachel, for joining us today. I learned so much. That was awesome. Great.
Thank you more than I ever knew about. Everybody Google Greenland sharks. And what were the ones that walk backward?
The Eppaulette sharks
they can't walk?
Yeah, they're walking sharks are super cool.
Take a video of that.
A couple of several. Yeah. Okay, I
will have to make a video but yeah. Thanks, everybody. Right. Thank you.
Thank you, Rachel.
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