Apols for being quiet for some time, but these past few months have been quite hectic and full of new discoveries in the world of the nursehound – a largish and rather elusive shark living in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean which we are studying with the help of scuba divers.
Divers that see this shark’s eggs – which are large, white and are fastened on seafans and sponges – are reporting their numbers and location to us, and we pool this info to map some of this sharks’ breeding sites around Italy.
Thanks to our citizen scientists – divers – we have identified several breeding grounds, concentrated in isolated hotspots in most Italian coastal regions. An average of 1-2 egg-cases were reported per dive site, while numbers and locations increase approaching theGulf of Naples and surrounding archipelagos. This is critical information for this little-known species, which IUCN believes may qualify for Vulnerable status in the near future.
Divers also helped us identify a major breeding ground: the Santa Croce Bank, a protected area within the Gulf of Naples, where we could find large numbers (exceeding 100+) of egg-cases, containing embryos at all stages of development. Live specimen are also regularly seen on the same dive site, mostly resting in crevices.
Once we discovered this amazing dive site – which even without such an abundance of eggs is in its own right one of the most fantatic dive sites in the whole Mediterranean! – we organized a preliminary study, which we’ll tell you about in the next post. Stay tuned!