When life gives you lemons...

Me holding a juvenile Lemon shark in tonic while Jon performs surgery to implant a transmitter

I'm pretty amazed it's taken me nearly four months to think of the pun that titles this entry, however, in light of the story I am about to tell, it's quite fitting.  As promised, I'll now explain the natural spectacle I witnessed that made me feel more privileged than a shoe salesmen with a foot fetish.

It was last friday, the final day of the UNB shark course, and I was driving one of five skiffs for chasedowns in the lagoon.  A chasedown is a method of catching larger sharks in shallow water and, big surprise here, it involves chasing the shark using multiple boats to corral it until it tires out.  Once the shark is tired out, the main chase boat gets alongside the shark and pokes it repeatedly with a dip-net wrapped in rope.  Once the shark bites the net, it is pulled alongside the boat while a tail rope with an attached float is put on.  The shark is then released to give it time to recover before the workup.

Going into the chasedown, there were several things I was worried about.  First, the lagoon is very shallow (0-1 meters) and, even at high tide, you need to keep the boat going fast so as to stay high on the water and not bottom out in certain areas.  Secondly, early May is prime time for pregnant Lemon sharks entering the lagoon to give birth, and all of the staff wanted to avoid chasing a pregnant Lemon because of the risk of inducing birth.

Needless to say, Doc spotted a large Lemon, and from that point on we were chasing her like divorce lawyers after Tiger Wood's wife.  After catching her and attaching the tail float, we released the shark and waited for her to recover.  However, instead of swimming around slowly, she proceeded to sit on the bottom and not move, prompting Emily to get in the water and try to get her swimming.  It's one thing to see a person walking down the street with a monster dog on a leash, but it's quite another thing to watch a friend take a ten foot Lemon shark for a stroll.  It became pretty apparent that the shark was pretty exhausted and likely very stressed, at which point we began to become a bit nervous.  After about twenty minutes of stop-go swimming, when the shark had finally begun to swim constantly, suddenly Emily yelled out.

"Baby shark!"

Sure enough, I looked a few feet behind the mother and could see a baby lemon shark thrashing in the water like a drunk toddler.  At this point chaos erupted.  Of the 23 people on the boats, only seven of us were sharklab staff and the rest were students who didn't have the slightest clue what to do, let alone how to drive the boats they suddenly found themselves abandoned on as the seven of us scrambled to collect the babies.

Sharks are fish and many give birth to litters of live pups.  As a result, the one baby shark Emily spotted was surely not to be the last.  As a result, for the next hour, a good part of which I spent running through waist-deep water, we raced to follow the shark and collect the 50-60 centimeter pups that the mother intermittently popped out like excess baggage.   We shuttled the vulnerable pups closer to the shelter of the mangroves where the mother likely would've given birth under normal conditions.

Twice during the ordeal, I caught and held in my hands a newborn Lemon shark with the umbilical cord still attached, only moments after it's mother had given birth to it.  Standing there, not only witnessing a wild shark giving birth, but holding it's newborn baby in my hands, was my own version of a religious experience and hopefully the closest i'll come to feeling like a father for a long time. While shark skin is normally rough and easy to grip, the newborns were covered in a film that made them extremely slippery and hard to hold.  All said and done, we collected, ID'd, and took DNA from twelve baby lemon sharks by the time the mother was finished and we watched her swim away.  It is important to know that, despite having likely induced the birthing, the shark was almost certainly going to give birth later that day or night and the baby sharks were not born prematurely.  Despite the stressful and chaotic nature of the whole thing, the experience was incredible and, for someone who loves sharks, about as cool as it gets.