Lemon Sharks spotted off Jupiter - From The Miami Herald

Lemon Sharks spotted off Jupiter - From The Miami Herald

From: Ralph
Date: 11 Apr 2003

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The Miami Herald UM Researcher Savors Once-In-A-Lifetime Shark Tale

40 lemon sharks spotted off Jupiter

BY SUSAN COCKING

March 9, 2003

Samuel Gruber, a University of Miami shark scientist, gazed upon a phenomenon that he had never seen in 42 years of studying the ocean's top predator. On Captain Kurle's Reef, 80 feet deep off Jupiter Inlet, Gruber counted 40 lemon sharks -- some as large as 10 feet -- laying motionless or milling slowly on the sandy bottom.

Seeing a lot of lemons was not unusual, considering Gruber has been capturing and studying them at his South Bimini lab in the Bahamas for years. But most of the sharks he had handled were juveniles less than 3 feet long. To see a vast school of large adults was unprecedented.

Hovering above the giant sharks and counting them wasn't enough to satisfy Gruber. He had to get down on the bottom among them. Wearing a Draeger Dolphin rebreather to minimize noisy exhaust bubbles, the scientist dropped down and laid on the sand, behind a pregnant female.

He couldn't help himself. He had to touch her. Carefully, Gruber brushed a finger along her flank. She flinched and swam a short distance away, but made no move to bite him. He remained on the bottom as the restless school of lemons, many flanked closely by remoras, glided above and around him. Hundreds of jacks and kingfish passed, but the sharks made no move to eat either man or fish.

When Gruber ran low on air and returned to Jim and Anna Abernethy's dive boat, he was ecstatic. ''Here, in one afternoon, I saw more adult sharks than I've seen in my 42-year career,'' he said. ``It was stunning, fabulous. I was drawn like a magnet. I looked at their faces and their bodies and I felt like I was at home. It was like being with your family.''

The sight that drove Gruber to distraction last month had never been observed by anybody until two years ago, even though Captain Kurle's Reef is a popular dive site among Palm Beach County scuba operators. Underwater photographer Walt Stearns of Boca Raton, field editor for Sport Diver magazine, was among the first to shoot images of the large aggregation of lemons in January 2001.

When Stearns informed Gruber of his find, Gruber was skeptical. But when Stearns e-mailed images of the large sharks to the scientist, Gruber was amazed. ''I started screaming and running around,'' he said. ``The only shark I ever knew that would aggregate like that was a nurse shark.''

Gruber and Stearns dove on the site a year later and encountered between 15 and 20 lemons. But after their visit, the sharks vanished. No one knew if they would return. But they showed up again in December and hung around until a couple of weeks ago -- much to Gruber's delight.

Gruber and doctoral student Steve Newman dove with the lemons the first week of February, observing, counting and wondering what the sharks were doing there.

Gruber has a hypothesis that he hopes to test with further research. From his years of working with lemon sharks in Bimini, the scientist has concluded that males are nomadic but females tend to home in on shallow inshore areas where they give birth every other year.

Gruber believes Captain Kurle's Reef was chosen by females as a gathering point for producing pheromones en masse, which are carried by currents to attract roaming males. After assembling on the reef, Gruber believes the males and females go into the Indian River and other protected inshore areas to mate, and for pregnant females to pup. But proving this could take several more years of study. Scientists have yet to witness mating between lemon sharks, so they don't know where it occurs. Gruber and Newman are looking for grants for next year to capture some of the Jupiter sharks, tag them, put satellite transmitters in them and follow them.

''When you see these animals out there, it's mysterious and you don't know anything about it,'' Gruber said. ``We can't take all the mystery and the magic out of them, but we'll get some information.

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