One year of watching sharks grow…

Yes, it’s been a little more than a year that we’ve identified Italy’s largest known breeding area of the nursehound, the Santa Croce Bank in the Gulf of Naples. We’ve tagged some of these eggs and followed the development of the baby sharks. Successes and setbacks in this year: some of the tagged eggs were “untagged” by well-meaning but ill-advised divers, who collected the coloured ropes fearing they were “marine litter”. And this of course meant that our observations were lost and we had to start all over again!
Nonetheless, we’ve had some great help from the diving community, which rallied during two BioBlitzes we organised and helped me tag more eggs. By now we’ve tagged 50 and we’re monitoring them at least every month.
We presented some preliminary observations last week-end at the European Elasmobranch Association meeting in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands – please see our poster here!