Sharks!

[senoritafish]

After a soak of about three hours, the set is hauled. A small mako coming up on the line - the line across the top is the mainline; the shark is hooked on the gangion. As the line comes in at the side, the gangions are taken off, and hooked sharks are walked to the stern where the scientists tag tag them.


Needless to say, I didn't take these, but they are on my camera...


Psyching myself up...I had done this before but with much smaller sharks. On the Mako, our own research vessel, we don't have the specialized equipment; when we got larger sharks, we tagged them with a pole while still in the water.

At the stern there is a metal platform with a cradle attached to it. Large sharks are led to cradle, pulled into it, then the cradle is raised from the water and about four people jump on the shark before it can start flapping around. I got to apply spaghetti tags and give them a shot of oxytetrcycline (marks their vertebrae for age & growth studies). A few got satellite tags bolted to their dorsal fins.





Afterward, when I looked at these pictures I was lamenting that my ass looks three times the size of the chief scientist's; her boss laughed and told me, "You know, in ten years of doing this, you wouldn't believe how many pictures of people's butts we have in our archives." XD