Everyone Needs A Buddy. Even Sharks
"Sharks are often maligned as Hollywood monsters, the lone wolves lurking in the deep,
hunting for prey. (Cue Jaws theme song)."
"But that caricature of sharks is increasingly out of step with what scientists are learning about the animals. Instead, they say, some species of sharks are social creatures who return day after day to a group of the same fellow sharks."
"'They form these spatially structured social groups where they hang out with the same individuals over multiple years,' says Yannis Papastamatiou, who runs the Predator Ecology and Conservation Lab at Florida International University."
"Papastamatiou's team studied gray reef sharks populating the waters off Palmyra Atoll, a sunken island ringed by coral reefs, in the central Pacific Ocean between the Hawaiian Islands and Fiji. They attached small location transmitters to 41 sharks, which allowed them to track the animals' movements around the reef. They also outfitted two sharks with small video cameras on their fins, to get what Papastamatiou calls a shark's-eye view of their daily lives."
"After tracking the sharks for four years, the researchers found that the same groupings of sharks — ranging from a couple up to as many as 20 — frequently returned to the same parts of the reef over and over again. They also found that some of the groups stuck together for the duration of the study — longer than previous studies have observed."