13: Endangered Sharks & Disappearing Moose

October 16, 2013 by kinfauns2 in Activism, Animal Welfare, Environment, Marine Conservation, Shark Conservation and tagged CITES, endangered sharks, endangered species, hammerhead sharks, manta rays, porbeagle sharks, President Obama, white tip sharks | Leave a comment

English: A timeline of the largest mass extinctions on Earth in the past 500 million years. Made using the numbers at Extinction event (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At my writing class today, a wonderful woman who knew that I write about sharks, said I ought to find out why the moose are disappearing, which led us both to remark on extraordinary fact that we are living through a mass extinction that, in day to day life, few people really talk about.

Here’s a gesture against forgetting:

Although CITES granted protection for hammerheads, manta rays, white tips and porbeagles, five countries (Japan, Iceland, Denmark, Yemen and Guyana) still refuse to recognize these treaties.

Please sign this petition to ask President Obama to apply sanctions against these countries.

Moose die-off: 100,000 ticks on just one moose, is Lyme disease culprit? (sott.net)
Moose Die-Off Alarms Scientists (nytimes.com)

Day 1 6/26/13 Love Makes a Family: Adopt a Shark

June 26, 2013 by kinfauns2 in Activism, Environment, Marine Conservation, Shark Charities, Shark Conservation and tagged hammerhead sharks, shark conservation, Shark Stewards, sharks | Leave a comment

http://sharkstewards.org

Shark Stewards offers symbolic adoptions of the sharks it tags and releases in the waters of the San Francisco Bay.

Today I became the proud surrogate parent of a hammerhead.

Here are some fun facts about this odd fish:

Hammerheads swim in large schools that sometimes exceed 100 sharks during the day, but at night are solitary hunters.
The oddly shaped hammerhead (known as a cephalofoil) is used for navigation and to detect and trap prey such as stingrays
Like humans, hammerheads have stereo vision, (each eye gets a slightly different view of an object), fantastic depth perception and better vision than other sharks.
In 2001, a captive female bonnethead (a type of hammerhead) gave birth to a shark without having had previous contact with a male. While “virgin birth” or parthenogenesis had been seen in birds, snakes and reptiles, until 2001, it had never been documented in sharks.