Featured Image Credit: Twitter/@Shark_Toothday
By: Sarah Sharkey
When you think about sharks, you probably do not think cute and cuddly sea creatures roaming around the seas with their best friends. Recent research may change all of this.
Researchers Culum Brown and Jo Day studied the social interactions of a common Southern Australian shark, the Port Jackson shark. These are small sharks that migrate from Jervis Bay in New South Wales, Australia to Tasmania every year. The researchers tagged the sharks during the breeding season and tracked them throughout 2012-2013.
These tags allowed researchers to see which sharks were hanging around each other and for how long. By using social network analysis of this data, they made some very interesting discoveries. The data showed that individuals chose to spend their time with the same individuals.
Culum Brown had this to say about the phenomena “One of the exciting things about this research is that we found the large aggregations that these sharks form in the breeding season is not a random collection of individuals. These sharks prefer to hang out with other individuals who are similar to them.”
That really is exciting! It means that sharks are consciously choosing to associate themselves with certain other individuals, which is basically what we all do when we make friends.
The hope is that this discovery, in conjunction with a study from last year about sharks having personalities, will help to change the public perception towards sharks.
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