Some exotic vacation locales offer tourists an incredible opportunity- the chance to feed
baby sharks by hand in small, natural lagoons.
The sharks involved are typically very young white tip reef sharks, black tip reef sharks,
nurse sharks, and the famous hammer heads.
The baby sharks are lured in with small pieces of fish and then the tourists are welcome
to toss the juvenile predators other pieces of bait fish from the safety of a dock or
a small boat.
Sometimes though a particularly adventurous, or foolhardy, tourist will jump in the water
and literally try to feed the sharks by hand, this can result in injury to the fingers or
even bites at the feet and legs.
While a single baby shark doesn't pose a particularly dangerous threat, what if you were swarmed
by 100 of them?
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Infographics Show- today we're going to take
a look at what would happen if you were attacked by 100 baby sharks.
Shark love is a very violent affair.
When a male shark is interested in mating, he finds a female and swims alongside her,
signaling his desire by biting at her pectoral fins.
While these bites aren't hard enough to cause serious damage, they can still draw blood
given the vast quantity of very sharp teeth each shark sports.
Once the female submits to mating, the male will bite down on her gills, head or fins
in order to keep her steady in the water- if you thought your first time was difficult,
imagine trying to make the beast with two backs while having no hands to hold on to
anything with.
Because of the violence involved in mating, females are typically up to 50% larger than
males and have skin that's up to three times as thick.
Still, a female can leave a mating session very battered and bloody from the male's love
bites, so it's a good thing that sharks have some serious healing superpowers that can
turn those open wounds to fading scars in just weeks.
Once fertilized, shark eggs can take anywhere from a few months to a year to develop, though
scientists suspect that the rare frilled shark could take an astonishing 3.5 years to develop
its eggs.
If you thought dealing with a pregnant wife or girlfriend for nine months was rough, imagine
almost four years of mood swings, nausea, and strange food cravings!
Once developed though, sharks can bear their young in three ways, by laying eggs, live
birth, or a hybrid of the two.
Only about 30% of sharks lay eggs, and most of these are bottom feeders such as horn and
catsharks.
Most sharks though give birth to live young, much the same way we humans do- these include
blue, bull, and hammerhead sharks.
Other sharks though hatch from eggs inside the mother's body in a hybrid of the two techniques,
and the baby sharks eat a store of unfertilized eggs in the womb until ready for birth- these
sharks include great white, tiger, and whale sharks.
Sand tiger sharks though are a breed apart, and these fearsome predators actually cannibalize
each other while inside the womb, typically leaving only one or two survivors which finally
reach birth.
Sand tiger sharks give survival of the fittest a completely new meaning.
Once born though, every shark of any species is on its own.
Unlike most other animals, shark mothers give absolutely no care to their young, and they
really don't need to.
Tens of millions of years of evolution have honed the shark into a perfect predator, and
baby sharks are born with all of their larger brethren's hunting ferocity and prowess.
While their eyesight is indeed poor, sharks have an incredible sense of smell, and many
have a powerful electro-receptive sense that enables them to sense the electric energy
given off by a prey animal's muscles.
This leaves prey with few places to hide, and young sharks often feed on small fish,
squid, and octopus.
The lack of parental support means that everything about a baby shark needs to be ready and fully
developed for a lifetime of killing the moment it leaves the womb.
Sharks though take a very long time to mature, with the dreaded Great White shark not reaching
full sexual maturity until it's 26 years old, and the Greenland shark, which is thought
to be Earth's longest living vertebrate, won't fully mature until an incredible 150 years
of age!
This means that a Greenland shark reaching sexual maturity this year was born in 1868,
the year that the Japanese Shogunate, or hereditary military dictator, was officially abolished!
Imagine being stuck living with your parents for a century and a half, or waiting over
100 years just to have sex!
That's nothing though for a shark which can live for an estimated 400 years, which if
you're keeping count that means that a shark dying today would have been born the same
year that astronomer Johannes Kepler established the last of his three planetary laws.
So just how dangerous really are baby sharks, and what would happen if you were attacked
by 100 of them at once?
Teeth are the first points to consider- pun fully intended.
While for instance a great white shark's teeth are serrated and triangular, designed to slice
through flesh, baby shark teeth are often conical, designed to puncture deep into flesh
and hold prey in place.
Keeping with the great white, its baby teeth can be up to a quarter-inch in length, which
may not seem like much until you realize that you'd be getting bit by a mouth full of up
to 50 teeth!
The problem with being swarmed by 100 tiny hungry mouths is not necessarily going to
be massive damage to your body, but rather the repeated punctures of 50 tiny teeth over
and over again.
Some places such as your skull, ribs, outer thighs, and buttocks will be able to tolerate
the assault just fine- these areas have tough bone or fatty deposits without major veins
or arteries that the baby shark teeth can reach.
Other places though such as the inner wrist, ankle, side of the neck and inner thigh feature
arteries that run very close to the surface of the skin, and these will be well within
biting distance of 100 tiny mouths.
The femoral artery along the inside of the thigh would be of serious concern, as it is
one of the largest arteries in the body and a puncture there would lead to you very quickly
bleeding out.
For men, there's the added concern of your dangly bits- soft and fleshy as they are,
they would be a prime target for the small sharks to munch on, and well, we don't want
to consider the type of damage that could happen down there.
Baby sharks don't pose much of a realistic threat to the average human, and it's not
until they grow into their adult sizes that we have much to fear from them.
Yet a swarm of 100 hungry baby sharks would make short work of you, not so much by eating
you as they would be physically incapable of tearing chunks of flesh from your body,
but just from the massive blood loss that their very sharp teeth would inflict.
So if you're ever on an exotic vacation and offered a chance to feed baby sharks, we suggest
you stay on the boat.
Oh, and to our male viewers, we bet you'll never think of that Baby Shark song the same
way again, will you?
How would you fight off 100 baby sharks?
Also, make sure you check our other video, what to do if you are attacked by a shark!
And as always if you enjoyed this video don't forget to Like, Share, and Subscribe.
See you next time!