by Playfuls Staff |
24th August 2006
Grey nurse sharks have a nasty and potentially species-threatening habit: In the womb, they engage in a survival-of-the-fittest orgy that decimates the birth rate. [more]
Australian scientists said Thursday that they have the answer to the fetal cannibalism: a procedure that flushes babies out of the uterus and into separate tanks before they start attacking each other and reducing the field from about 80 to just two.
"If we can raise about 40 pups a year, it will start brining up the grey nurse population," shark scientist Nick Ottway told The Sydney Morning Herald.
There are thought to be fewer than 500 grey nurse sharks on Australia's eastern seaboard, and fears that there could be none by 2025 unless drastic action is taken prompted scientists to intervene in what Ottway described as a "very bizarre reproductive biology."
In the wild, Ottway said, it's a veritable bloodbath inside mum.
"By the time the embryos reach about 10 centimetres, they have a well-developed set of jaws," he said. "They turn around and eat each other, inside mum."
What Ottway plans as a birth-rate boost is sedating pregnant sharks, drawing out the embryos and bringing them up in isolation in tanks that would act as artificial uteruses and from which they would be released into the ocean at about 12 months.
It's a desperate remedy, but so savage is sibling rivalry among grey nurse sharks that it might be the only way to save the population along the continent's eastern corner.
© 2006 DPA
