#elasmobranchs

they're usually drawn based on this specimen:

or sometimes this one if you're nasty:

both of these are super duper dead!

Alive goblin sharks are white in colour and don't have their jaws popped out, which is something they CAN do but not something they do all the time. Here are some examples of live ones! They do still look freaky, but they don't look like an explosively decompressed corpse:

they're kind of just normal sharks!

I'm going to try what I did last year again, so it's time for a new shark with shark facts for every day of Shark Week! Best week of the year :)

Today, it's LEMON SHARKS!

(Negaprion brevirostris)

Lemon sharks are really cool because they're recently learning a lot more about their social behavior! We don't often hear about sharks as social animals, but in the case of lemon sharks, group behavior is very common. Lemon sharks actively *prefer* to be social rather than being alone, see THIS cool behavioral experiment by Guttridge et. al. for more information. They often aggregate in groups based on being a similar size to the other sharks they choose to hang out with!

Atlantic torpedo | Torpedo nobiliana

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Stingray feeding pits (ignore the holes in the centre, that's from GPS equipment).

The stingrays would come to Leeke's Estuary at high tide to feed. To hunt any sediment-dwelling organisms, the stingrays would dig into the sand, displacing a large amount of sediment in the process. This left large distinct holes across the estuary's sediment.

This impacts the ecosystem in a few interesting ways, such as the recolonization of pits by various organisms (VanBlaricom 1982).

More information:

VanBlaricom GR 1982 ‘Experimental Analyses of Structural Regulation in a Marine Sand Community Exposed to Oceanic Swell’ Ecological monographs vol. 52 no. 3 pp. 295-302.

O’shea OR, Thums, M, Keulen, MV, Meekan, M 2012, ‘Bioturbation by stingrays at Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia’, Marine and freshwater research, vol. 63, no. 3, p. 195.

12/09/23 - Myliobatiformes sp.