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CoCAPTAINS

CoCAPTAINS

Sun rays beamed down on junior Julia Sousa Lima Blas’s face, while she used her strength to reel in heavy hooks and bait, in hopes of finding a shark attached.

“Reeling in the line was a lot harder than I thought. It was pretty heavy, because of the 40-pound weight attached,” Blas said.

On a clear skied day on Oct. 11, the research boat was packed, full of students who anxiously peered at the ocean, wanting to distinguish a shark that they had recently learned about in class.

“I initially wanted to go on the trip to have a hands-on experience with what we were learning in class,” said senior Nina Castro Alves.

However, reeling in the shark was only a small part of the work that took place on this shark tagging trip. Once the University of Miami’s research team managed to pull the shark up onto the floating platform, there was a long to-do list that had to be completed as quickly as possible in order to get the shark back into its habitat as efficiently as possible.

Each student was assigned a task, either keeping the shark wet with a hose, tagging it, measuring it, or cutting a skin sample from its fin.

“Once we caught the shark my job was to attach the tag to its dorsal fin, and the professionals taught me how to do it pretty quickly,” said senior Marcelo Gaitan-Wolfe.

The research collected from the sharks helped conserve and better understand the species. Sharks face lots of damaging factors that have downsized their population over the years, such as habitat loss and overall human exploitation of the oceans for commercial purposes. Mark Tohulka continues to take his students on these trips for them to help save what they spend so much time studying.

“Shark researchers get all kinds of information on these trips, such as data that helps to discourage people from hunting sharks and numbers to help track the sharks population size to see if there are specific conditions in the area that might contribute to population decline,” Tohulka said.

Spot That

Species

HAVING A BLAST, senior

Noah Reiter learns a lot about sharks while participating on the field trip. He got to work on a nine-foot shark on the trip. “It was an unreal feeling to see the big sharks up close. It made me realize their importance,” Reiter said. Photo by University of Miami

A NEW WAY TO LEARN, sophomore Jenna Perez finds it easier to appreciate the sharks through such a hands-on experience. Through interacting with the sharks, she felt even more motivated to learn about them. “I feel like this trip taught me way more than I would have ever learned in a classroom,” Perez said. Photo by University of Miami

ON THE BOAT, there are a number of small jobs and things to be checked off the to-do list. “I had a lot of jobs, but my favorite one was when I had to get a skin sample from the sharks’ dorsal fin,” senior Johanna Ernsberger said. The sample was taken to get DNA to compare relationships. Photo by University of Miami

Students applied what they learned in class to the field trip.

Once the sharks were reeled in close enough to the surface, students on board shouted out the names of species of sharks, trying to correctly categorize the animal that was making its way onto the boat. “Once I saw the yellow markings on the first shark we reeled in, I knew it was a lemon shark,” senior Marcelo Gaitan Wolfe said. Aside from working directly on the sharks, other data was recorded.“The refractometer told us the salinity of the water; we put a sample of water in the sunlight, and depending on how the light reflected, we could measure the ocean’s salinity,” junior Benjamin Berger said. This helped the researchers make sure the environment was perfect for the sharks. Photos by University of Miami

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