Huge Concentration of Bull Sharks?

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edlover92

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Hello my name is Ed Mitchell I live on the southern pacific coast of oaxaca mexico. Though I do dabble in scuba diving I am mainly a free/spear diver. Yesterday while out cruising the coast in my panga looking for concentrations of bait fish we happened upon hundreds if not thousands of very large bull sharks, 8-12 ft, cruinsing the surf zone. I have encountered bull sharks in this area before but have never seen more than one at a time. This concentration of sharks ran almost 4 miles of coastline. In talking with several local fisherman, some who have 40 plus years of fishing experience, none of them say they have ever seen such a phenomena. I am curious to know if anyone on this forum has every experienced or even heard of such a large concentration of bull sharks in the the same area at the same time?
 
Hi ED,
First let me say welcome to SB.
And no, this is not usual.In fact, I believe that this has not been documented in
the past with this species. I would be interested in any more information you
might have on this event. For example, would you know their sexes? Were they
about the same size or mixed? What time was it? This happens with
hammerheads but I've not heard of these numbers with this species.
It would help if you could tell of this sighting to a marine science dept.
of the nearest university. I would be thrilled to learn more if you can recall
anything. Please PM me if this develops or happens again.
Thank you,
PORBEAGLE
 
This is a very interesting post and might be better suited at SHARK FORUM.
Would the mod please consider moving this post ?
Thank you.


OH!, and if Dr. Bill and Caroyln catch this,it would be great to get their
take.
PORBEAGLE
 
Unfortunately my lack of shark expertise leaves me little to go on except for the limited information I've read online about Bullsharks. Everything I've read seems to suggest that this species usually hunts alone and is rarely seen in schools such as the one I witnessed. Most of the sharks we observed were about the same size (about 8 feet long) but we did see the occasional 10 and even 12 foot specimen. None of them were smaller than this. I wasn't able to determine the sex with my lack of knowledge of this species, however from what I've read it seems the males rarely go over 7 or 8 feet while females go much bigger. The fisherman I talked to speculated that the sharks were feeding on a large concentration of rays that were also in the area, but in our observation we did not see this. We did see some sharks feeding immediately in the surf zone in areas of churned up sand, but it looked like they were taking sardines or other small baitfish. The hour of observation was midday around 1 or 2 in the afternoon. We talked with some other fishermen who had seen them all day both early in the morning and late in the afternoon. It was interesting to note that when we saw the sharks they were all moving in the same direction (west) up the coast, but the day before the sharks were all moving east or down the coast. We also noted that the sharks did not like to move into the deeper water for very long, sometimes darting into water of 10 feet but always returning shortly to the 2-4 foot depth. I will be sure to share this experience on Shark Forum to see if anyone else has seen this phenomena.
 
Welcome Ed I hope you post again and tell me about your spearing .I use to go often down to Baja around cedros island . A friend and I went down 2 years ago and got run out of the water by the marina police . The month before a gang of gringos shot a **** load of grouper and really pissed the lobster fisherman off. My big mistake was I told one of these jerks about this place 15 years ago

















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