Living in Florida: My necropsy home girls would be so jelly

Hello to all of my avid readers, so nice of you to join me once more. Today was another typical day: started off with more presentations. These ones today, however, were extremely interesting and right up my ally. The first was about the current dolphin research that is being done on the river dolphins right here in the Jacksonville River. Super interesting presentation and I learned a lot of things I had never known before, such as this particular population of dolphins is exhibiting secondary alliances, which has only ever been documented in one other dolphin population in Shark Bay, Australia. Then we had a presentation from the woman who is going to be my mentor for this program, Dr. Richards. Most of what she discussed was about sea lions and the differences in allocation of resources during nursing. This is most likely what I will be working on during my time here starting next week. My mentor seems really nice and has a lot of solid research projects she is working on. Then we had lunch where I caught myself a nice little lizard friend and had time to enjoy some of the beautiful flowers that are in bloom.

Then back to the board room for more presentations on what research project posters should and shouldn't look like, again with which I am already extremely familiar. Then the real fun started. Jim is the director of the shark ecology program here and he had some sharks thawed out for dissection for us. CAUTION: graphic images to follow
The first shark was a Bonnethead shark, which is one of the sharks Jim specializes in. After weighing and taking size measurements, the cutting began!

Full grown Bonnethead shark

This is where my necropsy lovin homies from UNR would be jealous

So they were also looking at the health of the uterus, which are shown in the picture below. This shark species uteri are compartmentalized, as shown in the yellow yolk sacs.

Shark uterus

Stomach contents, including a crab almost the same size as the sharks mouth, swallowed whole

Look at those beautiful ampulla de lorenzini! (the little black dots) These are the electrical receptors that allow sharks to be such great predators.

After we had cut apart the Bonnethead, we moved on to a pregnant Atlantic Sharknosed shark. It was sad to see the dead babies, but from a scientific perspective, it was extremely interesting to see the inside biology of a pregnant female.We also learned how to use their specialized ultrasound machine to view the pregnancy before she was dissected. As a disclaimer, none of these sharks were killed by the University, they were all given to us after being caught by fishermen and turned in here for research. What they are doing with the ultrasound machine is basically testing in on the already dead sharks to provide information on improving it as a nondestructive sampling tool while out in the field.

You can see a baby sharks tail emerging

Using the ultrasound to view shark babies

Here you can see a baby shark in the uterus and you can also see she has eggs (the bright orange balls) all ready to be fertilized and begin development as soon as the young are born.