I think the new research underscores the fact we don't know very much about sharks, either inshore, offshore, or deepwater, and how they migrate.  

The pelagic shark probably most endangered in the Gulf on Mexico is the Mako ... no clue as to where they spawn ... they seem feed right in tight with the tuna ... some are actually prize catches for the fighting and jumping ability.

A word about the US regulations:  finning a shark of any kind is highly illegal and any fins cannot be bought or sold in the US - the ingredients for sharkfin soup are imported from the Orient.

Seems like most of the good tuna and shark research is in the Pacific though.  -sammie

Onward through the fog

We have not been able to get around losing tree frogs yet. It seems evolution has taken care of in their mind stream creatures but still can't tell us how we can have a tree frog without a tree.

Sorry, just spotted our first flying frog, will try to put him in a holding pattern until a tree grows back on the hard pack valley fill.

Darwin would have a field day down here.

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.

On top of the mysterious Makos, just a bit south of the Gulf you have whale sharks, famous for feeding off the coast of Belize (and perhaps other Central American countries).  It would be wonderful to get a sense of their life story, in the notoriously murky Caribbean.

Pompey Road,
do your best, for the sake of the vulnerable and the voiceless, in difficult and even hopeless circumstances.  That is what defines a hero.

Myself, I happen to be a big fan of frogs, especially treefrogs (Hylidae).  At least four photographs of them are in eyeshot of where I sit.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

The frogs I feel bad about.  Last year we had some good rains and we had three kinds of peepers singing at night: the toads, a water frog, and a kind of tree frog.  There are hardly any left here in out little area of south Texas; I could count the male calls on one hand.  No peepers this year so far and it was been warmer than normal but very dry.  

We live in very strange times my friends.

Onward through the fog

The frogs I feel bad about.  Last year we had some good rains and we had three kinds of peepers singing at night: the toads, a water frog, and a kind of tree frog.  There are hardly any left here in our little area of south Texas; I could count the male calls on one hand.  No peepers this year so far and it was been warmer than normal but very dry.  

We live in very strange times my friends.

Onward through the fog

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_shark.

I make no claim that they ever enter the Gulf of Mexico.

And I suspect they do not often fall victim to shark-fin hunters, because of their size.

And I certainly know the difference between the Orca (the largest dolphin) and the whale shark.  They are both beautiful animals, but the Orca is much more often seen, especially off the PacNW coast, by our pals in Seattle and thereabouts.

Atlanta, Georgia, is a city that I have absolutely no desire to visit, in itself; but I would visit it gladly for one reason only, to see its spectacular new aquarium, including its two whale sharks, Alice and Trixie.  Their two male companions, Ralph and Norton, sadly have died -- and hopefully the aquarium folks figured out what went wrong, so they will not let it happen again.  Plainly, from all the photography of them that I have seen, they are remarkably beautiful.

Orcas are very beautiful too, but of course are much more closely related to us than to sharks of any kind.

In fact, having the values of an evolutionary biologist, it burns me up when I see whale sharks described as the "largest fish."  But, what is a fish?!  We are fish!, if you want to get down to it.  The ancestors of us tetrapods were sarcopterygian osteichthyans.  Salmon (for example; sardines and angelfish would do just as well) are actinopterygian osteichthyans.  Sharks are chondrichthyans, not osteichthyans at all.  Salmon are more closely related to us than they are to sharks.  So, I have at least as much a right to be called a "fish" as does any shark.  And so do you!

So in that regard, if you want to say that "fish" must include sharks, then "fish" must mean any aquatic vertebrate, and all descendants of an aquatic vertebrate.  And in that case, the largest "fish" now living is the true-blue mammalian Blue Whale; and the largest "fish" of all time might have been some quite terrestrial sauropod dinosaur.

It is indeed a puzzle, evolutionarily, why the actinopterygian osteichthyans, by far the most diverse of vertebrate taxa, seem never to have produced a very large form, say fifty feet (15ish meters) long, or only very rarely, whereas many other ocean-going vertebrate taxa have indeed grown that big, and larger: placoderms perhaps, sharks, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, and cetaceans.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.