Some fins up! 100,000 sharks mass off Florida's beaches

Originally posted by ProtoplasmicTraveler
reply to post by VonDoomen

 

To protoplasmic traveller. I was kind of confused by one post you said, about a conspiracy in the fragile earth forum and various news angencies? Can you elaborate on that, or were you just poking at people?

I am jost poking at the Members who obviously have never bothered to read the Terms of Service who seem and wish to remain ignorant to the fact that it is permissible to post a duplicate topic in Altermative Breaking News even if the topic has been covered elsewhere in another Forum.

Conversely had this story appeared previously here, but not in Fragile Earth, a thread in Fragile Earth could be started.

So yes I am poking fun at the members who think there is some topical value to posting and reposting the links to the other two threads and complaining about this one, as opposed to getting excited that a new fresh thread on the board provides them the opportunity to drive traffic to their older threads that are similiarly related.

I am struggling to not say ATS sure has gone down hill lately with the amount of uncivil rhetoric and petty complaints, but it truly is a struggle not to say it.

It's a pity too, a number of people would have enjoyed discussing this fascinating occurence within nature in a civil atmosphere.

Thanks for posting.

Proto, im a big fan of your work. However these people do have a point. It does fracture the debate when we have 4 threads posted about the same topic. And yes, we all know it is not specifically against the ATS TS, however just because something is allowed, doesnt make it ethical. Just like banks can legally give out a bunch of bonuses after borrowing money from the government. It was all 100% legal, but, we still know its not exactly right. I usually try pretty hard to search for stuff before I post new topics, which doesnt always work considering some of the goofy titles people use sometimes. There was in fact a thread about this that started before mine, however I did not find it, due to how he named it. I usually try and stay as close to the headline as possible.

But I just wanted to share my opinion with the ATS population.

I actually had an idea. People should be allowed to post new topics to the "breaking news" forum, and then after a set amount of time (2-3) of good discussion, that same thread can then be moved to whichever forum would fit it best, with the whole discussion Intact. which is whats most important to me, Id rather monitor 1 thread than 4!

reply to post by Wyn Hawks


there was probly close to 10,000 in that video alone.
and that video was NOT the entire swarm. If you read the article he had to pull out his iphone and start recording after he realzied what it was.

either way, your arguing semantics, and im not wasting time on that. If you want to make a big fuss about the news article stating 100,000 go ahead and take beef with them. Im sick of people just trying to argue the stupidest point to look "smart" for some reason. Judging by how much work you put into your estimate, im going to go ahead and say theres no reason for anyone to assume its close to be right!

There is a normal yearly Migration and they do normally migrate from South to North. I can give two possible reasons to the greater numbers than usual.

1) the serious decrease in the commercial total allowable catch

2) the much colder water temps than normal to the North.

I am a commercial fisherman by trade and have been for the past 20 years. I primarily targeted sharks for the past 10 years until the drastically cut the quota and trip limit on them 3 years ago and made it too hard to make a profit.

Ironically at the same time that the NMFS was crying that we were overfishing the shark population New Smyrna Beach went from being known as "the World's safest beach" to "The shark bite capital of the World"

reply to post by Adamanteus


Good info! i just had another post in My thread from a floridian. He says these mass migrations happen every year in that area. Still, the magnitude is amazing.

Originally posted by VonDoomen
reply to post by Adamanteus

 

Good info! i just had another post in My thread from a floridian. He says these mass migrations happen every year in that area. Still, the magnitude is amazing.

Sharks are a migratory species even though those sharks are most likely "Spinners" and "Black tip sharks" and technically classified with NMFS as 'Large Coastals" and not "Highly migratory Sharks" They are still in fact Highly migratory. We typically catch Spinners and Black tips from 0 ft out to around 200 ft but they do occasionally venture out into deeper waters. The Gulf being shallow for many miles leaves plenty of room for them to spread out. When they start their migration North they're forced into a bottleneck once they round the keys until they reach around Cape Canaveral where they start to disperse once again. (Which is why they show up in great numbers around Miami every year.)

I too am a Floridian and State waters are closed totally for commercial fishing and have been for years which is why the sharks are able to appear in such numbers so close to shore. If state waters were open they would be targeted in the shallows in the keys and be thinned out before they appeared offshore of Miami.

reply to post by ProtoplasmicTraveler
Being aware of our surroundings goes for dry land as well because if your not that big ol' grzzley can sneek up on you at dinner time and that makes us at the shakey top of the food chain........lions and tigers and bears oh my!!

Originally posted by Movescamp
I may be a social scientist but it always puts up a flag when completely unscientific approaches are taken to justify beliefs. How can anybody here not involved in marine biology or migratory patterns give such assured answers? Do sharks migrate? Yes. How many at a time? What makes the numbers fluctuate? What is the reason for so many in one spot? They may have mundane answers but no one has answered those things.

You do not have to be a Marine Biologist to know the migratory patterns of something. I have been a commercial fisherman for 20 years and we take marine biologists out and teach them what the fish do, they do not teach us. A study done by NMFS Scientists determined that there were only 80 breeding size female Red Snapper in the whole 500,000 square miles of the SouthWest N. Atlantic. using this data they put a 30 closure on them. That is preposterous! After they closed them they hired the Boat I fish on and another boat from Georgia (I believe)to take them out and study the population density. The Georgia? boat caught so many that they reopened them between 31 and 32 N. the data from our catches have not been processed yet so they have made no ruling to reopen them off the Florida coast. We did catch more than the Georgia? Boat So only believing a "scientist is preposterous! If I want the real info I want to talk to the troops on the ground not some Bureaucrat sitting in an office somewhere! I thought we were here to deny ignorance not only take the word of the ignorant as truth.

I do have a friend that Studied Marine Bio specializing in shark biology at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth that I could probably persuade to input his knowledge on this thread but I can almost guarantee you he would refer you to me for anything pertaining to sharks other than their biology. ie migration patterns,maximum size,what they like to eat, how many are truly out there etc.

The Magnetism in the Earth is changing. Thats why the sharks are congregating. That's why fish are dying and that's why the birds are dying. I don't claim to know whats going on but I think the powers that be know.....BUT they aren't sharing.

Guess I won't go to the beach any time soon. I live just north of Jupiter where the photos were takin. I now you can usually see a hundred or so sharks just off the beach at any time even as swimmers are in the water. But those photos looked a little scary.

Truly amazing.

Stop eating FLAKE!

reply to post by ProtoplasmicTraveler


I'm the guy that posted the original thread on the 1st.. Amazing, you've got five pages of responses already!

www.abovetopsecret.com...

I just got a lot of dismissals. I was really just posting something that seems out of the range of widely-known normality. One thing, however, is someone posted something about sharks searching for warmer water. I don't really get that, but even so, Freeport is some 70-80 miles away, and last time I checked, water temps were 8 degrees higher.

reply to post by ProtoplasmicTraveler


What, sharks aren't allowed to protest too? Freedom of Assembly and all that? Heck, we're only driving them to extinction! Shark Fin soup, Shark omega 3 vitamins, shark sport hunting/fishing, etc.

I've haddock enough of these fish based puns. They're destroying my sole.

reply to post by rstregooski

They're not in fact seeking warmer water, They're just following their normal migratory pattern. It doesn't matter if they're going North or South either way they're forced into a natural bottle neck in that area.

Freeport may in fact only be 70-80 miles but may be out of their natural Migratory route. I stated in a previous post that these types of sharks are "Large Coastals" of the black tip shark and/or spinner shark variety and are rarely found in depths of greater than 200 feet, in order to get to the Bahamas they would have to cross much deeper waters than that. I am not saying they can't or don't go to the Bahamas, but prior to 10 years ago(when I started shark fishing) I pelagic longlined for swordfish for 6 years in the straits of Florida and never once caught either black tips or spinner sharks as a bycatch. so I assume that they do not cross over.

reply to post by Adamanteus

A natural bottleneck in the Atlantic? Methinks me missed something?

reply to post by rstregooski


Hey I just wanted to shoot you some advice. You have to add more to your thread to get people to take part in it.
Look at the difference between my thread and yours? Mine is in my signature btw.

You just need to market a little better ya know?

Originally posted by ~Lucidity
reply to post by Adamanteus

 

A natural bottleneck in the Atlantic? Methinks me missed something?

Yes a natural bottleneck determined by the depths of water that this type of shark inhabits.The water depth gets deeper much closer to shore in the straits of Florida. where as 400 ft of water is only 4 miles off shore of Key West you would have to go 50 plus miles offshore of Daytona Beach to attain the same depth of water.

Do you know if there different breads?

reply to post by VonDoomen

Geez, drop it already and quit derailing the thread.


reply to post by Adamanteus

I still don't see where the bottleneck is. Isn't this massing of sharks off the east coast of Florida and not near Key West? That wouldn't explain why they're so close to shore. I'm probably missing something..

I have seen the same thing off Calif.
There is a area about 100 miles off the coast where you can see 1000s at anytime.

When i was navy we operated out about 100 miles and we would see these mass groups of sharks for days as we did operations.

We always ask the marines if they wanted to go swimming.

The sharks off Calif never come close enough to the coast to get the medias attention