Last fall, Science Today’s Barbara Tannenbaum caught up with Dave Ebert and his grad student, Paul Clerkin, as they brought deep-sea shark specimens from the Indian Ocean to their new home in the Ichthyology collection here at the Academy.

Tannebaum’s article, “Fantastic Voyage,” captured their work expanding the Academy’s collections, and Ebert, an Academy research associate and director of the Pacific Shark Research Center in Moss Landing, has been tirelessly working ever since. We caught up with him by phone this week to hear the latest.

Earlier this year, Ebert traveled to Mauritius, east of Madagascar, searching for new and unknown shark species in the Indian Ocean. Ebert also attended a workshop put on by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, or FAO.

“We’re working on an identification catalog for sharks in that area to understand what’s being caught there,” Ebert explains.

In May, Ebert was part of a research cruise off of New Zealand, seeking more undiscovered sharks. His work was captured on film by the BBC for a segment that will air in early 2015. They hope to film him more on other expeditions in the coming year, too. “They’re doing something a little different,” Ebert says. “Kind of a day in the life of a researcher. They send us to a couple of different places to do some field surveys that will likely result in finding new or lesser known species.”

Ebert is pleased with the upcoming documentary because he’s hoping it will bring public awareness to little known shark species. “Everyone knows the white sharks and hammerheads, the charismatic species. These high profile sharks get a lot of attention and protection. But there are a lot of other species out there that for whatever reason are not known. Some of these have much higher conservation needs.”

He mentions the honeycomb cat shark (Holohalaelurus favus) off east Africa. The species was very abundant in the 1950s and 1960s, but hasn’t been seen for 40 years. “The shark didn’t even have a formal scientific name until 2006,” Ebert says. “We should know more about sharks like these and look out for them in fishery by-catch.”

When Ebert isn’t traveling, he works tirelessly on naming and describing these unknown and recently discovered shark species. The sharks he and Clerkin discovered were shipped here to the Academy for further examination. They will also find a permanent residence in our collections. “Several specimens just arrived from Taiwan and several more are due from South Africa this week,” he says.

Speaking of South Africa, Ebert will be a keynote speaker at next year’s Sharks International Conference in Durban, South Africa. The event occurs once every four years, and Ebert will be presenting on the biodiversity and conservation of sharks and rays, mostly African species.

And for true shark fans out there, Ebert is lead author on a new guidebook, Sharks of the World, due out next week.

Ebert is a busy scientist with much work ahead in discovering, describing and protecting sharks. Stay tuned for more updates on his important work.

Is it just Shark Week, or did thresher sharks get smarter?

Divers off the coast of Cebu, an island in the Philippines, called Simon Oliver when they noticed sharks exhibiting some strange behavior.

Oliver, an expert on these sharks since he began studying them in 2005, dropped everything to see what all the fuss was about. Apparently they were using their tails to hunt—strange behavior because it was thought that only smart mammals like dolphins and whales practiced tactical use of the tail fin.

Equipped with underwater camera equipment, the Thresher Shark Research and Conservation Project set out to film the new shark activity. They captured footage of 25 hunting events, then went back to the lab to analyze the videos.

The researchers found that the sharks hunt schooling sardines using a four-step procedure. This way, instead of collecting just one fish in their mouth per hunting event, they first stun the fish to eat an average of 3.5 sardines.

Thresher sharks’ tails comprise about 50% of their total length, which is particularly impressive for the 20-foot, 1,000-pound individuals. A sardine lucky enough to survive its initial fear would witness an incredible “tail-slap,” only to die or become stunned shortly after.

First the shark prepares. This preparatory lunge lasts longer than the other three phases, allowing the shark to perform some advanced physics calculations in order to determine tail velocity needed based on mass… Just kidding, they aren’t that smart! The shark then strikes, recovers briefly, and collects its prey.

“This extraordinary story highlights the diversity of shark hunting strategies in an ocean where top predators are forced to adapt to the complex evasion behaviors of their ever declining prey,” said Oliver.

These sharks had been studied previously, but Oliver thinks that lack of food has caused the sharks to hunt near the surface, finally giving humans a glimpse of their unique hunting techniques.

The footage is pretty incredible, and you can check it out here!

Alyssa Keimach is an astronomy and astrophysics student at the University of Michigan and interns for the Morrison Planetarium.

About a year ago, I heard Academy researchers talk about the same goal, identifying all life as quickly (and thoroughly) as possible, starting in pockets around the world where our research is and has been strong—Madagascar, the Coral Triangle, Gaoligongshan, and of course, California.

Why the need? Why the desire to accomplish this? I emailed Quentin Wheeler, the meeting organizer, who told me “With the biodiversity crisis, the need to advance taxonomy and species discovery has never been more urgent.” The Academy’s Stan Blum, who was part of the meeting, told me:

Human actions are profoundly changing our planet.  Knowing what exists and where will help us understand the resources we have at our disposal, and what we are at risk of losing. Right now we are like rich kids that haven’t learned to manage the family fortune. From medicine, to agriculture, to renewable energy, our reliance on the living portion of our natural heritage—biodiversity— is profound.

This project will include scientists from institutions around the world. Working together, in an open research format, is essential, says Blum:

This science is a global enterprise.  Every country has an interest in knowing how its own ecosystems work, and collectively we all have an interest in knowing life on Earth.

According to Wheeler, it won’t just be scientists. We can all get involved:

We spent a fair amount of time talking about citizen science and there are lots of exciting ideas for expanding involvement.  What I find especially exciting about cyber-enabled taxonomy or cybertaxonomy—the fusion of traditional taxonomic goals with cyber tools—is the coming democratization of taxonomy.  While only a privileged few in the past could access the rare literature and type- and rare-specimens in order to conduct taxonomy at high levels of excellence, all those resources are being digitized and soon citizen scientists will be able to take their work as far as their passion and talents permit.

(For more information on cybertaxonomy and to find out about the organization behind this proposal, check out the International Institution for Species Exploration website.)

I asked Blum if the goal was realistic, “to identify and describe all the world’s 10 million species in the next 50 years.”

Yes, with a few caveats.  This initiative doesn’t have a finite goal like landing on the moon; it doesn’t have the simple demonstration of achievement symbolized by planting a flag. Nevertheless, the value in going to the moon was not planting the flag.  The value was in what came out of getting there. We may never know ALL the species there are, but before we lose traction worrying about how we’ll know when we’re done, we really need to understand that we’re at the other end of the process with some very important and large groups of organisms.  Our ignorance is still profound.  It is very possible to achieve the discovery rate we need to meet the 50-year goal.

How much will it cost? How will it get funded? Wheeler told us that there will be a final report in March 2011, but a first report is expected earlier next year. This is a subject our institution is very passionate about. In fact, it’s in our mission statement: to explore, explain and protect the natural world. All of it. So stay tuned.

Creative Commons image by treegrow/flickr

Two research articles published online yesterday in Nature publications follow mice research in two behavioral directions—one in father-child bonding and one on exhibiting pain—that may help humans in the future.

Neuroscientists in Calgary found that male mice that were allowed to nuzzle with their infant offspring were able to recognize those offspring as adults. According to Science Now, “That recognition correlates with new neuron growth in dad’s brain, the team reports online today in Nature Neuroscience. When Mak and Weiss injected a marker that tags newly formed neurons into the fathers just after their pups were born, they found up to 40% more new neurons in… mice that had nuzzled their pups.

“The results suggest that in mice, and perhaps in humans, young babies and dads bond biologically in ways that can last a lifetime.”

Other scientists in Canada studied facial expressions in mice, looking for signs of pain. They discovered that when subjected to moderate pain stimuli, mice showed discomfort through facial expressions in the same way humans do. (Watch Science in Action’s story about human facial expressions here.)

Their study, published online May 9 in the journal Nature Methods, also details the development of a Mouse Grimace Scale that could inform better treatments for humans and improve conditions for lab animals.

Continuing experiments in the lab will investigate whether the scale works equally well in other species, whether drugs given to mice after surgical procedures work well at their commonly prescribed doses, and whether mice can respond to the facial pain cues of other mice.

Creative Commons image by George Shuklin