Word: klimley
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Dates: during 1997-1997
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...observing sharks repeatedly over the years, Klimley was able to solve the long-standing mystery of why hammerheads gather in schools. It's clearly not for protection, since nothing preys on what Klimley calls "the big tough guys of the ocean." It turns out that they gather, at least in part, for an elaborate mating ritual, in which large, dominant females fight their way to the center of the school. The males know which females are most desirable by their position in the pack...
...Klimley also discovered what may be the reason the hammerheads school year after year at an undersea mountain known as Espiritu Santo, 15 miles east of the Baja Peninsula. The metal-rich seamount, he found, has a particularly strong magnetic field. So do bands of ancient congealed lava that radiate from the seamount like spokes from a wheel. The hammerheads, he believes, can detect this magnetism and use it for navigation. The seamount is essentially a depot: the hammerheads gather there before going out to their feeding grounds...
...here, in the early 1980s, that Klimley first saw an attack by a great white, on a 400-lb. elephant seal. The shark rose almost entirely out of the water, with the massive seal in its jaws. "It was stunning," he recalls. "The shark ambushed the seal, then came back several times to take three or four bites out of it. I had never seen anything like it." Since then Klimley has analyzed more than 130 videotaped white-shark attacks. All seem to follow a pattern. The powerful first bite usually takes place underwater, and the first sign...
...portraying great whites as mindless eating machines. Ken Goldman, a shark researcher from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, in Gloucester Point, has been studying great whites in the Farallons for the past seven years. Says he: "Their attacks are very controlled, as is their feeding behavior." Klimley agrees: "The white shark is a skillful and stealthy predator that eats with both ritual and purpose...
While marine biologists like Klimley and Holland are trying to unravel the mysteries of sharks' behavior and their role in the marine food chain, immunologists and physiologists are attempting to understand the animals' biochemistry. The idea that sharks can actually be beneficial to human health was established decades ago: vitamin A came primarily from shark-liver oil until 1947, when it was first synthesized in the laboratory. The unctuous liquid is also, for reasons still unknown, highly effective in shrinking human hemorrhoids...