erome gobbled up two salmon steaks; Jackie was content with just one large mackerel.
Junior didn't show his face. Blackie, Spot, Scarface and Small swam away again
and again from even the juiciest cuts.
Is it feeding time at Sea Otters, Bat rays, or the Monterey Bay Habitats exhibit? The magic number seven provides the clues: seven of a kind, propelled and stabilized be seven fins, extracting oxygen with seven pairs of gills.
It's Thursday afternoon and Gil (aquarist Gilbert Van Dykhuizen) is trying to feed his charge of sevegill sharks. After 45 minutes he lets the leopard sharks have the leftovers. My help with clipboard and pencil (to keep track of who ate what and how much) is barely needed. The four large seven gill sharks didn't feel like eating. It had been a rough week for them. They were probably still recovering from their move to and from the quarantine area where they were treated for eye injuries.
A week earlier aquarists added about five dozen small jackmakerel to the exhibit. What a sight! These small fish schooled with the large sevengill sharks to evade the birds and hid behind the ocean sunfish to escape the giant seabass. In the end, the birds found all the jackmackerel, but in their zeal the cormorants damaged the sharks' corneas.
"Why don't the sharks eat the other fish? Why don't the sharks eat the birds?" are among the questions most often asked at this exhibit. Before becoming a guide and observing how the school of mackerel behaved and disappeared, many a guide would have asked the same question. Now we are much better prepared to answer.
Just using a name like "Jackie" for the only female or "Scarface" for the one with the abrasions on the dorsal and caudal fins does wonders for positive shark P.R.! Hopefully most visitors are completely converted when told that small fish "hang on" to large sharks for protection.
So let's keep up our efforts to counter the prevalent misinformation about the behavior of sharks. And let's hope that next Thursday it will be salmon steaks and mackerel for Blackie, Spot, Scarface and Small. They ought to be hungry by then!