Sharks have remained relatively unchanged by evolution for 400 million years, but shark science has evolved significantly in just the past few decades. In 1987 when Discovery Channel's now-famous Shark Week series debuted, researchers had few means of studying the animals
beyond underwater cages and crude acoustic tracking devices.
Twenty-three years later, marine biologists studying elasmobranch (the
subclass of cartilaginous fishes that include sharks, skates and rays)
animals employ satellite tracking, genetic analysis and high-definition cameras to broaden their knowledge of shark biology and behavior.
This research is revealing, among other things, that even sharks like the great white are intelligent, curious animals
with cognitive abilities worth studying. "Many sharks have good
learning capacity, which is one way we measure intelligence," says
Samuel Gruber, a marine biologist at the University of Miami's
Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS), who
discovered in 1975 that lemon sharks could learn a classical
conditioning task 80 times faster than a cat or rabbit. "I was shocked
to find that they could learn so rapidly," he says. Gruber's National
Science Foundation–supported Bimini Biological Field Station in the
Bahamas, known as Sharklab, is now planning to start a doctoral research program on shark cognition.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Today's Sharks: Smart, Tagged, and in Short Supply [Slide Show]: Scientific American
Author: John Pavlus
