sharks

A whale’s skin is easily glommed up with barnacles, algae, bacteria and other sea creatures, but sharks stay squeaky-clean. Although these parasites can pile onto a shark’s rippled skin too, they can’t take hold and thus simply wash away. Now scientists have printed that pattern on an adhesive film that will repel bacteria pathogens from hospitals and public restrooms.

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Overfishing made the grey nurse shark endangered, but it's the animal's bizarre, cannibalistic embryos that are making it difficult for the species to rebound. The gestating shark pups need a "time out," says Nick Otway, a fisheries biologist at Port Stephens Fisheries Institute in Australia. As a last-ditch effort to keep the species from eating itself into extinction, he built an artificial uterus, a souped-up fish tank that will give each unborn baby its own womb.

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In 2002, an Australian company called Shark Shield released a brick-size transponder meant to keep away the worst fear of every diver and surfer: sharks. The thinking behind Shark Shield’s eponymous gadget is simple enough. Sharks have electroreceptors in their snouts, called ampullae of Lorenzini, that detect electric fields for navigation and predation. By emitting an irritating electric field, the idea goes, the Shark Shield would trigger a nasty sensation in the ampullae, forcing even the hungriest hammerhead to turn on its fin.

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Six weeks ago, the Monterey Bay Aquarium released a young white shark into the ocean, and the swimmer has already cruised down the coast to the waters off Mexico.

The shark, which spent 162 days at the aquarium after it was accidentally caught by a local fisherman, is the first to carry two different tracking tags.

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George Burgess, the director of the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida, announced today that fatal attacks from the toothy predators dropped to a two-decade low worldwide. Only a single swimmer was lost in 2007, compared to four each in the two years before. Granted, that doesnt mean sharks are leaving us alone completely. The number of attacks actually increased from 2006 to 2007, jumping from 63 to 71.

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