Course's work

The Sharklab celebrated Easter Friday by tracking juvenile lemon sharks in the day and joining the invading hordes of American holiday makers on the north island for night one of Junkanoo and excessive dancing in the streets and dock-side pubs.

We needed a mildly wild night out after hosting a university elasmobranch course for five days. Kicked out of the lab for its duration, we were moved to an apartment down the road. We somewhat grudgingly took this minor inconvenience and made the absolute most of it. The volunteers often went out to help with their seatrips in whatever capacity we were needed - boat drivers, bait cutters and throwers, photographers. I helped out with baiting in 18 blacktips, and escorting the students down a mangrove-lined channel so they could hand feed juv lemons.





The second last night, I scored a dinner invitation that the others are still bitter over. Walking back to the apartment, a golf car pulled up and offered me a ride home - offering and accepting rides from complete strangers is normal and expected in Bimini. When I saw the driver and her three passengers had pink drinks in fish covered glasses, I knew it would be a crazy ride back. Stopping next door to where we were staying, the middle aged women invited me in for a dinner of steak, lobster, fresh wahoo, veggies and rum punch. The lobster or rum punch wasn't their cause of envy. It was the steak. Collectively, we haven't had steak in decades. I paid dearly for my dinner engagement the next morning.

Getting up hungover at 6:50 am to be at the lab at 7:10 am to set a vertical longline in the Gulf Stream on four foot rolling seas was the opposite of fun. The morning after a full moon has its perks though. Still stumbling and reeking of rum punch, I enjoyed these vistas.







Hauled up by hand, the 1800 feet of the vertical long line netted us three! tiger sharks.



The largest was 3.28 meters! They tied him alongside the boat so we could get in and snorkel with him.





I'm home in less than three weeks. Eeekk. It's going to be difficult to leave, but I am also eagerly anticipating my impending uni graduation and northern B.C. summer.

So far

The breakfast table sounds like a United Nations BBQ with a disproportionate number of English speakers. Eleven of the 14 of us currently at the lab are native English speakers with Swiss, Venezuelan and Quebecois volunteers making up the difference. The Venezuelan and Quebecois women converse comfortably in Spanish.

I have lived in shared housing throughout university and hosteled all over the world, but this is communal living at its extreme. We are literally in each other's bathing suits with up to four people sharing a single sex room, all 14 sharing two bathrooms and meal times resembling musical chairs with a violent twist as everyone clambers for an open seat at the table with too few chairs for the number of people in the mess hall. It's like summer camp with a purpose.

BBFS' Principal Investigator and doctoral student Kristine Stump is examining the effects of nursery habitat loss on juvenile lemon sharks around North and South Bimini Islands in the Bahamas.

A fine location, without question, but Stump's research is heavily tied to a foreign invader on North Bimini, Bimini Bay Resort. Scaled back since its inception, great tracts of mangrove-fringed habitat for the juvenile lemon sharks has still been bulldozed to make way for the resort's condos and estate homes.

All of Stump's research questions focus on changes the resort may have induced in areas such as abundance, first year mortality, prey assemblages, yearly growth, multi-year survivalship, habitat use and home range.

As her minions, the volunteers are responsible for various aspects of her field data collection. I’ve only had a limited sampling of what that might be, having just completed a week of classes and orientation.

Some of it was a refresher, like radio usage, GPS and map reading. The rest was completely new.

We learnt about long lining, a surveying method to gauge how the various shark populations in the area are doing; boat driving, which is extremely terrifying; knots, which included phrases like “the rabbit crosses the road” from Quebecois Valerie and “the tree hangs himself on the rabbit” from dyslexic Americans; and shark handling, which involved eight virgin shark handlers anxiously waiting for their turn with the juvenile lemon and nurse sharks.

Days off are once a week. So far I’ve mooched around the North Island, snuck into both resorts for swims and fresh water showers and popped into the cute, expensively stocked shops.