Nothing but net...and twelve sharks

If there's one thing i've learned while working here at the shark lab, it's that doing a PhD is hard, especially when extensive field research is involved.  Even when things are running smoothly, it appears as if Kristine will never emerge from the endless onslaught of writing grant proposals, reading papers, writing emails, learning new computer programs, and data entry.

Now imagine five important elements of your field work mysteriously escaping out of the back pen and swimming away with $800 worth of surgically inserted acoustic transmitters.  Oh yea, and you've just discovered that the tracking gear, upon which the accuracy of a vast majority of your data hinges, is going haywire.

So, everyday for the past week, we've been gillnetting in the North Sound with the hope of re-catching the escaped transmitter sharks, which might as well be swimming wads of cash.  Over the past few days, we've been catching about four sharks a day, however, today things got crazy and we caught twelve sharks.  For a good two hour period it seemed as if every time we checked the net there was at least one or two new sharks.  Quite inconveniently, this rush happened to coincide with dead low tide, and the best way to describe our shark shuttling runs to the holding pen further down the North Sound is probably "short bus".

While we've only caught one escapee this far, that in itself is pretty remarkable if you reference a map of Bimini and consider that that shark escaped from our pen on the south coast of South Bimini, and proceeded to find its way around the east coast of the island, through the lagoon, and up into the North Sound.

In other news, Andrew left a few days ago and Marc, Sherri, and Rachel are all leaving in the next few days.  Two new volunteers are arriving on the 15th with Doc, who is returning for a few days to oversee chasedowns in the lagoon.  April is the time of the year when pregnant lemon sharks return to Bimini and give birth to the new batch of neonates, and Doc likes to chase down, capture, and work-up at least one of these large mothers.

Should be fun.