Monday, February 23, 2009

Tiger shark accidently caught, Teahupoo

From the shark research blog of Johann Mourier yesterday news of a dead Tiger in Teahupoo. Original story broke on the Shark-l and The Shark Group:

As a PhD student at CRIOBE studying sharks in French Polynesia, the Fisheries Authorities contacted me to informe us that the tiger shark was caugth . At first they said that it was a pregnant female with pups that started to go out of the body.

When we arrived we saw that it was a male. The babies that saw was the 2 claspers. This male was exactly 3.6 m long but we didn’t have the material to weigth the shark. But I think it could weigth about 500kg. We took DNA samples and we opened the body to have a look at the stomack both for stomack contents and parasite analysis.

The stomack was almost empty. It only contained some vertabrae that should belong to small shark or fish, and some fibres that we think could be whalebone plates of small cetacean.

Johann MOURIER
PhD candidate - Shark research
Laboratoire Ecosystèmes Aquatiques Tropicaux et Méditerranéens
UMR 5244 CNRS - EPHE - UPVD "Biologie et Ecologie Tropicale et
Méditerranéenne"
Université Via Domitia, 52 avenue Paul Alduy 66860 Perpignan Cedex
France

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