BIMINI SHARKLAB ANNUAL

NEWSLETTER 2015
This newsletter includes...
Final figures of the year
Volunteers, visitors, and shark stats including our
captures throughout 2015, from 10 species!
Travels & Representation
From staff movements, to publications and international conferences, weve been reaching out further
than before.
PI Profiles
With three new Principal Investigators this year,
you can read a brief on what theyre all studying at
the Sharklab for the next three years.
What next?
The future is looking busy, as ever! Read on to find
out about more of the research we will be participating in.

Images by Angelo Villagomez, Jack Massuger, and Charlotte

Sams. Text by Charlotte Sams and Tristan Guttridge.

Life at the Sharklab is always a whirlwind of activity,

and 2015 has been no different, from tracking great
hammerhead sharks to presenting lemon shark
personality results in Australiaour research continues to push boundaries and make waves.

2015 has been a very special year - our 25th
anniversary! To celebrate such a milestone Doc
(our founder) worked closely with Jeremey Stafford-Deitsch (writer), Michael and Peter Scholl of
Save Our Seas to bring us Shark Doc, Shark lab,
a book that describes Docs early life and the origins of the Sharklab, including adventurous stories
and beautiful imagery. Available to purchase in the
New Year the books proceeds will be used to help
us build a new green, sustainable facility so that the
Sharklab can live on! Keep an eye out on our social
media pages for the upcoming release.

In other news this year, weve had a lot of
firsts for our research, towards the beginning we
had our first ever active tracking of a Great Hammerhead shark, followed by our first ever Caribbean reef shark and Southern stingray tagged with 10
yr acoustic tracking devices, and of course our 21st
year of our famous PIT project! Read on to discover more about Bimini Sharklab in 2015.

2015 annual shark stats:

___________________________________________

Total captures:

Lemon Shark (N. brevirostris)

Nurse Shark (G. cirratum)

Tiger Shark (G. cuvier)

Southern Stingray (D. americana)
Blacktip Shark (C. limbatus)

Caribbean Reef Shark (C. perezi)
Blacknose Shark (C. acronotus)
Great Hammerhead Shark (S. mokarran)
Bull Shark (C. leucas)
Atlantoc Sharpnose Shark (R. terranovae)

287
118
54
52
17
11
10
9
8
1

Publications & conference attendance:

6 papers accepted in peer reviewed journals 4 papers

are currently in review.
Our team presented at 5 international conferences
this year including FSBI Elasmobranch Symposium, American Elasmobranch Society, Behaviour in
Australia and GCFI68 for Caribbean Shark and Ray
Symposium. Our Founder Dr. Samuel Gruber was
the Keynote speaker at European Elasmobranch Association meeting in Portugal.

Grant Total of captures = 568 elasmobranchs!

Longest: 346cm Tiger Shark
Smallest: 44.7 Nurse Shark

Media:

9 film crews, from England, France, Canada, and

America.
We were also featured globally across programmes,
including the BBCs Shark series, Discoverys Shark
Week, and -+5m, a documentary piece shown at the
Paris COP21 summit.

Outreach:

50 volunteers from England, Canada, Germany, Brazil,

Canada & USA
98 students across 6 different University courses hosted over the year
Led public tours to over 750 visiting tourists.
We also assisted Dr Grant with his vet clinic on three
occasions this year, hosting South Biminis clinic at the
Sharklab, and helping out with North Bimini.
3 Sharklab staff hosted a stand at Tortuga festival once
again, and shortly after were happy to welcome Chris
Stacey (founder) and his friends to the Sharklab, introducing them to our local Caribbean Reef sharks!

In February we welcomed a special visitor with

the name of Sir Richard Branson (aka Virgin
Founder), who visited the Sharklab to say hello whilst on a trip with PEW Charitable Trusts,
to discuss shark protection in the Caribbean.
Following from their meeting, 6 months later two new shark sanctuaries will be established
by Dutch Government and the Island Governments of Bonaire and Saba, good news for sharks!

PI profiles

Flicie Dhellemmes

Working with our signature species, the lemon shark, Flicie is

learning more about shark personalities, by exploring whether
such individual variation has consequences for their survival. Juvenile lemon sharks are tested in
captive behavioural experiments
and tracked in the wild to examine
their exploratory tendencies.

Maurits van Zinnicq Bergmann

Matt Smukall

How do sharks and rays use the

various habitats in Bimini? Are
there hotspots or corridors of high
use? Are these predictable in time
and space? Through using an extensive array of stationary acoustic
receivers and tagging species from
hammerheads to blacktips and
stingrays, Maurits over the next
three years will find out!

Bimini has tiger sharks from newborns to huge pregnant females, but
what are they doing in our waters;
nursery ground, pupping area, migratory stop-off? Are our longline
captures of sharks in Biminis waters
a good representation of shark populations? Matt will expand longline
sampling into deep-water, focusing
on the elusive tiger shark.

Continuing Science:
As the Sharklab turned 25, our lemon shark tagging program PIT turned 21! This was another fantastic year,
not only because of the lack of mosquitoes, but the capture and processing of 196 individual lemon sharks,
adding to our ever expanding lemon shark family tree. Interestingly, this was an increase from last years total,
and a sign that Biminis lemon shark population is still going strong! Speaking of lemon sharks...watch out
for former Lab manager Jill Brooks publication next year that extends the minimum age of lemon sharks to a
WHOPPING 37 years oldthanks to our long term genetic program!

Year of the Hammerhead?

The start of the year saw us continue our exciting
collaboration with William Winram (The Watermen Project) tagging, via free-diving new females with external acoustic devices. LASERS and
sharks: we introduced a laser-photogrammetry
setup to obtain estimates of Biminis most elusive
great hammerheads. Furthermore, we completed
the first live active tracking of a great hammerhead
shark. In February a female (~3.1m) sponsored by
Epic Diving was tagged with an acoustic transmitter, and successfully tracked by our team for
7 hours, staying close to Bimini and dropping to
~100ft. Lastly but most importantly, we received
word (or detections) from several hammerheads
that had been recorded on tracking receivers in
the USA: one in Charleston and another Delray,
Florida--giving us CRITICAL data and insight on
their international movements!

Receiving shark data...

Our newly established acoustic receiver array
(used to track the movements of sharks and rays)
is beginning to build a pretty serious cult following! They are downloaded twice a year and its
hilarious, and basically extremely GEEKY to see
how excited everyone becomes, with good reason! This year we detected bull sharks from Cape
Eleuthera, bluefin tuna from Canada, tiger sharks
from Grand Bahamas, and within the detection
mix lemon sharks and hammerheads tagged in
previous years returned to Bimini after holidaying
in the USA !

Staff updates & turnarounds

2015 held a mammoth turnover bringing in fresh energies to the staff team. It goes without saying that each
individual has contributed a great deal towards the lab,
and old faces will always be missed, but their departures
create space for new characters and ideas. Towards the
beginning of the year we said goodbye to Manager TJ, and
PI Lauran Brewster. With this, Jack Massuger stepped up
to the Manager position and Chris Bolte taking on the
Assistant Manager role. Shortly afterwards, Chris Lang
left and was replaced by Charlotte Sams as the current
Media Manager. This was then followed by Anthony Gillis, taking over from Zach Parkers Outreach Coordinator
role. With Zachs departure, Lorna Scribner left her post
as Assistant Manager to Rachael, making space for Emily
White to join the team. Jean our R stats wizard PI departed in July, and by August our three new PIs were all on
site, including: Maurits van Zinnicq Bergmann, Matthew
Smukall and Felicie Dhellemmes. And what would the
Sharklab be without our dogs! Assistant Manager Chris
adopted Bimini puppy Cira this year. The lab then adopted potcake Fanta from a Freeport shelter, to join Sasha,
Shadow and Cira as the current Sharklab dog pack!

Looking to the future...

More sharks please! Hammerheads are on the horizon,
as the early months of 2016 will bring greater numbers of
these enigmatic predators. We aim to attach more satellite tags and implant long-term acoustic devices---to help
reveal important information on their behaviour, biology
and ecology.

We look forward to the arrival of two new MSc
students in January; Paddy Burke, who will be studying
movement and distribution of sharks, rays and their prey
using baited remote underwater video (BRUVS) in collaboration with Dr. Mark Bond and FinPrint. And, Joffrey
Baeyaert, who will be working with Flicie investigating
how personality differences in lemon sharks effects their
use of mangroves.

Excitedly, we will be branching out even further
and expanding our species studied, by collaborating with
Dr. Mariana Fuentes from Florida State University, Our
plan is to capture and tag turtles (green and loggerhead),
and potentially hawksbill, with wait for it.acoustic
tags! This will give us important data on their habitat
preferences in and around Bimini (especially considering
the continued development), as well as allow us to look
for potential predator-prey interactions with any of our
tagged sharks.

Further we will be travelling into deeper waters!
Through regular deep line sets off the west of Bimini
(down to 300m) we will gain an important understanding of the local deep sea assemblage and hopefully contribute important data to little known species, such as the
mysterious bigeye sixgill or gulper species !
With the release of a paper on smalltooth sawfish, and
positive discussions with Bahamas Department of Marine Resources, we hope that it will lead to species specific protection for this Critically Endangered batoid across
the Bahamas.

Sponsors
The Bimini Biological Field Station Foundation is a partner of The Save Our Seas Foundation. Wed like to thank them
for their continued support and funding towards our research, and are looking forward to further collaborations in the
future years. It would also not be possible to continue our work without the support of our sponsors, partners, and donors. They are invaluable to our stations operation, and we thank every person for their assistance in our continued work
at the Sharklab.

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