Sprummer is my favorite season.
About 32% of the sharks’ preferred meals included mid-water swimming fish such as Australian salmon, while the remainder of the contents consisted of bottom-dwelling fish such as stargazers (17%), flat boneless fish such as stingrays (15%) and reef fish (5%). “This evidence matches data we have from tagging white sharks that shows them spending a lot of time many meters below the surface,” Grainger said.The rest of the meals consisted of “less abundant prey” such as marine mammals, other sharks and cephalopods such as cuttlefish and squid, which “were eaten less frequently,” according to Grainger. But squid-hunting sharks are rare, experts say, and add to the mystery of sharks’ that is a shark’s behavior in the deep ocean blue.
Last week, the first scientific evidence of a shark interacting with a giant squid was published in the Journal of Fish Biology after photographer Deron Verbeck captured photos of a 7-foot whitetip shark with golf ball-sized suction marks on its skin. Giant squid can live as deep as 2,000 feet in the cold, dark area of the ocean called the twilight zone, so the photographic evidence might reveal battle scars from an accidental bump-in, or the aftermath of a hungry shark going after the creature, study co-author Heather Bracken-Grissom, a biologist at Florida International University, told National Geographic. “It is more likely this squid was being attacked by the shark and defending itself,” Bracken-Grissom said.
“This finding about oceanic whitetips is significant and goes along with what we are thinking about white sharks,” Shaili Johri, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University in California, told the magazine. Great whites are commonly found swimming in what Johri believes to be an empty part of the ocean she calls the “white shark café.” Now, one of her theories that the predators are hunting for giant squid down there seems more realistic.
Both studies highlight how connected marine food webs are, and how those webs can be used to protect many species of shark from hunting and entanglement in netting. These new findings can also inform policies on which parts of the ocean to protect in order to save sharks from overfishing and accidental catchings, and how to best prevent human-shark conflicts.
SURF:
Man has it been fun lately. Plenty of fun surf, water temps are slowly rebounding, beaches are open, and sunny skies for days. The calendar may say spring but it sure feels like summer. Welcome to sprummer! For the weekend, we've got a little more clouds/fog on Friday/Saturday from weak low pressure but we may see some partial sun in the afternoons.
We also get a slight bump tomorrow from SW groundswell and NW windswell for chest high+ surf and maybe shoulder high sets Sunday morning. Once the low pressure departs on Saturday, we should have more sun on Sunday too. Water temps should also stick to the high 60's. Nothing big this weekend nor particularly hot, but good enough for me. As far as the sun/water temps/tides go, here's what you need to know:
- Sunrise and sunset are:
- 5:40 AM sunrise
- 7:58 PM sunset
- PS- the summer solstice is June 21st and the sunrises at 5:40 AM and sets at 8 PM.
- Seattle? 5:11 AM and 9:11 PM
- And in Fairbanks, Alaska?... Sunrises at 2:58 AM and sets at 12:48 PM! That's almost 22 hours of surfing!
- After all that horrible NNW wind the past week, water temps have rebounded to the high 60's thankfully. I refuse to wear a fullsuit on July 4th!
- And tides are pretty simple this weekend:
- 3' at sunrise
- 1' mid-day
- 4' late afternoon
FORECAST:
Sunny skies and more swell are on tap to start the week. First up is a continuation of the SW groundswell for chest high surf in the far N part of San Diego County.
We get a similar sized reinforcement mid-week from the SW. There will also be various shots of waist high+ NW most of next week.
Charts then show a better SW that should arrive around the 21st for shoulder high surf and maybe chest high sets from the SW around the 25th. Nothing big (yet) with these swells but it's making up for a horrendous March and April.
BEST BET:
Sunday with fun combo swell and more sun. Or Wednesday with more combo swell and sunny skies. Or better SW swell around the 21st...
WEATHER:
June Gloom returned today as low pressure asserted itself and patchy fog returned. Low pressure strengthens slightly tomorrow and the clouds may stick around all day at the beaches. For Saturday, the sun may peak out late in the day. Besides the clouds, SW winds around 10 mph should return. Low pressure will exit by Sunday and we'll have mostly sunny skies through Wednesday. Low pressure (June Gloom) may return the 2nd half of next week. Nothing out of the ordinary for the next 7 days- just low clouds/fog off and on and temps around 70. Make sure to check out Twitter/North County Surf if anything changes between now and then.
NEWS OF THE WEEK:
We've all seen video, movies, or maybe in real life, of a shark's fin slicing through the surface of the water, hunting down it's next meal. But do they really stay at the surface to look for their prey? A recent study in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, found in the bellies of great white sharks significant amounts of bottom-dwelling organisms such as stargazers, stingrays and eels. Does this mean sharks feed closer to the seafloor than previously thought? Here's what the researchers found:
“Within the sharks’ stomachs we found remains from a variety of fish species that typically live on the seafloor or buried in the sand. This indicates the sharks must spend a good portion of their time foraging just above the seabed,” lead author Richard Grainger, a Ph.D. candidate at the Charles Perkins Centre and School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney, said in a press release. “The stereotype of a shark’s dorsal fin above the surface as it hunts is probably not a very accurate picture. Scientists often tag sharks to measure their movement and travel behaviors, but it’s difficult to follow them to great depths without disrupting their natural behavior, Gregory Skomal, a fisheries biologist with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in 2016.
“We have plenty of data on white sharks that show that some of them go out to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, wander around and dive down to depths as great as 3,000 feet every day,” said Skomal. “But we don’t have any clue what they’re actually doing there.” So researchers from the University of Sydney, the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries and the Sydney Institute of Marine Science set out to find some answers. The team analyzed stomach contents of 40 deceased juvenile white sharks caught in the New South Wales Shark Meshing Program, and compared their findings with published global data on great white shark nutrition.
About 32% of the sharks’ preferred meals included mid-water swimming fish such as Australian salmon, while the remainder of the contents consisted of bottom-dwelling fish such as stargazers (17%), flat boneless fish such as stingrays (15%) and reef fish (5%). “This evidence matches data we have from tagging white sharks that shows them spending a lot of time many meters below the surface,” Grainger said.The rest of the meals consisted of “less abundant prey” such as marine mammals, other sharks and cephalopods such as cuttlefish and squid, which “were eaten less frequently,” according to Grainger. But squid-hunting sharks are rare, experts say, and add to the mystery of sharks’ that is a shark’s behavior in the deep ocean blue.
Shark versus giant squid:
Last week, the first scientific evidence of a shark interacting with a giant squid was published in the Journal of Fish Biology after photographer Deron Verbeck captured photos of a 7-foot whitetip shark with golf ball-sized suction marks on its skin. Giant squid can live as deep as 2,000 feet in the cold, dark area of the ocean called the twilight zone, so the photographic evidence might reveal battle scars from an accidental bump-in, or the aftermath of a hungry shark going after the creature, study co-author Heather Bracken-Grissom, a biologist at Florida International University, told National Geographic. “It is more likely this squid was being attacked by the shark and defending itself,” Bracken-Grissom said.
“This finding about oceanic whitetips is significant and goes along with what we are thinking about white sharks,” Shaili Johri, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University in California, told the magazine. Great whites are commonly found swimming in what Johri believes to be an empty part of the ocean she calls the “white shark café.” Now, one of her theories that the predators are hunting for giant squid down there seems more realistic.
Both studies highlight how connected marine food webs are, and how those webs can be used to protect many species of shark from hunting and entanglement in netting. These new findings can also inform policies on which parts of the ocean to protect in order to save sharks from overfishing and accidental catchings, and how to best prevent human-shark conflicts.
PIC OF THE WEEK:
Keep Surfing,
Michael W. Glenn
Super Human Strength
Don't Need Binoculars 'Cause I Have 2000/20 Vision
My Parents Said It's Not Polite To Drop In Unannounced, That's Why I Yell And Scream When I Paddle For Waves
