New study shows these sharks can make friends and lead social lives

New research shows that not all sharks are the lonely, cold, ruthless predators they are portrayed in so many movies. It turns out that some species can even be sociable – at least among their own kind.

According to a recent news Study published in journal animal behaviorBull shark – a species that is widely considered to be solitary and “One of the most aggressive sharks on the planet” – can, in fact, form beneficial friendships and lead complex social lives.

“I was seeing all these really good social behaviors… Which appears to be a form of hierarchy,” said lead author Natasha Marosi. as it happens Host Nil Koksal.

“It was clear that some of them enjoyed being around each other, and some of them were possibly learning from or collaborating with each other.”

The study, conducted at a shark marine reserve in Fiji, was based on six years of data that included 473 dives and 8,192 minutes of underwater observations on 184 bull sharks, ranging in age from young to adult.

Marosi – a PhD student in animal behavior at the University of Exeter, UK, and founder of the research and conservation organization Fiji Shark Lab – says all the sharks were fed together inside a protected area called a “provision site”, allowing scientists, like her, to dive and study them.

Those who swim together, stay together

As part of their analysis, the researchers studied the sharks’ associative patterns, with “cooperation” defined as sharks being within body length of each other.

Marossi says he discovered that sharks describe their swimming as “parallel swimming.” They also observed “lead-follow” behavior between sharks “where one shark positions itself in front of the other and they follow the same synchronous movements.”

The researchers found that apex predators were selective about who they hung out with.

Both males and females preferred to be with female sharks, although males tended to have more social bonds with females. They also found that sharks were more likely to interact with other individuals of similar size.

Age also matters. They found that while adult sharks form the core of the network, more advanced sharks are less social.

Toby Daly-Engel, director of the Shark Conservation Laboratory at the Florida Institute of Technology, says this may be because older sharks do not need social interaction as much as younger sharks do.

She says that young adult sharks may learn information about food or mating or other aspects necessary for survival by hanging out with other sharks. But older sharks already have all that experience — plus they’re bigger, so there’s no need to hang out in packs.

“One of the major predators of sharks is other sharks,” said Daly-Engel, who was not involved in the research. “When they get to that large a size, they don’t have a huge number of natural predators and so, to me, it seems like there’s a benefit … to some extent, some type of protection.”

Why is there still water in the findings?

While the study took place at a provisioning site – where sharks were regularly given food during shark dives – Marosi says the behavior, itself, is natural. The setting, she says, made it possible to observe interactions that would otherwise have been difficult to capture.

“(The provision site) is not what is driving the conversation,” she said. “We know these are decisions they are making individually.”

Daly-Engle agrees, noting that the findings are consistent with previous studies using acoustic and satellite tracking – methods that do not rely on direct human observation.

“The fact that we see consistent results between studies where they’re not directly observing sharks and studies where they’re in the water with sharks suggests to me that those observers have very little influence, if any,” Daly-Engel said.

For Marosi, the implications go far beyond curiosity. She says understanding how sharks interact could help answer important questions about how they learn from each other, mate, move together between habitats and even whether they cooperate when hunting.

“How social an animal is will really have a long-term impact in terms of its ability to survive and adapt to … negative human impacts like our overfishing, pollution, our degradation of their environment,” Marosi said.

Beyond that, the research helps shape how the world thinks about sharks, Daly-Engel says.

“Hopefully it really helps when people think about sharks as these mindless, cold-blooded predators, rather than as social animals like other types of animals,” he said.

(They’re) not exactly super social animals like dolphins or humans, (but) they definitely have their own version of friendship.