Students Study Florida's Sharks

February 26, 2007

Release from: Georgia Tasker
Miami Herald (Florida)

Frantically slapping its tail, the gray-and-white sharpnose shark is a muscled dynamo, all surprised fury, but many hands finally drape its round black eyes and sleek head in a towel to ease its stress.

Stephanie Coronado takes scissors from Alix Braun and tries to remove a bit of dorsal fin for DNA sampling. The fin is tougher than she expects, so she switches angles and snips a small triangle, dropping it into a glass vial. Then, pushing a wooden-handled biopsy punch into the shark's back just below the dorsal, she removes a piece of skin the size of her little fingernail to test for mercury levels. Into the wound, she inserts a plastic ID tag that latches into the shark's cartilaginous spine. The shark doesn't flinch.

Out here on clear, silky Florida Bay and under the warm winter sun, marine-biology students from the MAST Academy, Palmer Trinity School and the University of Miami are coming face to face with the oceans' top predators and building a vital database for scientists. During this six-hour excursion they will catch another 10 Atlantic sharpnose sharks -- one more than three feet long. They soon become so adept that the sharks, hauled to the dive boat's makeshift gurney, are out of the water only three to four minutes.

After Coronado finishes, Erica Maxwell records tag numbers: ''PL,'' she calls back (precaudal length), ''16.5 inches''; TL, total length, 21.5 inches. Then she records sex. Rolling the shark over, the students note the short pair of claspers on its white underbelly. It's a juvenile male, probably less than 2 years old.

''Great job,'' shouts Neil Hammerschlag, marine biology doctoral student at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. ``That was just right.''

The students are building an inventory of the sharks in Florida waters. They record the latitude and longitude where each animal is found and test the water quality every hour.

Hammerschlag, 27, originated the South Florida Student Shark Program (SFSSP) in 2006. He envisioned high school marine-biology students not only taking inventory but also acting as shark ambassadors to spread the word about the animals' endangered status.

Now that vision has become multifaceted and scientifically important not just for high school and university students but also for ocean researchers.

Of course, some days there are no sharks.

Even then, students record the water's pH, salinity and dissolved oxygen levels and monitor the weather, hoping to correlate these factors with the animals' absence or presence.

Other days, something quite remarkable happens.

''Big fish!'' guide Jon Milchman yells. ``Tiger shark!''

Baited with fresh-caught ladyfish, Milchman's line is taut, its bobber disappears. Captain Rich Beliveau starts the engines of the boat belonging to the Boy Scouts of America Sea Base in Islamorada and slowly follows the enormous, rarely seen creature for almost an hour as it fights the hook.

Milchman estimates the shark weighs 300 to 350 pounds and stretches to 12 or 13 feet.

Hooked in the side of its mouth, the shark stays ahead of the boat for half an hour, too far off the bow to be clearly visible. Nearby is a large sea turtle, most likely the tiger's prey.

When the shark finally surfaces, the students and teachers gasp.

''It's good to know an animal like this still exists out here,'' says Mark Tohulka, a MAST science teacher.

Fighting to pull in the shark, Milchman hands the fishing pole to graduate student Anthony Di Silvestro and reaches for the line. The dive ladder he grabs gives way, and Milchman topples in, then frenetically hauls himself out.

Lying prone on the dive platform, Hammerschlag tries again and again to rope the lashing tail. Finally, the shark swims under the boat and snaps the fishing line on the propeller.

It gets away, but a cheer goes up anyway.

There are other successes:

Ryan Pham, a MAST junior, launches a bottom-crawling robot he and two other students made from scratch. Their inspiration was a similar project by students from South Broward High School, a marine magnet school.

''We had a book for an idea about how to make it, but it was trial and error,'' Pham says. ``We used leftover parts.''

This is the maiden voyage for the battery-powered device, dubbed Pequod after the ship in Moby Dick.

Housing a video camera with a live link to a TV screen onboard, Pequod is dangled by rope to the bay bottom, and off it goes, clambering over the swaying, thin-leafed turtle grass. It might be a tiny Mars Rover so well does it work.

Oddly, Pham is one of the few students on the shark mission who isn't aiming for an environmental career. ''I want to be a sports agent,'' he says.

Andres Salazar, a MAST junior, wants to be a biologist. Stephanie Coronado is thinking of zoology. Erica Maxwell, also from MAST, is considering ''aquatic environmental science,'' which focuses more on the chemistry of oceans than the biology. MAST senior Robert Jackson is trying to decide between environmental law and genetics.

From Palmer Trinity, Caitlin Pomerance, a 17-year-old senior who helps cut chum and opens a grunt's mouth to examine the orange tongue, has the University of Miami as one of her college choices because of Hammerschlag's program.

SFSSP takes students into Biscayne National Park to look at sharks and their prey, the fishes found among the mangroves.

''It's the first time someone is checking out scientifically what we are seeing,'' says Elsa Alvear, park resource manager. ``It's going to give us some concrete evidence that lack of fresh water has greatly impacted the fish species we see.''

Says Lacey Hoover, whose late father helped establish Biscayne National Park through the Herbert W. Hoover Foundation (which she now chairs): ``This is providing kids with an opportunity they'd never have anywhere else in the world. Whether they go on to become scientists or not, they will understand this environment and how special and important it is.''

When Hammerschlag was working on his master's degree at Nova Southeastern University's Oceanographic Institute, South Broward High notified the university that it had students seeking internships or willing to help with master's degree data.

Hammerschlag responded, and several South Broward marine studies students helped with his research on great white sharks. He and South Broward teacher Ted Davis then organized a trip to South Africa so the kids could gather their own data.