Bimini: Round 2

I couldn't stay away. The two months I spent at the Shark Lab in September and October of last year were so incredible that I have to go back. Luckily, they'll have me. For the month of June, I'll be back at the lab in bimini for PIT.

PIT (Passive Integrated Transponder) is the annual tagging program the lab runs, where for 3 weeks, juvenile lemon sharks are caught, tagged and released. (For more info on the program, click here.) Gillnets are set overnight for 12 hour periods (a full tidal cycle), and we'll sit out in the lagoon all night catching the sharks and working them up (tagging, measuring, weighing, etc.). Why? Good question. Here's an abridged version of the answer on the Shark Lab's website...

What it came down to for us was to assume that we had no immigration or emigration in the lagoon/nursery where we were studying young lemon sharks. We also assumed no fishing--only natural mortality. Then we chose a sure sampling procedure: We caught and tagged every last lemon shark in the nursery.

We fish the same stations for six nights: The first night we get maybe 65 sharks; the next perhaps 30 and then after a few days maybe 1 or 2 or none. Why? We have caught them all and they are in our big pen. It’s quite a sight to see 100 little lemon sharks all schooling together in the pen. Once we are satisfied that we have all the sharks in that particular nursery area we go on to the next one.

Then we do it all over again in an adjacent location. We find only little overlap between the two nursery grounds as the situation repeats itself: 60 the first night; 30 the second and 2 or 3 the third and so on. Perhaps only 1 or 2 are recaptured from the nights before.

This summer, I will be heading back to Bimini for PIT. There will be mosquitoes, sandflies, extreme heat, sleep deprivation, and hours spent hunched over in the blazing sun fixing gillnets, but then there will also be opportunities for pictures like this:


Last time, I wasn't really able to keep up the blog while I was there because of getting only 30 minutes of internet time a week on one computer on a dial-up connection. This time it will be even worse because there just won't physically be time. So instead, what I'm going to do is post pictures and stories about when I was there before, and I'll continue that up until the point I leave for Bimini at the end of May. When I get back, I'll let you know how it went. Stay tuned...