Man catches shark bare-handed
An Australian man who caught a 4ft shark with his bare hands says he only did it because he was drunk.
Phillip Kerkhof, 41, says he only realised what an ‘idiot’ he’d been when sobered up the next day.
The bricklayer had been to the pub for “a fair few vodkas” before going fishing with friends from a jetty at Louth Bay, on the Eyre Peninsula.
When he spotted the 4ft bronze whaler shark, he climbed down a ladder and followed the shark as it swam around the jetty.
Then he stripped off and launched himself into the water.
“It was a bit of a fluke – I just got behind the shark and I went for a big grab,” Mr Kerkhof said. “I guess you could say that it was the vodka spurring me on.”
After a short wrestle, Mr Kerkhof pulled the shark on to the jetty, to the cheers of his watching mates. His only injury was a scratch where the shark bit a hole in his jeans.
Mr Kerkhof said after sobering up the next day he realised that he had been “a bit of an idiot”.
Natural World
Pimp My Crab!
Niche products get taken to silly extremes, with this Ectotherm Hermit Crab Bling Kit:
Make your hermit crab’s shell sparkle! The new Hermit Crab Bling Kit comes with plenty of bling to accessorize 2 shells. Decorating has never been so much fun! The non-toxic kit contains google eyes, rhinestones, glitter poms, assorted gemstones, and a glitter glue pen. Let your imagination run wild and give your hermit crab the snazziest shell on the block.
I can’t imagine the brainstorming session in the marketing department that came up with this one. What were they on?
Prehistoric Shark Caught on Camera
Click Picture for BBC Realplayer video
Still gallery of the frilled shark here.
The frilled shark, Chlamydoselachus anguineus, is a primitive shark species of the family Chlamydoselachidae in the order Hexanchiformes. The Southern African frilled shark is a proposed new species from the Southern African range.
These two species are very different from the other hexanchiform sharks, and it has been recently proposed that the two frilled sharks should be given their own order: Chlamydoselachiformes. Additional extinct types are known from fossil teeth; thought to be extinct itself, it was only discovered in Japanese waters in the 19th century.
This one was also found in Japanese waters by fishermen who alerted the staff at a marine park near Tokyo to the strange fish they’d found. The 1.6 metre long (the length of a 2-seater sofa) animal was transferred to the park but only lived for a short while in a tank. The park’s scientists speculate that it was unhealthy and disorientated to begin with.
There’s been a lot of geological actvity in this area very recently – there was an earthquake in the small islands south of Tokyo in mid-January – so could normally deep-water-dwelling sharks have been stunned by seismic waves moving through water? Could any reader with actual biological and/or geological expertise say if that’s a potential explanation?
Friday Lifeform Blogging
I know I should be blogging about more important things, like the horrible Ipswich murders, or cash for peerages or Iraq or the fact that Palestine is going to blow, but this may just be the coolest thing ever.
Imortant as those things are they’re just ephemeral human concerns compared to this:
Fish dance on sulphur cauldrons
By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News, San FranciscoThese fish thrive in conditions that would kill most other fish.
Scientists have witnessed the extreme lifestyle of tonguefish that like to skip across pools of molten sulphur.
The animals – a type of flatfish – were filmed on three expeditions to undersea volcanoes in the western Pacific.
Huge numbers were seen to congregate around the sulphur ponds which well up from beneath the seafloor.
Researchers from the University of Victoria, Canada, are trying to work out how the creatures survive in such a hostile environment.
“There are a lot of toxic heavy metals coming out of these active volcanoes,” explained Dr John Dower, a fisheries oceanographer.
“As a visual spectacle, it’s like something from another planet Dr Alex Rogers, ZSL”
“The water is very warm, and it can be very acidic, the pH can be as low as two like sulphuric acid,” he told BBC News.”And yet here we’ve got a group that has not previously been seen in this type of environment and they’re doing very well – they’re actually thriving.”
The fish have been studied with remotely operated submersibles, including the Jason II vehicle this year.
Noaa’s arc
The area of interest is the Mariana Arc, a 1,200km chain of volcanic seamounts and islands between Guam and Japan.
It hosts a number of hydrothermal vents – rock systems that draw water through cracks in the seafloor, heat it to temperatures which can be well above 100C, load it with dissolved metals and other chemicals, and then eject the hot fluid back into the ocean.
This really is the most astonishing thing. It makes the possibility of life elsewhere in our solar sytem so much more likely – and these incredible little fish are not the only gobsmackingly interesting vent fauna they’ve found in the Marianas.
Which reminds me, I must go and feed our neighbour’s goldfish. She’s in Vienna for Christmas and I’m playing nanny to a couple of shubunkins and a small corydoras catfish. It may well pay longterm to be to nice to our finny friends. If reports are correct, they’re likely to inherit the planet.
Read more: Science, Marine Biology, Vent fauna
A Happy Solstice To One and All
Its the longest day of the year and it’s all downhill from here. It may be raining like buggery, but try to enjoy the day. I’m going to sit inside, watch the garden soak up the rain and drink tea.
Just at the moment I’m reading Richard Fortey’s A Hidden Landscape: A Journey into The Geological Past, which has given me a new respect for whatever mechanism it was that was used to move these bluestone behemoths from Wales to Wiltshire. Fortey is the most lyrical and poetic of science writers, and I’m enjoying the book so much I’m trying not to read it too fast, because then it’ll be over.
I hate it when that happens.