Ocean Blog

I recently finished Ernest Hemingway's classic, The Old Man and the Sea, which I somehow missed out on during school. Hemingway is remembered as the quintessential mid-century outdoorsman; however, a close reading of novel reveals his own confusion about the ocean and the superstitions he projected onto sea creatures, particularly the ominous sharks that star in the dramatic climax of the narrative.

The sharks are portrayed as bloodthirsty, greedy, and mindless killers, "like a pig to the trough, if a pig had a mouth so wide that you could put your head in it." As the sharks attack the old man's mythical fish, he curses and beats and stabs and kills them, narrated in language steeped in the imagery of a man fending off some barbarian horde.

Scientists confirmed Friday in the Journal of Fish Biology that a pregnant shark who died last year at the Virginia Aquarium was carrying a parthenogenetic baby, meaning the pup had been created asexually.

The shark, an Atlantic blacktip named Tidbit, died suddenly of shock following a routine medical check-up, and during an autopsy, her pup was discovered. Tidbit had not been kept with a male shark in 8 years and genetic testing confirmed that the pup only had Tidbit's genetic material.

Did you know that all six species of sea turtles in U.S. waters are listed under the Endangered Species Act?

Then I bet you'd be surprised to find out that our country's trawl fisheries still catch hundreds of sea turtles in their nets every year, killing or severely injuring many of them. Loggerhead turtles have been protected for 30 years, but their numbers continue to decline.

Fortunately, there's a way to prevent this: It's called a Turtle Excluder Device - or TED - and it's an "escape hatch" that allows a sea turtle to wiggle out of the trawl net, relatively unharmed.

While some fisheries use TEDs, too many do not - why? Because they're not required to.