Friday, Oct 31

Thanks to music composer Paul Williams, most of us know that we need only fear a shark attack if we hear two haunting notes. But though we know that shark attacks are vastly overestimated, they do happen, and communities sometimes respond with shark culls. But one researcher has set out to make clear that, when there is a shark attack, it isn’t the fault of “sharks,” plural, but of “one shark,” singular. And so in the wake of a couple of shark attacks in the Caribbean, Eric Clua, a marine biologist at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, France, managed to get the injuries swabbed, and DNA testing later revealed that they were both inflicted by one tiger shark. Clua, and others, then set out to catch the predator. This story about the hunt for one shark to ensure the protection of other sharks is a riveting read. 

And finally, divers with hammers are helping California’s underwater forests bounce back, according to this story. Kelp forests have suffered from warming waters, pollutants, and the scourge of sea urchins (whose natural predators have been diminished by climate change and environmental degradation). But arming divers with hammers to smash the overpopulated urchins — 5.8 million of them over the past 13 years — has restored acres of coastal seabed, which provides habitat for a multitude of marine lifeforms. 

Restoratively,

Dot