They Call Her Nicole

A Great White Shark That Is...

I know I keep harping about these beasties. They truly are the monsters of my nightmares. Irrational fears never go away; that's why they're irrational. Still, in a great leap for rationality, we're reporting a wonderful discovery: it is now understood that Great White Sharks travel a long way around the glob.

A great white shark named Nicole logged more than 12,000 miles swimming from Africa to Australia and back, the first proof of a link between the two continents' shark populations, researchers say.

A second report details the movement of dozens of salmon sharks from summer waters near Alaska to warmer winter quarters off Hawaii and Baja California.

"Sharks have home ranges that are at the scale of ocean basins," said researcher Barbara A. Block of Stanford University. She added that conservation management of sharks such as the white shark and salmon shark will require international cooperation.

Tracking a shark from Africa to Australia "is one of the most significant discoveries about white shark ecology and suggests we might have to rewrite the life history of this powerful fish," said Ramon Bonfil, lead author of that study.

Both reports appear in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

George H. Burgess, a shark expert at the Florida Museum of Natural History, said while sharks are known to travel long distances, this was the first evidence of movement between Australia and Africa.

"These are large animals that have the capability of making large movements," he said.

Enric Cortes of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Shark Population Assessment Group in Panama City, Fla., agreed this is the first direct evidence of a connection between African and Australian white sharks.

Using satellites to track sharks is new technology that may provide new perspective on their movements, he said.

Peter Klimley, a shark expert at the University of California, Davis, called a trip of that length "amazing." He said there have been genetic indications that these two shark groups might be connected, "but that's not the same as showing actual movement."

Bonfil, of the Bronx, N.Y.-based Wildlife Conservation Society, said he "suspected that these sharks could be doing these kinds of travels ... but there was previously no proof of this. Everybody thought they were mostly coastal in behavior."

A satellite tracking device temporarily attached to Nicole documented her 99-day swim from South Africa to Australia. About six months later, she was identified from photos back off the coast of South Africa.

Some 24 other white sharks tagged off South Africa engaged in wide-ranging coastal migration, but only Nicole headed out to sea. Nonetheless, Bonfil said, "I don't think we got one in a million."

Nicole was tagged in November 2003 with a device that reports her position. The researchers said the shark was renamed Nicole in honor of Australian actress Nicole Kidman.

Yay. A Great White Shark called ''Nicole"; I like it. Couldn't have named her better myself.
I love how the researchers pointedly made sure it made the press that that's who they called the shark after.

In related news, here's this funny pic:


It's actually the corpse of a huge Burmese Python that managed to swallow an entire alligator; but the alligator struggled just enough the rupture out of the Python, killing both.
In other news, a chimp in a Chinese zoo successfully gave up smoking after 16-years of chain-smoking.

Ai Ai, a 27-year-old chimp at the Qinling Safari Park in northern China's Shaanxi province, ended her tobacco dependency when zoo keepers put her on a strict regime that included walking, music therapy and exercise sessions, Xinhua news agency said.

"In the first few days, she squealed for cigarettes every now and then, but as her life became more colorful, she gradually forgot about them altogether," one zookeeper was quoted as saying.

"She's served fried dishes and dumplings at every meal, alongside her usual diet of milk, banana and rice," he said, "I also put earphones on her so that she could enjoy some pop music from my walkman."

According to the report, Ai Ai became a smoker in 1989, shortly after her first spouse died.

She started demanding more and more cigarettes after her second spouse died in 1997 and her daughter departed to another zoo, it said.

The report did not say why zookeepers started giving the animal cigarettes, or whether they faced punishment.

It's all true. You know it. A chimp can do it.