Sharks

Picture of Sharks With close to 400 shark species floating around, you could fill volumes cataloguing their individual food habits. While cookiecutter sharks take nonlethal bites of flesh from their prey and call it a day, great white shark may eat large sea mammals in one big gulp. And certainly the dietary customs of the 8-inch (20-centimeter) dogfish shark vary from that of the 60-foot (20-meter) whale shark, not to mention the different cousins, aunts and uncles in between. All sharks are at least partly carnivorous. They usually consume between 0.5 and 3.0 percent of their body weight each meal since most space their dinners out to every two or three days. Although their bodies are well equipped for catching food, they can't chew well, so they need time to properly digest. Since sharks stand at the top of the aquatic food chain, their diets play an important role in regulating the species below them, much like lions in the jungle. For instance, if large sharks were to die out,...

Shark Week The Discovery Channel's Shark Week, which first aired in 1987, is a week-long series of feature television programs dedicated to facts on sharks. Shark Week is held annually, normally running in July or August. During Shark Week 2006, the Silver Spring, Maryland, headquarters of the Discovery Channel was outfitted to resemble a giant shark. In 2000, six million 3D Pulfrich glasses were distributed to viewers in the United States and Canada for an episode featuring an extinct giant shark which had 3D segments. In 2005, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman from the Discovery Channel series MythBusters hosted Shark Week, and a two-hour MythBusters "Jaws Special" was premiered for the event. In 2006, Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs hosted, and two Dirty Jobs episodes were featured, titled "Jobs that Bite" and "Jobs that Bite Harder". Shark Week 2008 is currently running from July 27 to August 2. Shark Week

Shark Research Founded in 2001, the ReefQuest Centre for Shark Research is dedicated to shark and ray conservation through its scientific research and public education programs. The Centre maintains research equipment and facilities, reference collections of fossil and extant elasmobranch specimens, a scientific library, elasmobranch data bases, and public education materials. The Centre oversees the thesis research of selected graduate students as well as publishes results of its own original research and those resulting from collaboration with students or colleagues in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, co-organizes international scientific conferences, and will begin producing its own series of scientific reports in late 2003. Pictures of Sharks

Shark Lagoon As you cross the wooden bridge over Atlantis Marine World’s Sand Shark Lagoon, look both ways to view a miniature panorama of Long Island – the towering bluffs and rock-strewn beaches of the North Shore on one side, and the rolling dunes and salt marshes of the South Shore on the other. Long Island provides the theme – and virtually everything else – for this dramatic exhibit. In fact, all the fish in this exhibit have been caught locally, typically in either Peconic Bay or Shinnecock Bay. In addition to sand sharks (Carcharias taurus), one of the most abundant sharks on the US Atlantic coast, Sand Shark Lagoon features many fish common to Long Island waters, including striped bass, weakfish, fluke, Northern sea robins, smooth dogfish, and clearnose skate. The exhibit even features the endangered Atlantic sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrhynchus), caught in Shinnecock Bay. Shark Lagoon