Sharky Sunday out at the Caribsea

Posted on June 15, 2015

The wreck of the Caribsea has to be one of my favorite places to dive mostly due to the large community of sand tiger sharks.  These magnificent creatures don’t mind sharing their home with a few divers and I adore spending time with them.

Sand tiger sharks will occasionally come to the surface and gulp air.  I’ve mostly witnessed this while volunteering at the Pine Knoll Shores aquarium and it’s pretty cool.  As it turns out, they store air in their stomachs and this plays a role in how they can float nearly motionless in the water while staying fairly close to the bottom.  Divers would call this good buoyancy and others might just say it is a good trait since they appear to be very lazy.  It might also be a pretty sneaky way to wait for prey.

The sand tiger shark is listed as “vulnerable” on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Specifies and is also a candidate species for the U.S. Endangered Species list.  This is due to a couple of reasons, in some parts of the world, these sharks are in serious decline due to over-fishing, the shark fin industry, and commercial fishing methods, and also they have one of the lowest reproductive rates of all sharks (according to http://www.auduboninstitute.org), but here in North Carolina we have what seems to be a really strong population that is thriving.

Here is a short video of my dive this past SharkySunday:

Want to learn more about these super rad dudes in grey?  I encourage you to take the PADI Project AWARE Shark Conservation class at Olympus Dive Center and then book a charter for some shark diving or head on out to the North Carolina Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores for an up-close and personal (from behind the glass) view.